Occultation and Other Stories

by Laird Barron

  “Oh, honey,” I said, and stepped back and shut the door.

  15.

  I sold the house and moved across the country. For nearly a decade, I’ve lived on a farm in Kingston, New York, with an artist who welds bed frames and puts them on display in galleries. We share the property with a couple of nanny goats, some chickens, two dogs and Daulton. I write my culture essays, although Burt makes enough neither of us needs a real job. Repairing the fences in the field, patching the shed roof and making the odd repairs around the house keep me occupied, keep me from chewing my nails. Nothing can help me as I lie awake at night, unfortunately. That’s when I do the real damage to myself. Against my better judgment I mailed the Black Guide to Professor Berman, though I cursed him for a fool during our last email exchange.

  Victor’s confined to an asylum and his doctor contacts me on occasion, hoping I’ll reveal what “massive trauma” befell his patient to precipitate his catastrophic break from reality. From what I gather, Victor keeps journals—dozens of them. He’s got a yen for astronomy and physics and at least one scientist thinks he’s a savant. Dane disappeared three years after our fateful trip and hasn’t resurfaced. His credit cards and bank accounts remain untouched. The cops asked me about this, too. I really don’t know, and I don’t want to, either.

  Burt raised his eyebrows when I bought the .12 gauge shotgun a few months back and parked it by my side of the bed. I told him it was for varmints and he accepted that. There are cougars and bears and coyotes lurking in the nearby forest. He hasn’t a clue that when he’s away on his infrequent art show trips, I sit in our homey kitchen by the light of a kerosene lamp with the gun on the table and watch the small door leading into the cellar. The door is bolted, not that I’m convinced it matters. It began a few weeks ago and only happens when Burt’s out of town. He’s not a part of this, thank God for small favors. The dogs used to lie at my feet and whine. Lately, the normally loyal pair won’t come into the room after dark, and I don’t blame them.

  Burt’s in the city for the weekend. He’s mixing with the royalty and pining for home, has said as much in no less than a half-dozen phone messages. I sit here in the gathered gloom, with a bottle of scotch, a glass, and a loaded gun. Really, it’s pointless. I sip scotch and wait for the soft, insistent knocks against the cellar door, for Glenn to whisper that he loves me. Guilt and loneliness have worked like acid on my insides. God help me, but more and more, I’m tempted to rack the slide and eject the shells, send them spinning across the floor. I’m tempted to leave the deadbolt unlocked. Then see what happens next.

  Catch Hell

  1.

  For years she awakened in the darkest hours to a baby crying. She finally accepted the nursery they’d sealed like a tomb was really and truly empty, that the crib was empty. She learned to cover her ears until the crying stopped. It never stopped.

  2.

  Olde Towne lay forty miles east of Seattle in hill country, a depressed region populated by poor rural folk who worked the ranches, dairies, and farms. Forests, deep and forbidding, swept along the hem of tilled land. Farther on, the terrain rose into a line of mountains that divided the state.

  The town’s streets were bracketed by houses with peaked roofs. The houses were made of brick or stone with tall brick chimneys. People had settled here long ago; many homes bore bronze plates designating them as historic landmarks. Shops squeezed tight, fronted by wooden awnings and boardwalks; signs were done in gilt script over double-paned glass, or etched into antique shingles. Ancient magnolias and chestnuts reared at intervals to shade the sidewalks and the lanes. The police station, firehouse, and city hall occupied the far end of Main Street; art deco structures bordered by lawns, hedgerows, and picket fences. One could imagine the police gunning down the McCoys on the courthouse steps.

  Sonny and Katherine Reynolds waited for the light to change at the intersection of Main Street and Wright. Options at the airport had been limited, so they rented a sedan—a blocky gas guzzler that swallowed most of its lane, but, happily enough, possessed far more than sufficient trunk space to accommodate their luggage and Sonny’s carton of research texts and notes. He told her several times during the drive it was like steering a boat. Katherine wanted a chance behind the wheel. Sonny laughed and said he’d let her drive it on the return leg of their journey. She called him a liar, but the ease of his humor, so removed from his usual melancholy, surprised her into a smile and she reached across and clasped his hand. Their hands on the wheel caught fire and burned orange, then red, as if they’d renewed an unspoken blood compact.

  “Wow, a real live soda shop,” she said. The sign outside of town claimed a population of three thousand. She estimated two or three times that number seeded throughout the surrounding countryside. Such a small, insular community—no wonder it clung to its heyday.

  “Stuck in the ’50s,” he said. “Cripes—is that a wooden Indian in front of the barber shop?

  “Yes indeedy.”

  “You gotta be kidding.”

  “I’ve never seen so many weathervanes in one place,” she said. This was true; she spied one on nearly every roof, lazily revolving in the westerly breeze. Most were iron roosters.

  “Wisconsin, it’s cheese, he said. “Here, the fascination seems to be with cock. Gotta watch out for them cock fetishists.”

  “It’s a left. Up ahead past that pink building.” She shook her road map open.

  “Looks like the set of a modern gothic. I read there’s a big institution just down the road with the lights still on and everything. Guess they weren’t all closed in the ’80s.”

  Katherine immediately withdrew from him, embittered by his indifference, his callous disregard for her aversion to such places. “You fuck,” she said and turned away and rested her forehead against the window.

  “Yeah, I’m a fuck,” he said cheerfully, and played with the radio dial. The local station crackled in. Apparently the afternoon DJ was a transcendentalist; she spoke in the monotone of an amateur hypnotist and played recordings of wind chimes and the periodic rattle of what might’ve been gravel shaken in a jar.

  The street narrowed to a bumpy stretch of country road, and climbed a series of bluffs that gave them a view of the entire valley. Sonny turned onto a blacktop drive that made a shallow, quarter-mile curve through a field of wild flowers and blackberry thickets and overgrown wooden fences, until it ended in a lot before the Black Ram Lodge. The building sat at the edge of a forest: brick and mortar and half-timber; three floors with a long, sloping tile roof flanked by hedges and a stand of enormous magnolia trees. The windows were dark and impenetrable.

  “Nothing looks the same in real life,” he said.

  “It seemed way smaller in the pictures,” Katherine said, even though she’d suspected otherwise all along. She’d taken the brochure from her purse, comparing black and white photographs against the real artifact. “God, I hope this place isn’t as empty as it looks.” Why’d I have to say that? Another excuse for him to think of me as a needy little bitch? Being alone isn’t so bad. Not like I’m alone, anyway. I got you babe, ha. She glanced sidelong at her husband, checking for the oblique signs of contempt. Maybe I am a needy little bitch. I’ll say something stupid just to get a reaction. Some attention.

  There was no denying her dread of aloneness. She’d made peace with loneliness and sorrow, become accustomed to her own bleak thoughts, her recriminations and regrets. True isolation was a different proposition entirely. It seemed as if she’d dozed off during the drive from shiny, metropolitan Seattle and woken to find herself lost in a green wasteland. The town wasn’t even comfortably picturesque anymore. Far below in the deepening gulf, lamps blinked on like the running lights of a seagoing vessel in fog. Sunset wasn’t for another hour, yet a soft curtain of twilight had settled over the land. This was nowhere. I hate you, Sonny. Selfish asshole.

  “I hope it is,” Sonny said.

  “Huh? Hope it’s what?”

  “Empty.”


  A wooden garage lay a hundred yards or so off in what had once likely been a cow pasture. Perhaps the garage was built from the bones of a massive barn, the place where they’d milked the cows, or slaughtered them. According to the pamphlet, more buildings were hidden beyond the central structure: a series of bungalows, a walled garden, a small distillery.

  Two men stood in conversation on the cement steps of the main building. One was tall and lean, an older gentleman whose snowy hair touched the shoulders of his gray suit. The other man was a bit younger and heavier and dressed in slacks and a dark polo shirt.

  “Welcome to Fantasy Island,” Sonny said, and laughed. He put on his sunglasses and climbed out of the car. Katherine watched him approach the men on the steps. Exhaustion had stolen her will, melted her into the seat. She chafed at his ability to adopt a genial demeanor with such casual efficacy, like a chameleon brightening to match the foliage.

  “Mr. Reynolds,” the taller man said as he shook hands with Sonny. His voice was dampened by glass. “I’m Kent Prettyman, humble steward of the Black Ram. This is my accomplice, Derek Lang.” As a group, they glanced at the car as Katherine emerged, a badger driven from her burrow. “Ah, Mrs. Reynolds! I’m Kent Prettyman. Call me Kent, please. And this is—”

  Her sunglasses were the oversized variety worn by actresses and battered wives. “Kat. Just Kat.”

  “Meow,” Mr. Lang said. His face was almost as dark as his shirt and he was brutishly muscular beneath the softness of his shoulders and belly.

  Mr. Prettyman explained that Mr. Lang managed the grounds. There was a significant measure of yearly upkeep on the buildings and environs, a monetary burden divided between the state, the county, and the owners of the estate. When Katherine inquired who these owners were, he said the landlords, a family of hereditary nobility, resided in Europe. The family possessed numerous holdings and cared little for the lodge, leaving its management to intermediaries, most lately (as of 1995) a nonprofit foundation for the preservation of historical sites. All rather boring, he assured them. Did they have many bags? One of the boys would fetch their luggage and park the car.

  The lodge predated Olde Towne and the very weight of its history settled upon Katherine ‘s shoulders when she followed Mr. Prettyman through the double doors of age-blackened oak into the grand foyer. The Black Ram had been established as a trading post in the 1860s, doing a brisk business with settlers from Seattle and tribes from neighboring Snohomish Valley. The post was expanded and refurbished as the manse of the Welloc family, the very same who carried the deed to this day, until it finally became an inn directly following the Great Depression, and thus remained. Slabbed beams crisscrossed the upper vault and glowed gold-black from the light passing through leaded glass. Katherine squinted to discern the shadowed forms of suits of armor and weapons on display, moldering tapestries of medieval hunts, and large potted plants of obscure genus’ that thrived in gloom. The flavor was certainly far more Western European than Colonial America, or America of any other era, for that matter.

  She stood in the semicircle of men, oversized shades dangling from her fingers. Her arm brushed Sonny’s and each of them instinctively flinched. She opened her mouth to mutter an apology and saw the gesture would be fruitless; he’d already forgotten her. His white shirt shone in the encroaching darkness and it illuminated his inscrutable, olive face, lent it the illusion of life. Mr. Prettyman said something to Mr. Lang, and Mr. Lang slunk away.

  “No phones?” Sonny said, incredulous enough to drop his fake smile for a moment.

  “There is a house phone,” Mr. Prettyman said. He pointed to a wooden-paneled booth across from the front desk. Another bit of bric-a-brac from a dusty period in European history. Doubtless the lodge sported a billiards room, a smoking den, tables for baccarat and canasta. “And another in my office. No wireless internet, I’m afraid. We make every attempt to foster an atmosphere of seclusion and relaxation here at the Black Ram. Guests needn’t trouble themselves with intrusions from the city while in our care.”

  “A house phone….”

  “It’s all in the brochure,” Katherine said. “Didn’t you read the brochure, honey? It’ll be an adventure, like the hotel we stayed at in Croatia, or the other one in Mexico.” Remote, decrepit half-star hotels, the pair of them. It rained torrentially during their stay in Mexico and the roof leaked in a half dozen places, water fairly poured in, truth be told, and sent cockroaches skittering across the bed sheets in search of high ground. “Who cares. I’m sure we’ve got plenty of bars on this hill.” She flipped open her cell phone and checked.

  “Are we the only guests?” Sonny asked.

  “Oh, well, there are several others. Fewer than a dozen, at the moment. Midsummer doldrums,” Mr. Prettyman said. He rubbed his hands together when he spoke, absently polishing the malachite ring on the third finger of his left hand—Katherine couldn’t make out the symbol embossed upon onyx; a star, perhaps. “At our peak we can host on the order of eighty or so guests. I’ll give you a tour of the property—tomorrow morning, say? Allow me to introduce the staff.” Even as he spoke, a pair of strapping boys laboriously rolled a baggage cart overstuffed with the Reynoldses’ belongings through the lobby and onto the elevator at the opposite end of the room. The elevator was flanked by a pair of marble rams and appeared as ancient as everything else, a wide platform caged in wrought iron. It lifted almost silently, except for the soft ding of a bell and the hum and slide of well-oiled gears.

  As promised, Mr. Prettyman walked them through the lodge, and Katherine smugly noted there was indeed a den containing card and billiard tables, an abundance of big game trophies, and the largest stone fireplace she’d ever seen—larger than the ones found in the proud old rustic ski lodges in Italy they’d frequented before Sonny broke his knee and gave up skiing altogether.

  “Naturally it gets rather soggy during the winter, but summer storms are also fierce in these parts,” Mr. Prettyman said. “A front will roll down out of the mountains and positively deck us with thunder and lightning. Nothing like a roaring fire and hot cocoa to steel a soul against the weather….”

  The proprietor oversaw a chef and bartender and their requisite assistants, a handful of maids and custodial personnel, two porters (Billy and Zack, the burly farm boys), a maintenance man, and the concierge, a gaunt, clerkish gentleman named Kristoff. Kristoff had jaundiced eyes and old-fashioned false teeth that didn’t quite fit his mouth. He smelled sharply of alcohol. Katherine thought the dour fellow probably kept a flask of something strong under the desk. As Mr. Prettyman swept them along to the upper floors, he mentioned Mr. Lang was responsible for nearly a dozen carpenters, laborers, and gardeners. In addition, Mr. Lang stood in as the de facto chief of security—he handled the infrequent trespasser; hunters, mainly. Poachers who slipped into the wooded preserve beyond the lodge in hopes of bagging a deer or one of the wild boars or black bears that roamed the hills. The land had once doubled as a private wildlife preserve.

  “Wild boar? Bears?” Katherine wasn’t happy with this revelation. “Is that even…well, legal?”

  “I don’t think the family concerned itself with the niceties back then,” Mr. Prettyman said. “They stocked their game in the ’20s, I believe. Possibly earlier. Money talks, as the saying goes. Local law enforcement was frequently invited to hunt with the, ah, royalty, as it were. Oh, and there’s a small cougar population. Indigenous.”

  “So much for nature walks.”

  “Nonsense, Mrs. Reynolds! Don’t bother them, they won’t bother you. Very few of the big animals venture close to the lodge proper. Besides, if you’d care to explore the region, sightsee the ruins and whatnot, I’m sure Mr. Lang would be happy to organize a daytrip. He’s a dead shot. Small likelihood of your being eaten by bears, I promise.”

  She pictured Mr. Lang’s sadistic grin, his sweaty hands caressing a hunting rifle. “I think I’d like to lie down now.”

  Their suite occupied the second floor of
the southern wing. It consisted of a living room, kitchenette, bedroom, and one and a half baths. The pine bureaus and armoire were antiques. A tapestry depicting a stag hunt hung over the bed, some pastoral oil paintings were scattered elsewhere, and in the living area a Philco radio that must’ve been popular in the 1940s, but no television. The living room window commanded a view of the forested hills.

  Katherine eyed the stag hunt. The vision of the stag, rearing before frothing mastiffs and men on horses, all eyes black and wild, the horns and the spears—this visceral image looming over the bed was a disquieting prospect.

  “First no phones, now no television.” Sonny rummaged through the drawers of a small writing desk. A kerosene lamp perched atop the hutch of the desk, bookending a handful of clothbound volumes so decrepit, humidity had sloughed the titles from their spines. He sniffed the sooty glass. “Makes you wonder how often they lose power. Prettyman says there’s a coal furnace in the boiler room.”

  “Maybe it’s part of the ambience. Lamps, rose petals—”

  “Yep, and a romantic game of cribbage. Or dominos.” He rattled a velvet bag and she laughed.

  A few minutes later they argued, an indication things were back to normal, or what passed for normalcy here in the lucky thirteenth year of their union. She’d made reference to Mr. Prettyman’s offhand comment regarding ruins and Sonny immediately clammed up. He leaped to his feet and began pacing the bedroom. Then he grabbed his coat. Katherine asked where he was going, alarmed at the prospect of being deserted in this place, surrounded by strangers, one of whom gave her the serious creeps. “Out,” he said.

  “But where?” By an act of supreme will she kept her voice level.

  “Don’t worry about it. Take a nap. Whatever.” He was on his way, face set, a man in action.