by Laird Barron
—And then?
—Then nothing. End of story. Mo and the stripper went back to the main room and drank some more and blazed the night away. He came to forty-eight hours later when his platoon sergeant dumped a bucket of water on his head and kicked his ass back to the ship for the clap inspection.
—Clap inspection?
—After shore leave all the grunts had to drop their pants so an NCO could check them for VD. Heh-heh.
—What a crock of shit, she said. —That’s not even scary.
—Sorry. I made the last part up. The part about Mo getting a BJ while the hooker and the other dude were getting busy across the way was true. I think. Uncle Mo lies about stuff, so you never really know.
She groaned in disgust. —Where’d you even get the idea?
—I dunno. Popped into my head while I was lying there. Figured it would get a rise outta you. He laughed and poked her arm, dropped his hand to her leg.
She pushed his hand aside. —Now that that’s over. Check this out: I found something odd earlier, she said. —A bible.
—Lots of motels have bibles lying around, he said. —And Jack Chick tracts. He was studying the shadow again. —You know, that thing does resemble an insect. Thought it had wings earlier, but I dunno. Can’t see shit in here. Wait a minute… It’s a water stain. This rat hole leaks like a sieve, betcha anything.
—The bathroom wall is rotten. I was sitting on the toilet and felt a cool breeze. I could stick my fingers outside. Freezing out there.
—Peephole, he said. —For the desert cannibals. There’s an abandoned atomic testing range a few dunes over. History Channel did a documentary on them. So I hear.
—I dunno about that, but what I do know is something poisonous could a crawled in any old time and made a nest, could be waiting to lay eggs in our ears when we fall asleep. If that’s the case, I gotta tell you, twenty bucks a night seems like a rip-off.
He chuckled.
—Why are you laughing? she said.
—Earlier, I was pissing and noticed something a bit fucked up.
—I think you might have an enlarged prostate.
—The hell are you going on about?
—Frequent urination is a sign of an enlarged prostate. Don’t you watch infomercials? They could save your life.
—Anyway. I’m taking one of my apparently frequent pisses, when I notice there’s no toilet paper. Like the gentleman I am, I find another roll in the cabinet and get ready to put it on the hanger rod. All for you, snookums.
—You are a gentleman, she said.
—Yeah, I raised the seat and everything. I pulled the rod out and set it aside. Unfortunately, I dropped the toilet paper and it went flying out the door and I had to chase it down, wadding the unspooled paper as I went. Man, you could trace pictures with that stuff. It’s like one-ply.
—The moral of the story is, shut the door when taking a piss.
—No, that’s not the moral of the story. There’s more. I go back just in time to watch a big-ass spider squeeze itself out of the rod and scurry into the sink. Thing had a body maybe the size of a jawbreaker; red and yellow, and fleshy, like a plum. It was so damned hefty I could see light reflecting in its eyes. Then it took off down the drain. I think it was irate I screwed with its cozy little home. He had a laugh over the scenario.
—For real? she said.
—Oh, yeah.
She thought things over for a bit. —No way in hell I’m going back in there. I’ll pee behind a cactus. A jawbreaker?
—Hand to a stack of bibles, he said, wiping his eyes and visibly working to appear more solemn.
—The bible! She half climbed from bed, groped for the dresser, and after a few anxious moments came back with something heavy and black. She snicked the lighter until its flame revealed the pebbled hide of a small, thick book.
—What kind of bible is that? he said.
—Greek. Byzantine. I dunno, she said. Gilt symbols caught the flame and glistened in convoluted whorls and angular slashes; golden reflections played over the blankets, rippled across the couple’s flesh. The pages were thin as white leaves and covered in script to match the cover design. Many of the pages were defiled by chocolaty fingerprints. The book smelled of cigarette musk and mothballs. It was quite patently old.
—This has got to be a collector’s item. Some poor schlep forgot it here. He turned the book over in his hands, riffling the pages. No name on it… Finders-keepers.
—Hmm, I dunno….
—Dunno what?
—Whether that’s a good idea.
—Billy will go apeshit over this thing. Besides, I owe him a hundred bucks.
—I don’t care if Billy goes apeshit over antiquarian crap. That’s what antiquarians do, right? You owe me the hundred bucks, anyway, motherfucker.
—Don’t you want to know what it is?
—I already know what it is; it’s a bible.
He shrugged and handed the book over. —Whatever. Do what you want. I don’t care.
—Great! She tossed the book over her shoulder in the general direction of the dresser.
—Man, you really are so wasted.
—Gettin’ my second wind, boy. I’m bored.
—Go to sleep. Then you won’t be bored.
—Can’t sleep. I’m preoccupied with that spider. She’s in those rusty pipes, rubbing her claws together and plotting vengeance. Go kill her, would ya?
—You kiddin’? It’s pitch dark in there—she’d get the drop on me.
—Hmp. I’m chilly. Let’s screw.
—No thanks. I’d just whiskey dick you for half an hour and pass out.
—I see. You won’t kill a predatory bug, but you’ll club our romance like a baby seal. Swell.
—Wah, wah, he said.
It had grown steadily chillier in the room. She idly thumbed the lighter wheel and watched their breath coalesce by intermittent licks of flame. The shadow above the television had become oblong and black as the cranium of a squid. She raised her arm and the shadow seemed to bleed upward and sideways, as if avoiding the feeble nimbus of fire. —Man, why would that thing appear during your story. Maybe I only noticed it then. Right…?
—I called the shadow forth. And summoned the coyotes. Go to sleep. He rolled over and faced the opposite wall.
—Hell with this. I need a cig. Honey.
—Don’t honey me. I’m bushed. He pulled a pillow over his head.
—Fine. She flounced from the bed and promptly smacked her shin on the chair that had toppled over from the weight of her jeans and purse. —Ahh! She hopped around, cursing and fuming and finally yanked on her pants and blouse, snatched up her purse and blundered through the door into the night.
It was cold, all right. The stars were out, fierce and prehistoric. The dark matter between them seemed blacker than usual and thick as tar. She hugged herself and clattered along the boardwalk past the blank windows and the cheap doors with descending numbers to the pop and cigarette machines by the manager’s office. No bulbs glowed along the walkway, the office was a deep, dark pit; the neon vacancy sign reared blind and black. Luckily, the vending panels oozed blurry, greenish light to guide her way. Probably the only light for miles. She disliked that thought.
She dug whiskey-soaked dollar bills and a few coins from her purse, started plugging them into the cigarette machine until it clanked and dispensed a pack of Camels. The cold almost drove her scurrying back to the room where her husband doubtless slumbered with dreams of unfiltered cigarettes dancing in his head, but not quite. She cracked the pack and got one going, determined to satisfy her craving and then hide the rest where he’d never find them. Lazy, unchivalrous bastard! Let him forage for his own smokes.
Smoke boiled in her lungs; she leaned against a post and exhaled with beatific self-satisfaction, momentarily immune to the chill. The radiance of the vending machines seeped a few yards across the gravel lot, illuminating the hood of her Volkswagen Beetle and a beat-to-hell pickup s
he presumed belonged to the night clerk. She was halfway through her second cigarette when she finally detected a foreign shape between the Volkswagen and the pickup. Though mostly cloaked in shadow and impossibly huge, she recognized it as a tortoise. It squatted there, the crown of its shell even with the car window. Its beak and monstrously clawed forepaws were bisected by the wavering edge of illumination. There was a blob of skull perhaps the diameter of a melon, and a moist eye that glimmered yellow.
—Wow, she said. She finished her cigarette. Afraid to move, she lighted another, and that was tricky with her hands shaking so terribly, then she smoked that one too and stared at the giant tortoise staring back at her. She thought, for a moment, she saw its shell rhythmically dilate and contract in time with her own surging heart.
The night remained preternaturally quiet there on the edge of the highway, absent the burr of distant engines or blatting horns, or the stark sweep of rushing headlights. The world had descended into a primeval well while she’d been partying in their motel room; it had slipped backward and now the desert truly was an ancient and haunted place. What else would shamble from the wastes of rock and scrub and the far-off dunes?
She finished the third cigarette and stuffed the pack in her jeans pocket, and with a great act of will sidled the way she’d come; not turning her back, oh no, simply crabbing sideways, hips brushing doorknobs as she went. The tortoise remained in place, immobile as a boulder. The cosmic black tar began eating a few handfuls of stars here and there, like peanuts.
Once at what she prayed was a safe distance, she moved faster, counting doors, terrified of tripping in the dark, of sprawling on her face, and thus helpless, hearing the sibilant shift and crunch of a massive body sliding across gravel. But she made it to the room without occurrence and locked the door and pressed against it, sobbing and blubbering with exhaustion.
He lay face down in the middle of the crummy bed, his naked body a pale gray smear in the gloom. She went to him and shook him. He raised his head at a drunken pitch and mumbled incoherencies. He didn’t react to her frantic account of the giant tortoise, her speculation that it might be even now bearing down upon them for a late-night snack, that the world might be coming to an end.
—Goddamn it, wake up! she said and smacked his shoulder, hard. Then, as her eyes adjusted, she saw tears on his cheeks, the unnatural luster of his eyes. Not tears; sweat poured from him, smoked from him, it saturated the sheets until they resembled a sloughed cocoon. The muscles of his shoulder flexed and bunched in agonized knots beneath her hand.
—There’s been an incident, he whispered.
She wrapped her arms around her knees and bit her thumb and began to rock ever so slightly. —Baby, I just saw a goddamned turtle the size of a car in the parking lot. What incident are you talking about?
—It wasn’t a water stain. You were right. It’s a worm, like a kind that lived in the Paleozoic. The worm slithered off the wall when you left, made a beeline right over here…. He pushed his face into the sheets and uttered a bark. —Look at the wall.
She looked at the wall. The ominous shadow was gone, melted away, if it had ever been. —What happened? she said.
—The worm crawled up my ass and there it waits. It’s gonna rule the world.
She didn’t know what to say. She cried softly, and bit her thumb, and rocked.
—I’m high, he said. His entire body relaxed and he began to snore.
—Oh, you jerk, she said, and cried shamelessly, this time in relief. No more pills with tequila chasers for her. She wiped her nose and curled into a ball against his clammy flank and fell unconscious as if she’d been chloroformed.
When she awakened it was still very dark. They lay spine to spine, her leg draped over his, her arm trailing over the edge and near the carpet. His body twitched against hers the way a person does when they dream of running, flying, being pursued through vast, sunless spaces. She closed her eyes.
He shuddered.
Something hit the floor on the opposite side of the bed with a fleshy thud, like a coconut dropping from a tree into wet sand. Her breath caught and her eyes bulged as she listened to the object slowly roll across the floorboards in a bumpy, lopsided fashion. This was a purposeful, animated movement that bristled every hair on her body. She reached over her shoulder and gripped his arm. —Psst! Honey! It was like shaking a corpse.
Quietly, muffled by the mattresses, someone under the bed began to laugh.
The Lagerstätte
October 2004
Virgil acquired the cute little blue-and-white-pinstriped Cessna at an auction; this over Danni’s strenuous objections. There were financial issues; Virgil’s salary as department head at his software development company wasn’t scheduled to increase for another eighteen months and they’d recently enrolled their son Keith in an exclusive grammar school. Thirty grand a year was a serious hit on their rainy-day fund. Also, Danni didn’t like planes, especially small ones, which she asserted were scarcely more than tin, plastic, and balsawood. She even avoided traveling by commercial airliner if it was possible to drive or take a train. But she couldn’t compete with love at first sight. Virgil took one look at the four-seater and practically swooned, and Danni knew she’d had it before the argument even started. Keith begged to fly and Virgil promised to teach him, teased that he might be the only kid to get his pilot’s license before he learned to drive.
Because Danni detested flying so much, when their assiduously planned weeklong vacation rolled around, she decided to boycott the flight and meet her husband and son at the in-laws place on Cape Cod a day late, after wrapping up business in the city. The drive was only a couple of hours—she’d be at the house in time for Friday supper. She saw them off from a small airport in the suburbs, and returned home to pack and go over last minute adjustments to her evening lecture at the museum.
How many times did the plane crash between waking and sleeping? There was no way to measure that; during the first weeks the accident cycled through a continuous playback loop, cheap and grainy and soundless like a closed circuit security feed. They’d recovered pieces of fuselage from the water, bobbing like cork—she caught a few moments of news footage before someone, probably Dad, killed the television.
They threw the most beautiful double funeral courtesy of Virgil’s parents, followed by a reception in his family’s summer home. She recalled wavering shadowbox lights and the muted hum of voices, men in black hats clasping cocktails to the breasts of their black suits, and severe women gathered near the sharper, astral glow of the kitchen, faces gaunt and cold as porcelain, their dresses black, their children underfoot and dressed as adults in miniature; and afterward, a smooth descent into darkness like a bullet reversing its trajectory and dropping into the barrel of a gun.
Later, in the hospital, she chuckled when she read the police report. It claimed she’d eaten a bottle of pills she’d found in her mother-in-law’s dresser and curled up to die in her husband’s closet among his little league uniforms and boxes of trophies. That was simply hilarious because anyone who knew her would know the notion was just too goddamned melodramatic for words.
March 2005
About four months after she lost her husband and son, Danni transplanted to the West Coast, taken in by a childhood friend named Merrill Thurman, and cut all ties with extended family, peers, and associates from before the accident. She eventually lost interest in grieving just as she lost interest in her former career as an entomologist; both were exercises of excruciating tediousness and ultimately pointless in the face of her brand new, freewheeling course. All those years of college and marriage were abruptly and irrevocably reduced to the fond memories of another life, a chapter in a closed book.
Danni was satisfied with the status quo of patchwork memory and aching numbness. At her best, there were no highs, no lows, just a seamless thrum as one day rolled into the next. She took to perusing self-help pamphlets and treatises on Eastern philosophy, and trendy art magazines; she p
iled them in her room until they wedged the door open. She studied Tai Chi during an eight-week course in the decrepit gym of the crosstown YMCA. She toyed with an easel and paints, attended a class at the community college. She’d taken some drafting as an undergrad. This was helpful for the technical aspects, the geometry of line and space; the actual artistic part proved more difficult. Maybe she needed to steep herself in the bohemian culture—a coldwater flat in Paris, or an artist commune, or a sea shanty on the coast of Barbados.
Oh, but she’d never live alone, would she?
Amidst this reevaluation and reordering, came the fugue, a lunatic element that found genesis in the void between melancholy and nightmare. The fugue made familiar places strange; it wiped away friendly faces and replaced them with beekeeper masks and reduced English to the low growl of the swarm. It was a disorder of trauma and shock, a hybrid of temporary dementia and selective amnesia. It battened to her with the mindless tenacity of a leech.
She tried not to think about its origins, because when she did she was carried back to the twilight land of her subconscious; to Keith’s fifth birthday party; her wedding day with the thousand-dollar cake, and the honeymoon in Niagara Falls; the Cessna spinning against the sun, streaking downward to slam into the Atlantic; and the lush corruption of a green-black jungle and its hidden cairns—the bones of giants slowly sinking into the always hungry earth.