Occultation and Other Stories

by Laird Barron

  After a while, he gathered the courage to unlimber the rifle and slip outdoors. He padded in a stealthy circuit of the module, stalking from shadow to shadow, finger heavy on the trigger. Wind scuffed up little puffs of dust. When he began to crash from the adrenaline high, he went inside, locked the hatch, and settled in to keep watch until daylight.

  She found him sleeping in the fetal position under the table, the rifle clasped to his breast. —Get laid and go back to the Stone Age. Why the hell are you letting all the bugs inside?

  The hatch hung ajar. Gnats swarmed in the cold white light of the opening. —The world is large and unknowable, he said.

  She stepped into the threshold, her form rendered a black shadow limned by fire. —I lied about the horn, she said. —I made up that stuff to scare you, piss you off. I like telling tales. Whatever. It was lying in the bushes near an ant nest I’ve been studying. Been there so long it looked like petrified wood. Animals dug it up, probably. Freaky as fuck no matter how you slice it. She closed the hatch and its clang reminded him of a cage locking.

  The only tracks around the module belonged to him and her. As expected, the surveillance footage went offline in conjunction with the nocturnal visitation and the recordings were useless. He waited until she’d gone into the field to check on her ants, or wasps, or what-the-hell-ever she did instead of analyzing tape, and dialed his supervisor in Seattle to deliver the weekly report.

  His supervisor was intrigued by the theory that the aberrant wildlife behavior could be linked to poison, although he dismissed the idea of military testing. Hunter activity, on the other hand, was sexy. —I’ll send a chopper in next week. Have some water samples ready.

  He cleared his throat and said, —My partner may not be handling the stress.

  —How so? Are you two having problems?

  —She’s cracking. He was grateful they weren’t speaking via satellite video, acutely aware of his wild, matted hair and beard. —Nothing serious, yet.

  —If it’s not serious, than what?

  —Look, it’s difficult to describe. Her work hasn’t been stellar. Make a note, is all I’m saying. We get back to civilization, I don’t want the blame for shoddy data.

  His supervisor sighed. —The Sierras rumor is true, huh? I’m not much of a marriage counselor, but my best advice is if you ever get another opportunity to spend sixty days stranded in the wilds with an ex, pass.

  —Thanks. Never mind. An insidious thought surfaced: What if hooking him up with his ex-lover and stranding them in the wilds was the whole point of the exercise?

  His supervisor said goodbye and good luck.

  He sat for a while, observing her on Feed One. She was insubstantial, wandering across the foreground with a stick, flipping over rocks. Looking for bugs. Innocently or not, erasing clues. He thought about the scratching against the hatch, the faint unearthly lullaby his mother sang when he was a baby and before she left forever. He switched the camera off. He took his rifle and left, muttering about checking his traps as he passed her.

  He didn’t go far, perhaps two hundred meters into a copse of alder on a nearby hill with a clear view of the camp. Burrowed like a tick deep into the leaves and the dirt, he tenderly wiped moisture from the scope and snugged it to his eye. There she was. A blurred patch of shadow. When he looked through the scope it was as if the largest part of him dissolved and what remained was the kernel everything sprang from. The cathode stole everything, rendered him nameless, a seed floating on a vast cosmic tidal current.

  —Where’s your friend? he said. Sweat poured into his eyes until the world doubled and distorted like a kaleidoscope. —Where’s your friend? Where’s your friend?

  —You believe in God? She was snapping pictures of the cryptic horn, working it from multiple angles.

  He remembered with clear and explicit detail his father walking with him through the reeds where the buck had dropped in its tracks. The buck was alive, its eyes warm with a last, candescent surge of vitality. The marsh was cold and dim. Their collective breath rose like smoke into the black sky. His father handed him the knife.

  —Which one? I can get behind the idea of one of those evil cocksuckers the ancients kowtowed to. A few years ago a lost temple was discovered beneath some rainforest. There were caverns with altars to a hideous anthropomorphic beast. Researchers documented dozens of enormous slabs with sluices, for what was literally rivers of blood. There was a primitive sewage system built to handle the gore. Could be they gathered up slaves and enemies and sacrificed thousands at a time during festivals. There’s the real deal. That’s how a real super being would roll.

  —I mean the our Father who art in Heaven.

  —Oh, that guy. The Old Testament dude, sure. He’d slept the entire day and dreamed of fleeing through a barren, red-lit landscape. He wore the form of the buck and his father was the hunter.

  The afternoon had been brutally hot, and stars undulated as though through warped glass. He felt mentally and spiritually torpid, helpless to make meaningful decisions. It was as if a low-grade sedative pumped through his veins, robbing him of volition; it was the sensation of being trapped in quicksand, or paralyzed in a permanent nightmare. Everything around him was television, and he was acting from a script. He should call HQ and tell them the project had gone off the rails in a major way. He would make that call. In a few minutes, once he gathered the ambition to rise from the lawn chair and stumble inside.

  She half-straddled the prodigious horn. Her sinewy back gleamed. She’d worn only his hat and a pair of panties the last two days. The sun had scorched her bronze, except for slashes of ivory at her hips and the creases of her buttocks. He too went shirtless since that morning. She chuckled and called him a Nubian stud and flirted with unbuckling his belt until he pushed her away and retreated into his sleeping berth. He didn’t think either of them had bathed in several days. Her cheeks were smudged with grime. She appeared wild as an ancient Celt, naked, her hair lank and stiff as if limed for battle. His nails were black and he smelled the ripe sourness of his own body.

  —Did you hear the knocking? I bet you did.

  He wished for another bottle of scotch. —Yeah.

  —Someone wants in.

  —I know, he said. —Who?

  She grinned at him over her shoulder. She stroked the horn’s ridges, dug the inside of her thigh against them until blood welled and ran in a thin rail toward her ankle.

  His head felt light and empty. Static hissed like windblown sand somewhere in the depths. —We should bag this job and head home. I’m getting a bad feeling. He turned his gaze from her legs, regarded the stars.

  —A bad feeling? You’re so primal, so in touch with your roots. I can see you and your homies with spears and loincloths on the savanna.

  —Go on, let your hair down, he said. —You’re among friends.

  —Don’t be touchy. It’s a fucking compliment.

  —Shut up.

  She chuckled.

  —It’s not as if every single nut case that followed the cult went to the slammer, he said. —What if some of those crazy bastards have come home to the ol’ stomping grounds? Makes me very uncomfortable.

  —We’re alone, she said.

  —Are we?

  —You’ve said so at least a hundred times. Don’t change your story now.

  —Only fools and the dead never change their mind.

  She turned and walked over and sat beside him. —I haven’t even heard a plane since we got here. Might as well be on the moon. There’s a certain aura, something in the fabric of the land. Feels like an acid trip. Whatever happened to the farmers who settled these parts?

  —Ranchers.

  —Right, ranchers.

  —The original parcel got split and sold to a bunch of local interests. The hardcore folks dwindled, moved away. The grandkids weren’t eager to carry on with the Old West lifestyle. I’m sure they’ll put in a mall or a parking lot. Haha, condos and a retirement center.

 
—No, she said. —Nothing will be built. They’ll be sorry if they do. I think you’re wrong about the ranchers, by the way. Did you research it, or just accept what we got spoon fed at the briefing?

  —I was a baby bird. Cheep, cheep.

  —Me too, buddy-boy. Me too. I’ve been pondering it more lately. I bet anything, if you were to dredge up a hundred and twenty years’ worth of newspaper articles, county documents, federal reports and local folklore, you’d get a completely different perspective. Murder, lynching, rape….

  —Which would be typical of much of rural, agricultural America, he said.

  —Oh, sure. Except here, you’ll find it was epidemic. The cowpokes and their kin were probably crazy as shithouse rats by the time the second generation outgrew diapers. Society kept its mouth shut, of course. Glossed over the frequency, downplayed all but the most sensational atrocities. I’ve seen it in more genteel settings. This shit’s happened since when. I think the Family came because like attracts like. They were drawn by lunatic music only the Devil’s own can hear. Yeah, man, no way to ever be sure, but I’d put money that the sickos were nothing more than the latest victims of Hell Range.

  —Pretty insane, he said.

  —That’s how this would go if it was a horror flick, she said.

  —Scripting one?

  —There’s this producer in L.A. who says I’m talented.

  —Him fucking you and you actually being able to write are two different things.

  —Nah, he’s ugly as sin. My sister, the model, he did fuck her. Got her a gig doing hand lotion spots. Silly bitch’s face only appears for like two milliseconds. I believe in God.

  —Yeah?

  —Because I know who that horn belongs to. Can’t have one without the other.

  He didn’t say anything.

  —C’mon, can’t you feel it? she said.

  —Can’t you feel it when something should remain unspoken? Most cultures consider that a survival trait.

  —Beware of Things Man Is Not Meant to Know? I don’t fear the immensity of the universe. Some things are too big to worry about. I’m highly credulous.

  Once, when he was much younger, he’d walked across an ice-locked expanse of the Bering Sea and comprehended his insignificance. —Chickens have a twenty-minute memory. We primates cope through booze and denial. Dial up more of that denial part, you’ll last longer.

  —We all end up in the fire, anyway. This friend of mine told me a story. He was raised in Kansas on a farm. He told me his older brother met Satan. Billy Bob was riding his tractor one miserably hot afternoon and the Devil was sitting on a stump at the end of a row. Fire engine red, horns, tail, pitchfork stuck in the ground. The Devil said, Hi, Billy Bob.

  —And? I’m on the edge of my seat here.

  —I dunno. My pal couldn’t get anything else from his brother. His bro was one of those sullen, salt o’ the earth types. You, know, the kind I despise. He only mentioned it when he was drunk as a skunk and preached the Rapture.

  —Probably didn’t know what came next because he’d cooked his brains sitting on the tractor one too many summers. Now full darkness was upon them and they were two lumps of shadow, side by side.

  —When I saw the horn, kinda peeking out of the dirt, ants swarming over it, this feeling, a shock, hit me. A moving picture, a sick, sick black and white movie, clicked on in my mind. I wanted to sit in the dirt and keep replaying it. This morning I watched you sleeping and the movie started again. For a few seconds I got why our cult friends went to the nursing home and went wild. I really, really understood.

  He couldn’t see her face. He didn’t know what to do with her, so he pretended not to hear. —My father was a woodsman, he said. —After Mom died, he disappeared into the Olympic National Forest with a backpack and his dog. He made a ramshackle camp in the heart of the forest and lived there about eighteen months. He had cancer and he didn’t want to go on without his wife, so he did what the mountain men used to do. He went into the wilderness to die. Animals ate him. Only the bones were left.

  —That’s a beautiful story, she said. —My dad’s fat as a cow and farts his way through CNN and tournament poker sixteen hours a day. I wish a wild animal would eat him.

  The buck, the knife. Him trudging across the ice, in the distance a steel-gray wall closing fast. There wasn’t anything left to say, so they sat as if shackled to their chairs until the full moon floated to the surface of the sky like a corpse buoyed and bloated by its decomposition. The moon was yellow as a skull. He imagined it resembled the skulls of any of the people who’d ended their days at the bottom of a hole on this ranch. The skull moon resembled their own future selves, he was certain.

  It rained hard for two days and they cooped in the module, she entering reports into the computer, he descaling the live traps and foothold traps he’d left hanging outside from a rack. The climate was harsh and limescale built quickly. She didn’t say much, didn’t come into his compartment again. She’d gone cold. Her eyes were strange and she sat for hours staring into the monitor, hands motionless on the keyboard. He realized he’d become afraid of her. This paranoia was exacerbated by flu symptoms, the sense of terrible vulnerability. His muscles ached, the strength drained from them. He spent hours on the toilet, bowels convulsing. The damned pilot had obviously brought them the gift of plague from town.

  On the third morning, the weather cleared and he slipped away and lit out for the hills without saying goodbye. Crows roosted in the trees, and they alighted on the wet earth as he passed. The birds hopped from bush to bush in dreadful silence, following him in a dark train. He plodded directly to the coyote den, tranquilizer gun in hand, his mind mostly blank. Coyotes had been in the vicinity; their sign was sparse, but recent. He leaned against a tree and concentrated on blending into the scenery, willing one of his furry friends to make an appearance. His brain itched for a cigarette and he bought himself time by promising to smoke at least two if he remained stoic for an hour, three should he strike gold and nail his quarry.

  It wasn’t like him to fidget, to chafe at the sweat on his neck, to twitch at every gnat bite and mosquito prick. Dad taught him better, taught him to sink into himself and leave the body an insensate shell, a blind within a blind. He was going to pieces. Inside of twenty minutes his nerve endings were on fire. A coyote appeared, moving unhurriedly, nose to the ground. He raised the gun without hesitation and fired. The coyote yelped, jaws snapping at its flank where the dart penetrated. He chambered another round and the little beastie was gone, fled like smoke into the shadows of the trees.

  —Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! He leaped to pursue, charged into the underbrush, and this too was contrary to a lifetime of character. Branches gored his arms, drew blood from his cheek. He shouted more obscenities, roared like a bull. The coyote had vanished, and after half a kilometer, he stood on the edge of a prairie, lungs burning, sparks pin-wheeling across his vision. He bellowed at the sky, seized the gun by its stock and hurled it with all his might. The gun arced, end over end, like a tomahawk, and smashed to pieces against the hard ground.

  He kept walking, tears stinging the scratches on his cheek, matting his beard. The chopper had crashed behind a hill in a shallow ravine. He recognized the vehicle instantly. There hadn’t been a fire and it was largely intact. Crows perched on the bent tail rotor, and the mangled struts, pecked and preened among the glittering bed of shattered safety glass. The cockpit was empty. One of the flight seats lay a few meters from the wreck.

  He uncapped his canteen and drank, then screwed the cap on again and dialed HQ. He reported the accident to an anonymous functionary who advised him law enforcement would be apprised and rescue personnel dispatched directly. He closed the phone and walked away from the crash site. The crows stayed.

  He tracked his own footprints toward the mountains. The pilot’s tinted glasses twinkled where they hung from a sage bush. He stuck the glasses into his shirt pocket and kept moving, hardly bothering to glance down now; instin
ct dragged him forward. He came to a low rise. The ground was trampled. A long, sloping slab of carved rock dominated. A strange misshapen skull was transfixed on a wooden pole; the skull of an impossibly large ram missing a horn.

  Two men stood at either end of the rock. The pilot’s flight suit was torn and grimy. —Give those back. The pilot pointed at the glasses. In the near distance, a column of deadly black storm clouds mounted vertically, its interior shot with brief flares of lightning.

  The other man wore a toga open at the chest. His flesh glowed blue-white like the wings of a moth. The man looked at him and said, —Hello, Billy Bob.

  He awakened, cross-legged, the bole of a pine digging into his back. Red, evening light filtered through a scrim of clouds. The coyote den remained silent, lifeless. His canteen lay beside him, open so that most of the water had leaked and made a small, mucky depression. He poured what remained over his cracked lips, then spat, stomach recoiling at the acrid taste; bitter grains he couldn’t identify lingered on his tongue. A beam of light illuminated the canteen so that it fractured like a prism and continued along his optic nerve and into the recesses of his brain where something turned over. A crow’s shadow flitted and fluttered, and danced away.

  —You crazy bitch, he said, staring at the canteen with mounting horror. This couldn’t be happening. He dropped the canteen, then with bleary resolve, retrieved it and hooked it on his belt. He’d need evidence.

  The module glistened red and orange, then winked out, a blown match head, as he walked into the yard. Simon and Garfunkel sang about darkness, their old friend, on the intercom. She was in a far better mood. She hummed while industriously clacking away at the keyboard, occasionally stirring a spoon in her tin cup. He stowed the tranquilizer gun, undressed, then went to the toilet, pushed his fingers down his throat, and retched. He clutched the sides of the toilet and listened to her chuckle in the other room. She sounded like a witch, he thought. Cackling and rubbing her knuckles as she plotted his doom.