Occultation and Other Stories

by Laird Barron

  Then the accident. Matters had become bizarre. Kafka and William Burroughs type bizarre. At least Sonny hadn’t tried to blast a glass off her head. He’d done other things, however. A quiet, festering resentment bubbled to the surface in a glance, a smile, the subtle tightening of his grip on her wrist, the way he hurt her in bed, though never beyond the pale, just enough to let her feel his animosity. She feared that’s what they’d gradually become—a pair of mated animals who snapped and snarled at one another, who remained together due to instinct, to pure expediency.

  His sophomoric attempt to raise hell, as it were, signaled a sharp descent.

  Mind over matter, he said when first introducing her to the ebon figurine of some dead tribe’s fertility god, a trinket he acquired during his travels abroad; he clutched the fetish in his left hand whenever they fucked—and, oh, hadn’t sex become a choreographed event. He tried to put the fetish in her until she slapped him hard enough to leave a mark. Mind over matter, he said the next time from behind a Celtic mask while painting her with red ochre, and the time after that when feeding her peyote buttons while shaking voodoo rattles in her face. Once, they’d visited the wreckage of a church sunk beneath the projects in Detroit, and a priest in black robes killed a chicken and anointed her in blood as a circle of bare-breasted acolytes howled. The unholy congregation melted away and Sonny mounted her, his expression twisted, a mirror of her own insides, and after, neither could look the other in the eye. Riding the empty late-night bus back to their hotel, they huddled near the rear, she wrapped in a blanket, staring at her reflection, staring into and past her own dead eyes at block after block of urban blight; there were no streetlights, no blue flickering television screens or reading lamps, only the blackness.

  No baby was forthcoming, either.

  13.

  The next morning, after Sonny slipped away, she took a long hot shower and was drying her hair when she heard a door shut in the other room.

  Someone left an envelope addressed to her on the table. Her name was printed in a loose, sloppy hand. The envelope contained two dozen photographs. Several were shots of Sonny digging up artifacts. Ten or so were close-ups of arrowheads, pottery, figurines and the like. All were quite damning in their clarity. An itemized list documented various pieces, where they’d been acquired and who purchased them. Some of the photos were fifteen or more years old, dating back to Sonny’s graduate days. Katherine knew about his compulsive theft, but she’d not allowed herself to dwell upon how long he’d engaged in his habits.

  The list was signed: Meet me, tonight. Witching Hour. Mr. Lang was indeed wily, leaving her to infer his identity and where to rendezvous. Her hands shook as she tossed the envelope and its contents into the fireplace. She hugged herself and watched the packet curl and burn. Only much later, after she’d called Ms. Fabini to cancel their luncheon plans and burrowed under the covers to hibernate, did she recall that there were no ashes from the impromptu fire, only a fine tracing of soot that swirled and disappeared into the chimney.

  In her dreams, Sonny called from the recesses of the chimney while she started a fire from his papers and books and a pile of his muddy clothes. She’d collected a sack of his clipped hair and threw it on for kindling. He screamed at her, but she didn’t stop. She ripped off her wedding dress and added it to the blaze. A baby shrieked as it cooked and sizzled. She tossed on pieces of the old crib and watched them burn.

  14.

  At first, she tried to convince herself this would be about rescuing Sonny from the clutches of crazy, vindictive Mr. Lang. Except, that didn’t fly—there was no way to avoid the reality that Sonny getting caught and jailed for a few years would be a relief from tension and satisfying to boot. Truthfully, his getting nailed for a career of misdeeds appealed to her on several levels.

  Regardless of Sonny’s legal hassles or potential financial ruin, it was really his problem alone. Her face hadn’t been photographed. Her name hadn’t appeared on any lists. In any event, no matter how dire the circumstances, she could run home to mama; a girl could always do that. No, there were other deeper, less rational motives for keeping the rendezvous. She just refused to face them directly.

  Katherine crumbled sleeping pills and Valium into two consecutive glasses of vodka and watched Sonny gulp them down. He was already a bit drunk, so it was almost like the movies, almost frighteningly easy. For all she knew she’d dealt him an elephant’s dose that might stop his heart. He fell asleep in his chair, snoring gently into his scattered notes. She blew out the candles.

  The hour was late.

  The moon hung cold and yellow behind a gossamer scrim. Her shoes crunched against the path that wound from the lodge and its attendant structures. Katherine arrived on the doorstep of the Goat’s Head Bungalow at the appointed time and was slightly surprised to find it dark. She rapped on the door and waited. Her left hand dug into her jacket pocket and tightened around the can of mace attached to her keychain. In her right pocket was an envelope stuffed with twenty dollar bills she’d withdrawn from an ATM in Olde Towne earlier that day. The mace was a decade old: Sonny bought it for her after a guy mugged them in Venice. The thug gave her a shiner and a sprained neck in the process of yanking away her camera. Stunned, Sonny had stood there while it happened. That evening in the hotel, he berated her for carrying the camera, for attracting trouble. Later, he apologized by handing her the mace and some flowers. When they returned to the states he enrolled in karate lessons and attended classes religiously until he quietly dropped them in a few weeks.

  No one stirred within the bungalow; it squatted dead and cold as a husk, tenanted by silence so palpable it throbbed in her ears. Clouds slid across the face of the moon, and its yellow light curdled, reddened into the eye of a drunk. The temperature had dipped and her breath streamed from her mouth. She stepped off the porch and surveyed the empty field. Fire briefly shone within the distant oak grove.

  She walked the path to the very shadow of the grove, hesitated before the briar arch. A figure barred the way, a black form silhouetted by the dim illumination from coals dying in the pit. “Mr. Lang,” she said, knowing in that instant her mistake, experiencing the sweet, horrific bloom of understanding that accompanies waking to a nightmare within a nightmare.

  He laughed. His laugh was similar to Mr. Lang’s, but deeper, darker. Hearing it was like hearing blood rush over pebbles. Red shadows crawled from the fire pit and enlarged him. His outline flickered, suggestive of manifold possibilities.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “Yes, you are,” he said in a voice that whispered as from a distance. A familiar voice, but clotted with an excess of saliva and eagerness. She thought if some ancient creature of the wood could form words this would be their shape. “Bravery born of damnation isn’t courageous, is it, lovely one?”

  “You’re Bill,” she said.

  “If you’d like.”

  “I brought money.”

  “But I don’t want that.”

  “Four hundred and sixty dollars. That’s all I could get. Take it… I’ll write you a check when we get back home. I’ll be wanting the negatives.”

  “Negatives? Negatives for pictures that never were? I wouldn’t worry about them.”

  “Take the money—let’s not play games, okay?”

  “Yes, yes. It’s time to quit pretending,” he said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  He laughed again. The coals hissed and his silhouette became a lump of utter darkness. “These woods are very old.”

  “And dark; I know,” she said. She could no longer see him. His presence magnified in her mind, it obliterated everything else.

  “These woods are dear to me.”

  “It’s right here. Please.” She brandished the envelope in defiant supplication. The envelope absorbed the starlight, gleamed like a tooth. “Here. I swear, my husband won’t trespass into the woods again.”

  “Yet, he’s the fool who called me,” he said. “What of you
, sweet?”

  Her arm shook from extending the envelope, so she folded her hands at her waist. “I’ve never gone into the forest.”

  “Pity, pity.” He laughed again and now she imagined a hyena with an overdeveloped skull regarding her from the darkness, a stag crowned by tiers of crooked and decaying antlers. There was a terrible sickness in that laughter. “What of you? Tell me what you need.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Best wish for something,” he said. “I could lie with you until you shrieked fair to drive the pheasants from their nests. Then I could split you open on the altar and have you to the fullest.”

  “Oh.” The stars began to flash and she allowed her jelly legs to fold. She bowed her head, aware of the obscenity of this pseudo genuflection. “Not that.”

  “Then speak your desire.”

  Her mouth opened and she blurted, “You fucking well know, don’t you?” Tears dripped from the end of her nose. She dared to raise her gaze, lips curled to bare her teeth in an expression of abject self-loathing. “Give me that. It’s what I deserve, isn’t it.”

  “I think you are both richly deserving.”

  “What…what must I do?”

  “Why, pet, it’s done. All these years I’ve been waiting to hold up my end of the bargain.”

  He emerged from the curtain of darkness and it stretched to limn him, to halo him in a writhing, black nimbus. She looked upon him and gave forth an involuntary moan of terror. For a moment, it was who she expected, the huntsman, florid and smug in triumph. The moonlight brightened and his face waxed ordinary—the face of a lover, the man who reads the meter, a blank-eyed passenger sharing a bus seat; a face mundane in its capacity for cruelty or avarice. Then he smiled and fulfilled every dreadful image conceived in a thousand plates in a thousand hallowed tomes, and woodblock illustrations and overwrought cinema. Corrupt heat pulsed from his flesh; his breath stunned her with its foul humidity. Yet, the impulse to clutch his lank beard, to twine her tongue in his, consumed her will. Her thighs trembled and she moistened. She wept as she pressed her lips against his muscular thigh and inhaled the reek of sulfur, bestial sweat, and rank, overripe sex.

  His fingers tangled in her hair, long nails like hooks pricking at her scalp. He whispered, “Ask and ye shall receive.”

  15.

  The sulfurous moon had almost dissolved into the horizon.

  Katherine returned to the suite and stood for a while as a shadow among shadows, watching Sonny. He groaned in his sleep and called a name she couldn’t recognize for his slurring. She erased a section of the ridiculous chalk pentagram with her bare foot, then went to him and murmured in his ear and coaxed him to bed. They fell across it and she undressed him. She sweated. The fierceness of her need was an agony, a pressure of such magnitude it eclipsed reason, caused the room to spin around her. The painting of the stag hunt caught her glance for a moment, its detail obscured and grainy, but—the mastiffs sat on their haunches and the stag towered on its hind legs, and the entire dark company gazed down upon the couple on the bed.

  She caressed him, licked his ear and kissed his neck until he stirred and woke. It didn’t take much more. Her heat was contagious and he made a sound in his chest and rolled atop her. She closed her eyes and arched, hooked her calves over his hips, pinned him to her with all her strength.

  Motes and sparks behind her eyelids stuttered with her pulse. Pleasure shot through her brain and unfolded a kaleidoscope. She saw the white nanny goat bound at the foot of the statue. It bleated, then the knife and a fan of blood, her husband, his face one of legion, exultant and savage.

  He drove into her without love, merciless; and in her skull, rockets. Sonny, what did you wish? She knew, oh, yes, but the question lingered, bored into her just as he did, and she trembled violently. What did you wish? The nanny goat rolled its head on the altar and its eyes flared red to a surge of panpipes, an offstage Gregorian liturgy, thunderous laughter.

  She came, and, simultaneously, he rocked with a powerful spasm and bellowed. Her eyes snapped open. His face was a white mask, flesh stretched so tight his mouth pulled sharply upward at the corners. He vibrated as if he’d grabbed a high-voltage wire. Something cracked, a tendon, a bone, and he shoved away from her, flew from the bed and crashed to the floor. She managed to right herself. Her belly felt overfull. It was the strangest sensation, this ballooning inside, the sudden rush of nausea.

  Sonny thrashed against the floorboards and continued to ejaculate. In the near darkness, she became confused by what she saw—the short, quick spurts that arced across his body were neither ropes nor strands, but thick and segmented. She’d seen a dead bird in the garbage and what had feasted upon it in oozing carpets, and her mental equilibrium wobbled mightily. He squealed as his rigid muscles softened and sloughed. He rapidly diminished and became physically incomprehensible, emptied of substance. What remained of him continued to flow in seeping tributaries toward the bed, and her. It happened very fast; a time lapse photo of an animal decomposing in the forest.

  Sticky things squirmed upon her thighs and loins, and when she registered the flatworm torsos and embryonic faces, she screamed, was still screaming long after people finally battered through the door and everything was over.

  They couldn’t find a trace of Sonny anywhere.

  16.

  The pregnancy wasn’t complicated. The hospital staff (they called it a “home”) gave her a single occupancy room with a lovely view of the grounds. A squirrel lived in the chestnut tree near the window, and the nurses let her feed him breadcrumbs over the sill. Nurse Jennifer gave her medicine in the morning. Nurse Margaret tucked her in at night. Dr. Green visited daily and gave her peppermint candies, which she’d loved since childhood.

  She slept a lot. She ate Jell-O cups whenever she liked, and watched The 700 Club on the television hanging in the corner. Occasionally, after dark, it’d be something nasty with bare tits and gouts of gore, children with withered faces who glared hatefully, and priests walking with their heads on backwards, but she didn’t panic, the screen always went blank then returned to regularly scheduled programming when a nurse came in to check on her. Sometimes she watched the Reverend Jerry Falwell or Benny Hinn. She followed their sermons from a new King James Bible her father brought after an incident he’d jokingly referred to as an “exorcism” when she first came to the home. Admittedly, she’d had issues in the beginning, some outbursts. There hadn’t been an incident in months and she’d practically blacked out entire sections of the Old Testament by underlining. She knew what to expect. She was ready. Things had gone so smoothly, so dreamily, it had scarcely felt like being pregnant at all.

  It happened in the middle of the night and she didn’t feel anything after the epidural except sweet, bright oblivion. They removed the baby before she revived. Nurse Jennifer told her she’d given birth to a healthy boy and they’d bring him around soon. Several days later they wheeled her into the sunshine and parked her on the patio by the fountain. She loved this spot. The grounds were decorated with manicured hedges and plum trees, and obscured by the trees, a high stone wall topped with wrought iron spikes.

  Dr. Green, Nurse Jennifer, and one of the big male attendants brought the baby wrapped in a yellow blanket. The doctor and the nurse seemed reserved, disquieted despite their friendly greetings, and they exchanged looks. She’d heard them whispering about progeria while they thought she was asleep. They probably weren’t sure what to tell her, were doubtless loath to upset her at this delicate juncture.

  Dr. Green cleared his throat. “So, have you decided what you’re going to call him?” He watched carefully as the attendant put the boy in her arms.

  “Baby has a name,” she said, staring with wonder and terror at her child’s face. You’ll be talking in a few months. Oh, sweet Lord, won’t that be interesting? His smooth, olive skin was pitted by a faint scatter of acne scars. His eyes were alive with a dreadful knowingness. He already resembled his driver license photo.
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br />   Strappado

  Kenshi Suzuki and Swayne Harris had a chance reunion at a bathhouse in an Indian tourist town. It had been five or six years since their previous Malta liaison, a cocktail party at the British consulate that segued into a branding iron-hot-affair. They’d spent a long weekend of day cruises to the cyclopean ruins on Gozo, nightclubbing at the elite hotels and casinos, and booze-drenched marathon sex before the dissolution of their respective junkets swept them back to New York and London in a storm of tears and bitter farewells. For Kenshi, the emotional hangover lasted through desolate summer and into a melancholy autumn. And even now, when elegant, thunderously handsome Swayne materialized from the crowd on the balcony like the Ghost of Christmas Past—!

  Kenshi wore a black suit; sleek and polished as a seal or a banker. He swept his single lock of gelled black hair to the left, like a gothic teardrop. His skin was sallow and dewlapped at his neck, and soft at his belly and beneath his Italian leather belt. He’d been a swimmer once, earnestly meant to return to his collegiate form, but hadn’t yet braced for the exhaustion of such an endeavor. He preferred to float in hotel pools whilst dreaming of his supple youth, once so exotic in the suburbs of white-bread Connecticut. Everyone but his grandparents (who never fully acclimated to their transplantation to the West) called him Ken. A naturalized U.S. citizen, he spoke meager Japanese, knew next to zero about the history or the culture and had visited Tokyo a grand total of three times. In short, he privately acknowledged his unworthiness to lay claim to his blood heritage and thus lived a life of minor, yet persistent regret.