Occultation and Other Stories

by Laird Barron

  Jesus, and I thought the alpha male routine was sexy, once. “We’re in this together. This leaky ol’ rowboat. Right?”

  “I’ll see you for supper.” His demeanor was that of a man announcing to his family he was running to the corner store for cigarettes. I’ll be right back! He turned away, snuffing the conversation.

  “Yeah, sure.” She wanted to stick her nail file in his ass cheek.

  “Kitchen’s open till ten. Put on something nice. You look good in the taffeta.” He walked out, shutting the door carefully behind him.

  Katherine flipped him the bird with both hands and slumped on the bed and seethed. She hated him, not because he’d dismissed her as one dismisses an inferior, a child, although certainly that was a portion. Her rage sprang from the simple fact that he always seemed to know so much more than she did.

  She went to the window and stared out at a landscape growing soft and shapeless as light slipped away. Toward the horizon and closing fast, came a towering storm cloud, a death’s-head lit by internal fires. Her eyes grew heavy. She swallowed a couple of pills from one of multiple bottles that comprised her daily regimen of behavioral equalization, and fell asleep. Wind clattered the shutters and the last bit of evening sun faded and died.

  3.

  Katherine had spent six years dwelling on the accident, yet she seldom pictured Janie. Baby clothes, the odor of formula and spittle, but not the baby herself. In retrospect, the pregnancy, the seven months that had followed, were dreamlike; they left an impression that she’d engaged in a protracted struggle with some indefinable illness or injury. Yes, it seemed the stuff of dreams. There were scars: her vertigo persisted, and too, her phobia of bridges and overpasses. Sometimes the cry of an infant caused her to lactate. Sometimes it elicited a flood of tears and inconsolable sobbing. She’d screamed at a hapless mother in a coffee shop; told her to shut up her squalling brat and was instantly mortified at the lady’s expression of shock and fear. Thankfully, the fits of lunacy had ebbed.

  Sonny had wanted another child right away. A few months after the dust of the tragedy settled, he insisted they try again. His desire developed into an unequivocal force, an implacable usurper of their life-aspirations, of all they’d planned during their days as romantic conspirators.

  Katherine’s mother pulled her aside at the family Christmas dinner—she recalled her father and Sonny’s laughter echoing from the living room, how it transcended the boom and roar of a football game on TV. Sonny hated football, sneered at the preening athletes, their “bling” and arrogance; he pretended to enjoy sports to bond with her father who’d been a devout booster of his own hometown high school team since forever.

  Are you sure you’re ready? Mom said. Is it what you want? And what Mom meant was, Are you still the kind of bitch who eats her own puppies? Katherine smiled brightly and bore down on the potato peeler. She said, Yes, yes, of course we’re ready. I want this. Mom’s eyes hinted at a profound unhappiness born of doubt that abruptly submerged to be replaced by her songbird cheer. Mom was a survivor, too. Everyone had a nice, fattening dinner and far too many Irish coffees. While they watched one of Pop’s moldy old VCR tapes of a Bob Hope special, Katherine thought, What I really want is to be punished. That’s why I can’t get well. Why I stay married to the sonofabitch.

  When a year passed without a positive result, they, or Sonny, to be specific, grew concerned. It developed his sperm count was merely adequate. The specialists were at a loss in her case; she tested fertile, nonetheless, her insides had lapsed into a peculiar dormancy. Adoption was out of the question; Sonny would accept no less than his own image in miniature. This went on and on. Then the desperate act—the surrogacy. They borrowed money, they recruited a volunteer, and the volunteer miscarried. Their marriage plunged into the Dark Ages.

  It wasn’t the end, though. There’s no end to hell.

  4.

  Katherine and Sonny arrived in time for a late supper in the dining room. Sonny had apparently stopped off at the hotel bar and made the acquaintance of three fellow guests whom he invited to join Katherine and himself for supper. She instantly recognized that her husband had indulged in several drinks from his slightly disheveled hair, the width of his smile, the shine of his eyes. As he flushed, the old patina of acne scars became fiercely evident and roughened his cheeks, lending his expression a coarseness one might glimpse in a mug shot. Not good—Sonny’s wit became caustic when he drank overmuch. Luckily, he didn’t indulge frequently, preferring to focus upon less hedonistic pursuits. Katherine wondered if she might prefer an alcoholic husband to a morbidly obsessive one.

  Gary Woodruff was a retired investment banker on vacation from Manhattan. He wore a suit out of place in their rustic surroundings. Lyle Cockrum neglected to divulge his occupation. Katherine pegged him for a playboy. His hands were fragile, his black hair expensively styled, his boredom complete and genuine. His designer clothes were loose and a compellingly tasteless shade of lime. He’d arrived with a frail blonde woman who’d immediately professed awful allergies and retreated to her room. The third guest, Melvin Ting, served as assistant curator of Olde Towne’s most venerable repository of historical artifacts, the Welloc-Devlin Museum. Of evident Eurasian lineage, he struck Katherine as much too young for such a post: thirty years old at most, and clad in a turtleneck and slacks, a gold hoop in his left ear. He would’ve fit right in at a trendy coffeehouse slinging lattes or reciting the poetry of the disaffected. He also smiled too much for her taste. This, of course, was the very individual they’d traveled from California to meet. However, since the rendezvous was intended to be clandestine, neither she nor Sonny gave any hint.

  The chef personally introduced the courses, which included salmon and truffles, and sorbet for dessert. Afterward, they ordered drinks and lounged near the softly crackling hearth, their conclave presided over by an enormous black ram’s head on the mantle. Buzzed from several glasses of red wine and somewhat disarmed by her cozy surroundings, Katherine nonetheless wished they’d chosen to call it a night. The lights flickered and died to a chorus of gasps and mild curses. The group sat in tense silence, listening to grand old beams shift and creak, and rain slash against the windows while hotel staff bustled about lighting lanterns and refreshing drinks.

  “So, what’s your line?” Mr. Cockrum said. He studied Sonny over the rim of a brandy snifter.

  “Until recently I taught cultural anthropology at a little college in Pasadena. Folklore. I’ve dabbled in archeology. Now I write for travel journals.” And, in a perfunctory gesture to his wife, “Kat is vice president of communications for the Blessingham Agency. They design colors.”

  “For marketing strategies, I presume,” Woodruff said.

  “If you’ve ever wondered where Super Burger restaurants got that color scheme, or why Tuffenup Buddy pain reliever comes in a Day-Glo pink box, I’m the one to ask.” She smiled faintly.

  There was a long, dead pause.

  “How does one become an expert in folklore?” Woodruff’s tone suggested vast condescension. He exaggerated the syllables of “expert.”

  “His father was a famous primatologist,” she said in automatic defense of her husband’s pride. Whether it would bolster his confidence or annoy him was a gamble. She couldn’t help herself.

  “Ah, not really famous,” Sonny said. “He read traditional fairy tales to us kids every night. The unvarnished ones where Cinderella’s sisters cut off pieces of their feet to fit the glass slipper. Sex and cannibalism—all the good stuff modern publishers whitewash. It stuck.”

  “He researched ape languages at Kyoto University.” Katherine tried her wine, determined to slug it out now that she’d gone this far. It had grown unpleasantly warm. “Sonny won’t tell you this, but his father, Quentin, did a lot of important work for the Primate Research Group in the 1950s. A very prestigious organization. The Japanese thought so highly of him they bought him a house.”

  “He left the University long ago,” Sonny said.
“I’m sure you’ve never heard of him—”

  “What kind of folklore do you study?” Mr. Ting asked. He’d remained silent during dinner while chain smoking and sipping espresso.

  “Japanese mythology. I’ve some facility with Chinese and Indian oral traditions, a smattering of others.” This was exceptionally modest of Sonny. He’d acquired extensive knowledge of several dozen mythological traditions.

  “You get into the scary shit, I see,” Mr. Cockrum said. Katherine wondered how much the man knew about the subject. Cliff Notes and Penguin Abridged Classics most likely. He hardly seemed the type to pore over scholarly treatises.

  “Eh, the really scary shit would be the Slavic mythos. Or Catholicism, ha-ha,” Sonny said.

  “He’s written books.” Katherine stared at her glass. The vein in her temple began to pulse.

  “Oh, more than magazine features? You mean real books?” Mr. Woodruff said.

  “Ah, of course he has,” Mr. Cockrum said. “Publish or perish; is this not the academic way, Mr. Reynolds?”

  What the fuck do you know about academia, Cock-ring?

  “Damned right it is.” Sonny swallowed a half glass of whiskey and signaled the cocktail waitress for another. His ruddy flush deepened and crept beneath his open collar. He was growing bellicose and reckless and Katherine decided she’d best figure a graceful way to maneuver them away from the dinner party before things got truly ugly.

  “Well, if you want spooky, get Prettyman or Lang to tell you about the local legends,” Cockrum said. “An associate of mine spent his honeymoon here a couple of years ago. They sat right here in this den and swapped ghost stories. Prettyman and Lang had some doozies about the Old Man of the Wood.”

  “Oooh! The Old Goat!” Mr. Woodruff chortled at his own wit.

  “I read about that,” Sonny said. “The locals used to think he stole their livestock and seduced their womenfolk—”

  “—and granted wishes,” Mr. Ting said.

  “For a price, no doubt.” Mr. Cockrum had lighted a cigarette. Its cherry illuminated the panes of his face.

  “He has colorful appellations—Wild Bill, Splayfoot Bill, Billy the Black—”

  “—Mr. Bill,” said Mr. Cockrum to Mr. Ting’s pained smile.

  “Hear, hear!” Woodruff said. “Seducer of women? A satyr.”

  Cockrum winked at Sonny. “Not a satyr. Not a randy flautist, not Pan incarnate. The legends around here are darker than that.”

  “The Old Man of the Wood is a devil,” Sonny said. “One of Lucifer’s circle.”

  “Or Satan Hisownself. Isn’t that right, Mr. Ting?” Mr. Cockrum exhaled toward the curator.

  Mr. Ting shrugged. “Admittedly, in the olden days many an unfortunate event was laid at the feet, erm, hooves, of the Old Man.”

  “I’d say rape, murder, mutilation, the kidnapping of wee children qualifies as unfortunate, all right.” Mr. Cockrum leaned toward Katherine . “You wanna see what I mean, there’s a painting of the old boy down the hall on the way to the stairs. Curl your toes.” Then, he lowered his voice to a stage whisper, “Prettyman says the Goat Lord still blunders through the darkest woods, that occasionally he meets up with a lost hiker, or a kid, pardon the pun…. On nights such as these it almost seems plausible.”

  On her way to dinner, Katherine had stopped to view the painting of the so called Old Man of the Wood. The oils were old and blurry, yet the depiction of the naked figure in a grove was oddly disquieting. One could discern massive horns, obscured by shadow, a sinister smile, a beckoning hand, elongated and strange. The painting possessed a quality of tainted eroticism, the fanciful and unnerving impression of a piece of ancient history leaked into the present. It gleamed darkly from its alcove, insinuating the permanence of lust and wickedness and the mortal fascination with such corruption.

  “Let us not forget, our esteemed proprietor was once a man of the cloth,” Mr. Ting said. “A good Lutheran minister descended from the Olde Towne tradition of such men. Understandably his conjecture would veer to the ecclesiastical.”

  “Really?” Sonny said. “He appears a bit, I dunno, wild, to be a minister.”

  “Former minister,” Mr. Ting said.

  “I say, whoever named this lodge certainly possessed a fiendish sense of humor,” Mr. Woodruff said. “Black Ram is a tad obvious, though.”

  “Placation,” Sonny said. “One must give the Devil his due.”

  “Puhleeze!” Katherine reached over and smacked his arm to the accompaniment of groans and chuckles.

  Lights sputtered and fizzed in their sockets and power was restored to a round of tipsy applause. There came a brief lull, and when people began yawning, she seized the opportunity to proclaim road exhaustion and soon the party drifted to their respective quarters.

  5.

  Mr. Ting knocked on the door after a discreet period. Sonny poured nightcaps from a complimentary bottle of vodka management had stored in the icebox. Ting drew a leather packet from his valise and set it on the table and clicked on the lamp. The leather had paled to yellow and was bound with rawhide strings. The curator undid the knots and delicately spread several sheets of ancient, curling parchment. The papers were written in Latin, and decorated with alchemical annotations and cryptic diagrams. Ting explained that the materials had once been the property of the Welloc-Devlin Museum via the estate of Johansen Welloc, one of Olde Towne’s self-styled nobles during the early 1900s. Welloc was a trained archeologist and noted collector of antiquities, the latter including a preoccupation with manuscripts and art objects certain to have gotten him burned at the stake during quainter times.

  “Olde Towne is a rather fascinating case,” Mr. Ting said. “Reading between the lines one might surmise its founding fathers were predominately occultists. Witchcraft, hermetic magic, geomancy…the gentry pursued knowledge of all manners of superstitious methodology. A veritable goldmine for an anthropologist.”

  “A wet dream,” Katherine said. Clearly the town hadn’t escaped the eccentricities of its founders—a flock of Golden Dawn-style crackpots who’d transmitted their kookiness down through the generations.

  While Sonny studied the papers, Ting made himself another drink. “You realize, I assume, this is all rubbish.” He produced a battered geophysical map of Olde Towne and environs. Red X’s marked several locations.

  “Yes, yes. Rubbish.” Sonny didn’t bother to glance up. His eyes were slits twinkling with lamplight. He licked his lips.

  Mr. Ting smiled dryly. “Nor should I need to warn you about the legality of traipsing across sites of cultural import…much less tampering with anything you might find. The locals frown upon tourists pocketing arrowheads and such as souvenirs. Mr. Lang keeps a sharp eye on the grounds, I might add.”

  “Not to worry, Ting. That’s a contemptible sport.” Sonny’s grin wasn’t his most convincing.

  Mr. Ting nodded and dragged on his cigarette. He exhaled and his shrewd expression was partially screened by the blue cloud, the back of his hand. “You have to be cautious,” he said. He gestured at the discarded leather case, the survey map. “A word to the wise, my friends: there are those in Olde Towne who enjoy meeting nice people such as yourselves. These parties I mention are possessed of selfish interests and curious appetites. That’s all I’ll say.”

  “Um, thanks,” Sonny said.

  “Forgive my crassness, but the fee… Regrettable, however, my acquisition of your papers was not without some jeopardy to my position.”

  “Forgive you?” Sonny scribbled a check for a sum that made him wince, and sent the fellow on his way.

  “Finally,” Katherine said. She thought of the rotting grimoires with titles in Latin, German, and Greek, the mandrake roots and moon dust, and the other items stowed among their suitcases and bags. What would the unflappable Mr. Ting think of those? He’d probably think we’re just two more loons in a long line.

  Sonny locked the door. He went to the bed and dragged it about eighteen inches away fro
m the wall. He’d purchased crimson chalk from a witch in Salem, Massachusetts. The witch was the real deal, he said, and he only tracked her down after many weeks of legwork. The crone dwelt in a shack in a bog, like all authentic witches did. She sold him the chalk, a dirty nub allegedly preserved from the collection of a Renaissance sorcerer who dabbled in the summoning of various entities best not mentioned, and candles made from the tears of freshly hanged men and babies’ fat. Katherine refused to ask what the so-called witch wanted in exchange for her services. The possibilities induced a shudder.

  He drew a pentagram around the bed, and another on the ceiling directly above, all the while muttering a Latin incantation. When he’d finished, he dusted off his hands and surveyed his work. The pentagrams were protective circles designed to repel negative forces that crept upon hapless sleepers: the night hags, the succubae and incubi, whatever unnamed demons that made feasts of a dreamer’s spirit. “Be sure to step carefully when you get into bed. Smudge the line and it’s useless.”

  “The maid is gonna love this,” she said. Probably Sonny had arranged for them to be left undisturbed, however. He thought of everything. “Maybe we should sacrifice a goat. Yeah, ram’s blood. And a virgin.”

  “You’re drunk. Go to sleep,” he said.

  6.

  Katherine lay sleep-drugged and passive while Sonny fucked her. His face always changed during sex. His eyes narrowed, his teeth shone like tarnished gemstones; he seemed dangerous and she occasionally fantasized he was a criminal, maybe a gangster who’d decided to have his way with her.

  She turned her cheek against the coolness of her pillow while he grunted in her ear. The room was dark, but by the glow of the guttering candles she slowly realized Mr. Lang stood in the doorway, watching. She groaned, and Sonny put his hand over her mouth as he’d gotten in the habit of doing back when they were young and lusty and dwelt in an apartment with paper-thin walls. She struggled and that excited him and he moved faster, pressed her so hard the mattress formed a cave around them. Mr. Lang sidled from the doorway and toward the bed and slipped from her field of view. All she could hear was Sonny panting, her own muffled moans and cries. She panicked and thrashed against him and then she came and moments later he finished and collapsed upon her like a dead man.