Occultation and Other Stories

by Laird Barron

  12.

  Glenn cuffed and shook me awake. His cheeks were wet with tears. “You weren’t moving,” he said. I sat up and looked around. The unearthly light had faded to a dull glow, but I could make out some details of the chamber. Victor stood beside the idol, his back to us. He caressed the statue’s rotund belly, palm flat the way a man touches his wife’s stomach, feeling for the baby’s kick. Dane was nowhere to be seen.

  I said, “Vicky? Vicky, you okay?” It required great effort to form the words. Victor slowly turned. Something was wrong with his face. Dried gore caked his forehead and temples. He grinned ghoulishly. “You should’ve seen what I saw. This isn’t a tomb…it’s…” He laughed and it gurgled in his throat. “They’ll be here soon, my sweets.”

  Victor’s certitude, the lunacy in his expression, his tone, frightened me. “Glenn, we’ve got to get out of here.” I pushed away his arm and rose. “Vicky, come on. Let’s find your husband.”

  “Where’s Dane going? He won’t leave me here, nor you, his best buddies. However, if he doesn’t come to his senses, if he’s run screaming for the hills, I’ll visit him soon enough. I’ll drag him home to the dark.”

  “Vicky—” Glenn said. Victor mocked him. “Glenn! Be still, be at peace. They love you. You’ll see, you’ll see. Everything will change; you’ll be remade, turned inside out. We won’t need our skin, our teeth, our bones.” He licked his thumb and casually gouged his chest an inch above the nipple. Blood flowed, coursed over his rooting thumb and across the knuckles of his fist.

  Glenn screamed. I glanced at the ground near my feet, hoping for a loose rock with which to brain Victor. Victor ripped loose a flap of skin and let it hang, revealing muscle. “We won’t need this, friends. Every quivering nerve, every sinew will be laid bare.” He leaned over and reached for the switchblade taped to his ankle. “Oh, shit,” I said.

  Glenn said shrilly, “What’s that?” There was movement in the fissure. A figure manifested as a pale smudge against the background. It was naked and its skin glistened a pallid white like the soft meat of a grub. Its features were hidden by the gloom, and I was glad of that. Victor raised his arms and uttered a glottal exclamation.

  The Man (it was a man, wasn’t it?) crept forward to the very edge of the crevice, and hesitated there, apparently loath to emerge into the feeble light despite its palpable yearning to do so. Whether man or woman I couldn’t actually determine as its wattles and pleats disguised its sex, but the figure’s size and proportions were so large I couldn’t imagine it being a woman. The weight of its hunger and lust echoed the empathic blast I’d received from the black cloud, and my mind itched as this damp, corpulent apparition whispered to me, tried to insinuate its thoughts into mine via a psychic frequency.

  I beheld again the cloud, a dank cosmic mold seeping from galaxy to galaxy, a system of hollow planets and a brown dwarf star nested within its coils and cockles. Sunless seas of warm ichor sloshed with the gravitational spin of those hollow, lightless worlds, spoiled yolks within eggshells. Hosts of darksome inhabitants squirmed and joined in terrible communion. I felt unclean, violated in bearing witness to their coupling.

  Beyond the entrance of the dolmen and the encircling trees, the sun burned cool and red. Soon it would be dusk…and then, and then… “Vicky! For the love of God, get over here.” Victor ignored me and shuffled toward the figure, and the figure’s luminous flesh darkened with a spreading, cancerous stain, like a piece of paper charring in a flame, or a sheet soaked in blood, and it reached, extending a hideously long arm. Its spindly fingers tapered to filthy, sharp points. Those fingers crooked, beckoning languidly. What did it promise Victor, with its whispers and wheedles?

  I moved without thinking, for if I’d stopped to think I would’ve sprinted after Dane, who’d obviously exercised common sense in beating a retreat. I tackled Victor and slung him to the ground. The impact sent shocks through my wounded arm and I almost fainted again, but I hung tough and pinned him. Stunned, he resisted ineffectually, flopped like a worm until I freed the pistol from my pocket and smacked him in the forehead with the butt. That worked just like the movies—his eyes rolled back and he went limp. Glenn came running and we grabbed Victor beneath the arms and dragged him from the chamber. The figure in the crevice laughed, a hyena drowning or a lunatic with a sliced throat.

  The flight down the trail toward camp was harrowing. We bound Victor’s hands with his own belt, and made a tourniquet to staunch the bleeding from his leg as it refused to clot, and half-carried him as he raved and shrieked—I finally pistol-whipped him again and he was quiet after that. The entire way, I glanced over my shoulder fully expecting the dreadful presence to overtake us. Hysteria galvanized me into forty minutes of superhuman exertion—had Glenn not been there, I’m sure I could’ve easily hoisted Victor onto my shoulders and made like a track star.

  Dane jumped from the bushes near the main road and Glenn nearly lopped his head with a hatchet. Dane had run to the camp before his panic subsided and he’d mustered the courage to double back and find us. His shame was soon replaced by horror at Victor’s condition, which neither I nor Glenn could fully explain. I convinced Dane there wasn’t time to talk lest someone or something had followed us from the dolmen. So, the three of us lugged Victor to camp, loaded the Land Rover and got the hell off Mystery Mountain.

  13.

  I put the pedal to the metal and Glenn made the calls as we hurtled down the logging road in the dark. The authorities were waiting at the campgrounds. Victor recovered from his stupor as they strapped him to a gurney. He cursed and snarled and thrashed until the paramedics tranquilized him. Dane, Glenn, and I were escorted to the local sheriff’s office where the uniforms asked a lot of questions.

  The smartest move would’ve been to fudge the details. That’s the movies, though. None of us were coherent enough to concoct a cover story to logically explain the hole in Victor’s leg, or the monster, or the bad acid trip phantasmagoria of the pool. We just spilled the tale, drew an X on a topographical map and invited the sheriff and his boys to go see for themselves. It didn’t help our credibility that the cops found Victor’s weed stash and several hundred empty beer cans in the truck.

  Ultimately, they let us walk. The fight at the tavern wasn’t mentioned, despite our mashed faces and missing teeth, which surprised the hell out of me. Victor’s wound was presumed an accident; the investigators decided he harpooned himself on a branch while drunkenly wandering the mountainside. Personally, I preferred that version as well—the reality was too horrible. Victor’s deranged state was obviously a hysterical reaction to the near-death incident. Our statements were taken and we were shown the door. Once the cops put two and two together that the four of us were queer, they couldn’t end the conversation fast enough. Someone would be in touch, thank you for your cooperation, etcetera, etcetera.

  Dane went to stay with Victor at Harborview Hospital while Glenn and I returned home. Neither of us was in any shape to linger by Victor’s bedside. I’d tried to talk Dane into crashing at the house, to no avail—he hadn’t even acknowledged the offer. His face was blank and prematurely lined. I’d seen refugees from shelled villages wearing the exact same look. In his own way, he was as removed from reality as Victor.

  Glenn fared a little better—he was a wreck too, but we had each other. I dreaded his reaction when the shock dissipated and the magnitude of the tragedy sank in. He’d lost one friend, possibly forever, and the jury was out on the other. God help me, a bit of my heart savored the notion I finally had him all to myself. Another, even more bitter and shriveled bit slightly gloated over the fact it was finally his turn to suffer. I’d done all the crying in our relationship.

  Daulton meowed when we came in and turned on the lights. The house, our comfy furniture and family pictures, all of it, seemed artificial, props from someone else’s life. I showered for the first time in several days, spent an hour with my forehead pressed against the stall tiles. I saw the wound in Victor
’s leg, his mouth chanting soundlessly, saw the stars thicken into a stream that poured into that black hole. The black hole, the black cloud, was limned in red and it made me think of the broken circle on the cover of Moderor de Caliginis. These images were not exact, not perfectly symmetrical, and the hot water cascading over my back no longer thawed me. My teeth chattered.

  I wrapped myself in one of the luxuriously thick towels we’d gotten for a mutual anniversary gift and limped into the hall and found Glenn on hands and knees, his ear pressed to the vent. “What the hell?” I said. He gestured awkwardly over his shoulder for quiet. After a few moments he rose and dusted his pajamas with a half-dozen brisk pats. “I thought the TV was on downstairs. It’s not. Must’ve been sound traveling along the pipes from the neighbors, or I dunno. Let’s hit the rack, huh?”

  I lay in bed, chilled and shaking, Glenn a dead lump next to me. The accent lamp in the hall gave a warm, albeit fragile yellow light. Without shifting to face me like he normally would’ve, Glenn said, “Tommy fell into a hole in the woods. That’s how he really died.” I said, “Yeah. Vicky told me. You fucker.” Glenn still didn’t move. I couldn’t recall him ever being so still. He said, “I figured that’s why you’ve been so bent. Then you know why we kept quiet.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  The light flickered and now Glenn’s head turned. “True. You don’t. I apologize. I should’ve come clean long ago. Tommy was so deep into black magic it blew my mind when I finally caught on. He always sneered at the lightweight stuff me and Dane fooled with. I really believed he was just a redneck who made good. Then we hit some extra heavy-duty acid one night and he bared his soul. We were on spring break and spending a weekend in the Mojave with some of the guys and he got to rambling. His parents were basically illiterate, but he had well-to-do relatives on his mom’s side. Scholars. He lived a few summers with them and they turned him on to very, very dark occultism. Tommy intimated he’d taken part in a human sacrifice. He lied to impress me, I’m sure.”

  I wasn’t sure. “What did they do? The relatives.”

  “His uncle was a professor. World traveler who went native. Hear Tommy tell it, the old dude was a connoisseur of the black arts, but specialized in blood rituals and necromancy. Tommy said the man could… conjure things. Dr. Faustus style.”

  “I might’ve laughed at that the other day,” I said. The lamp flickered again and shadows raced across the wall. Glenn said, “Tommy showed me some moldy manuscript pages he carried in his pocket. They were wrinkled and obviously torn from a book. The words were written in Latin—he actually read Latin! He wouldn’t say what they meant, but he consulted them later when we went on our trip into the Black Hills near Olympia. Looking back, I get the feeling maybe he had his own Black Guide.”

  “It could’ve been a possum stew recipe from his grandma’s cookbook,” I said. “The motherfucker didn’t come visit me in the night. I dreamed that when I was rocked off my ass. The guide, well there’s a coincidence. I’m not going to buy a conspiracy theory about how dead Tom made sure we found it at ye old knickknack shop. I sure as fuck ain’t going to worry my pretty head over what we saw on the mountain. I’m sorry for Vicky and Dane. We’re okay, though and I say let sleeping dogs lie.” I breathed heavily and stared at the hall lamp so hard my eyes hurt.

  “Ignoring those sleeping dogs is what got us here. Tommy talked and talked that enchanted evening, had a scary expression as he watched me. His eyes were so strange. I got paranoid thinking he wasn’t really high, that this was a test. Or a trap. I remember him saying there was ‘sure as God made little green apples’ life out there. He pointed at the stars. Cold night in the desert and those stars were right on top of us in their billions. He wanted to meet them, except he was afraid. His uncle warned him the only thing an advanced species would want from us would be our meat and bones.”

  Glenn didn’t say anything for a while. He rubbed my arm, which still ached fiercely. Finally, he said, “Everything returned to normal after the Mojave trip—he didn’t mention our chat, didn’t seem to recall letting me in on his secret life. A few months later it was summer vacation and we were knocking around Seattle. I came home to visit my folks and the others tagged along. Tommy put together an overnight hike and away we went. I saw him fall into the hole as we were walking way up in the hills along a well-beaten path. Mountain bikers used it a lot, even though it’s a remote spot. Dane and Victor were joking around and I glanced over my shoulder exactly as Tommy fell. I didn’t tell those two what I saw. I made a show of yelling for him until Dane found the sinkhole. Course we called in the troops. I’m sure Vicky told you what happened next. Cops, Fish and Wildlife, everybody we could think of. No luck. That pit just dropped into the center of the Earth and it was impossible to help him. To this day nobody but me is completely sure that’s where Tommy disappeared—it just makes the most sense. Him tripping into a bottomless pit is awful, yeah. Not as awful as other possibilities, though.”

  The lamp clicked off and on three times and I raised myself against the headboard and clutched the coverlet to my chin. I lost interest in finally getting to the bottom of Tommy’s death and the weird conspiracy to sanitize its circumstances. “Holy shit— Glenn, please stop. I’ve got a bad feeling.” I had a sense of impending doom, in fact. I could easily envision a colossal meteor descending from on high and smashing the house to bits. Daulton fluffed into a ball of bristling fur and scooted under the bed where he hissed and growled.

  Glenn kept rubbing my arm and the light flickered again and again, and the filament ticked like a rattler. “I never told the guys what I really saw that day. Tommy didn’t fall. He was snatched by a hand…not a hand that belonged to any regular person I’ve seen. An arm, fish belly white, shot up and caught his belt and yanked him in…and the hand had…claws. He didn’t even scream. He didn’t make a peep. It happened so fast I thought it couldn’t be real. I dreamed it like you dreamed Tommy was in the living room after the party.”

  “I can’t believe this shit,” I said. What had Tommy expected to find in the Black Hills? Another ancient ruin hidden from all but the initiated and the doomed? I was getting colder. I wanted to ask Glenn if he still loved Tommy. Nothing he said would’ve mattered and so I comforted myself with smoldering resentment.

  “When we were in the dolmen, did you get a look at that guy’s face?” he said.

  “The dude in the crevice? That freaky inbred motherfucker who got separated from all his Ozarks kin? No.”

  “I did,” Glenn said. “It was him.”

  The light went off and stayed off.

  14.

  I woke with a dry mouth. Glenn’s covers were thrown back and his side of the sheets were cool. I listened to the creaks of the house. The power was out. Glenn laughed, downstairs. He said something unintelligible. In my semiconscious state, I assumed he’d called the power company and was sharing a joke with the poor sap manning the phone center.

  Fuzzy-headed, I put on my robe and negotiated the hall and the stairs. A bit of starlight and the tip of the crescent moon gleamed through the windows. Glenn had lighted a candle in the kitchen and it led me through the haunted woods to the doorway. It was only a single candle, a fat one I’d bought at a bookstore for my office but stuck in a kitchen drawer for emergencies instead, and so the room remained mostly in gloom.

  She slouched at the opposite end of the dining table. She was naked and lush and repellently white. Her hair was long and thick and black. Her hands rested on the table, and her fingers and cracked, sharp nails were far too long and thin. Moderor de Caliginis lay open before her. She lazily riffled pages and smiled at me. I couldn’t see her teeth.

  Glenn stood to her left in the breakfast nook, the toes of his slippers in the light, his shape otherwise indistinct. He waited mutely. “Who are you?” I said to her, although I already knew. The covetous way she handled the guide made it clear. “Three guesses,” she said in a perfectly normal, good-humored tone. “Rose, I presume,�
� I said, voice cracking and ruining my attempt at bravado. “How kind of you to drop in.” The gun was in my coat in the living room. I thought I might make it if I ran and if I didn’t trip over anything.

  “How kind of you to open your home. Thank you for the lovely note. Yes, I had a fabulous visit to the Peninsula—and points beyond. That saying, a nice place to visit… Well, I liked it so much, I decided to naturalize.”

  “Glenn,” I said. I was exhausted. It came over me in a wave—the seasick feeling of giving way too much blood at the nurse’s station. I resisted a sudden compulsion to collapse into a chair and lay my head on the table. My fingers and toes tingled. I gripped the doorframe for balance. “Glenn,” I tried again, weak, hopeless. Glenn said nothing.

  “He’s not for you. He belongs to Tommy,” Rose said. “He belongs to us. We love him. You were never part of their inner circle, were you Willem? Second best for Glenn. His vanilla life after graduation into the real world of jobs, bills, routine sex. No thrills, not like college.” She closed the book and traced the broken ring on its cover. “Alas, nice guys do indeed finish last. I, however, believe in second chances and do-overs. Would you like a do-over, Willem? You’ll need to decide whether to come along with us and see the sights. Or not. You are more than welcome to join the fun. Goodness knows, I hope you do. Tommy does too.”

  The cellar door had swung open while I was distracted. Rose stood and took Glenn’s hand. They passed over the threshold. He turned and stared at me. Behind him was infinite blackness. Her arms, pale as death, emerged from that blackness and draped his shoulders. She caressed him. She whispered in his ear, and in mine.

  The pull was ineluctable; I released the doorframe and crossed the room in slow, tottering steps like a man wading into high tide. The universe whirled and roared. I came within kissing distance of my love and looked deep into his dull, wet eyes, gazed into the bottomless pit. His face was inert but for the eyes. Maybe that was really him waiting somewhere down there in the dark.