by Laird Barron
"He probably should call it a day."
"Landscomb's a sawbones. He isn't blind. Guess I'll leave it to him."
"Been hankerin' to ask you, friend-how did you end up on the list? This is a mighty exclusive event. My pappy knew the Lubbock Wellocs before I was born. Took me sixteen years to get an invite here. And a bribe or two."
"Lubbock Wellocs?"
"Yep. Wellocs are everywhere. More of them than you shake a stick at- Nevada, Indiana, Massachusetts. Buncha foreign states too. Their granddads threw a wide loop, as my pappy used to say."
"My parents lived east of here. Over the mountains. Dad had some cousins in Ransom Hollow. They visited occasionally. I was a kid and I only heard bits and pieces… the men all got liquored up and told tall tales. I heard about the stag, decided I'd drill it when I got older."
"Here you are, sure enough. Why? I know you don't give a whit about the rifle. Or the money."
"How do you figure?"
"The look in your eyes, boy. You're afraid. A man like you is afraid, I take stock."
"I've known some fearless men. Hunted lions with them. A few of those gents forgot that Mother Nature is more of a killer than we humans will ever be and wound up getting chomped. She wants our blood, our bones, our goddamned guts. Fear is healthy."
"Sure as hell is. Except, there's something in you besides fear. Ain't that right? I swear you got the weird look some guys get who play with fire. I knew this vaquero who loved to ride his pony along the canyon edge. By close, I mean rocks crumbling under its hooves and falling into nothingness. I ask myself, what's here in these woods for you? Maybe I don't want any part of it."
"I reckon we all heard the same story about Mr. Blackwood. Same one my Daddy and his cousins chewed over the fire."
"Sweet Jesus, boy. You don't believe that cart load of manure Welloc and his crony been shovelin'? Okay then. I've got a whopper for you. These paths form a miles wide pattern if you see 'em from a plane. World's biggest pentagram carved out of the countryside. Hear that one?"
Luke Honey smiled dryly and crushed the butt of his cigarette underfoot.
Mr. Williams poured out the dregs of his coffee. He hooked his thumbs in his belt. "My uncle Greg came here for the hunt in '16. They sent him home in a fancy box. The Black Ram Lodge is first class all the way."
"Stag get him?"
The rancher threw back his head and laughed. He grabbed Luke Honey's arm. There were tears in his eyes. "Oh, you are a card, kid. You really do buy into that mumbo-jumbo horse pucky. Greg spotted a huge buck moving through the woods and tried to plug it from the saddle. His horse threw him and he split his head on a rock. Damned fool."
"In other words, the stag got him."
Mr. Williams squeezed Luke Honey's shoulder. Then he slackened his grip and laughed again. "Yeah, maybe you're on to something. My pappy liked to say this family is cursed. We sure had our share of untimely deaths."
The party split again, Dr. Landscomb and the British following Scobie and the dogs; Mr. Welloc, Luke Honey and the Texans proceeding along a parallel trail. Nobody was interested in the lesser game; all were intent upon tracking down Blackwood's Baby.
They entered the deepest, darkest part of the forest. The trees were huge and ribboned with moss and creepers and fungi. Scant light penetrated the canopy, yet brambles hemmed the path. The fog persisted.
Luke Honey had been an avid reader since childhood. Robert Louis Stevenson, M. R. James, and Ambrose Bierce had gotten him through many a miserable night in the tarpaper shack his father built. He thought of the fairy tale books at his aunt's house. Musty books with wooden covers and woodblock illustrations that raised the hair on his head. The evil stepmother made to dance in red hot iron shoes at Snow White's garden wedding while the dwarves hunched like fiends. Hansel and Gretel lost in a vast, endless wood, the eyes of a thousand demons glittering in the shadows. The forest in the book was not so different from the one he found himself riding through.
At noon, they stopped to take a cold lunch from their own saddlebags as this was beyond the range of the lodge staff. Arlen trotted from the forest, dodgy and feral as a fox, to report Scobie picked up the trail and was hoping to soon drive the stag itself from hiding. Dr. Landscomb and the British were in hot pursuit.
"Damn," Mr. Williams said.
"Aw, now that limey's going to do the honors," Mr. Briggs said. "I wanted that rifle."
"Everybody wants that rifle," Mr. McEvoy said.
Mr. Williams clapped his hands together. "Let's mount up, muchachos. Maybe we'll get lucky and our friends will miss their opening."
"The quarry is elusive," Mr. Liam Welloc said. "Anything is possible."
The men kicked their ponies to a brisk trot and gave chase.
***
An hour later, all hell broke loose.
The path crossed a plank bridge and continued upstream along the cut bank of a fast moving stream. Dogs barked and howled and the shouts of men echoed from the trees. A heavy rifle boomed twice. No sooner had Luke Honey and his companions entered a large clearing with a lagoon fed by a waterfall, did he spy Lord Bullard and Mr. Wesley afoot, rifles aimed at the trees. Dr. Landscomb stood to one side, hands tight on the bridle of his pony. Dead and dying dogs were strewn everywhere. A pair of surviving mastiffs yapped and snarled, muzzles slathered in foam, as Scobie wrenched mightily at their leashes.
The Brits' rifles thundered in unison. Luke Honey caught a glimpse of what at first he took to be a stag. Yet something was amiss about the shape as it bolted through the trees and disappeared. It was far too massive and it moved in a strange, top-heavy manner. Lord Bullard's horse whinnied and galloped blindly through the midst of the gawking Americans. It missed Luke Honey and Mr. Williams, collided with Mr. McEvoy and knocked his horse to the ground. The banker cursed and vaulted from the saddle, landing awkwardly. His horse staggered upright while Mr. Wesley's mount charged away into the mist in the opposite direction. Mr. Briggs yelled and pulled at the reins of his mount as it crow-hopped all over the clearing.
"What the hell was that?" Williams said, expertly controlling his horse as it half-reared, eyes rolling to the whites. "Welloc?"
Mr. Liam Welloc had wisely halted at the entrance and was supremely unaffected by the debacle. "I warned you, gentlemen. Blackwood's Baby is no tender doe."
Mr. McEvoy had twisted an ankle. He sat on a rock while Dr. Landscomb tended him. Scobie calmed his mastiffs and handed their leashes to Mr. Liam Welloc. He took a pistol from his coat and walked among the dogs who lay scattered and broken along the bank of the lagoon and in the bushes. He fired the pistol three times.
No one spoke. They rubbed their horses' necks and stared at the blood smeared across the rocks and at the savaged corpses of the dogs. Scobie began dragging them into a pile. A couple of flasks of whiskey were passed around and everyone drank in morbid silence.
Finally, Mr. Williams said, "Bullard, what happened here?" He repeated the question until the Englishman shuddered and looked up, blank-faced, from the carnage.
"It speared them on its horns. In all my years… it scooped two dogs and pranced about while they screamed and writhed on its antlers."
"Anybody get a clear shot?"
"I did," Mr. Wesley said. He leaned on his rifle like an old man. "Thought I nicked the bugger. Surely I did." He coughed and his shoulders convulsed. Dr. Landscomb left Mr. McEvoy and came over to examine him.
Mr. Liam Welloc took stock. "Two horses gone. Five dogs killed. Mr. McEvoy's ankle is swelling nicely, I see. Doctor, what of Mr. Wesley?"
Dr. Landscomb listened to Mr. Wesley's chest with a stethoscope. "This man requires further medical attention. We must get him to a hospital at once."
Scobie shouted. He ran back to the group, his eyes red, his mouth twisted in fear. "Arlen's gone. Arlen's gone."
"Easy, friend." Mr. Williams handed the older man the whiskey and waited for him to take a slug. "You mean that boy of yours?"
Scobie nodd
ed. "He climbed a tree when the beast charged our midst. Now he's gone."
"He probably ran away," Mr. Briggs said. "Can't say as I blame him."
"No." Scobie brandished a soiled leather shoe. "This was lying near the tracks of the stag. They've gone deeper into the wood."
"Why the bloody hell would the little fool do that?" Lord Bullard said, slowly returning to himself.
"He's a brave lad," Scobie said and wrung the shoe in his grimy hands.
"Obviously we have to find the kid," Luke Honey said, although he was unhappy about the prospect. If anything, the fog had grown thicker. "We have four hours of light. Maybe less."
"It's never taken the dogs," Scobie said so quietly Luke Honey was certain no one else heard.
***
There was a brief discussion regarding logistics where it was decided that Dr. Landscomb would escort Mr. Wesley and Mr. McEvoy to the prior evening's campsite-it would be impossible to proceed much farther before dark. The search party would rendezvous with them and continue on to the lodge in the morning. Luke Honey volunteered his horse to carry Mr. Wesley, not from a sense of honor, but because he was likely the best tracker of the bunch and probably also the fleetest of foot.
They spread into a loose line, Mr. Liam Welloc and Mr. Briggs ranging along the flanks on horseback, while Luke Honey, Scobie, and Mr. Williams formed a picket. Mr. Williams led his horse. By turns, each of them shouted Arlen's name.
Initially, pursuit went forth with much enthusiasm as Lord Bullard had evidently wounded the stag. Its blood splattered fern leafs and puddled in the spaces between its hoof prints and led them away from the beaten trails into brush so thick, Luke Honey unsheathed his Barlow knife and hacked at the undergrowth. Mosquitoes attacked in swarms. The light dimmed and the trail went cold. A breeze sighed, and the ubiquitous fog swirled around them and tracking soon became a fruitless exercise. Mr. Liam Welloc announced an end to the search on account of encroaching darkness.
Mr. Williams and Luke Honey stopped to rest upon the exposed roots of a dying oak tree and take a slug from Mr. Williams' hip flask. The rancher smoked a cigarette. His face was red and he fanned away the mosquitoes with his hat. "Greg said this is how it was."
"Your uncle? The one who died?"
"Yeah, on the second go-around. The first time he came home and talked about a disaster. Horse threw a feller from a rich family in Kansas and broke his neck."
"I reckon everybody knows what they're getting into coming to this place."
"I'm not sure of that at all. You think you know what evil is until you look it in the eye. That's when you really cotton to the consequences. Ain't no fancy shooting iron worth any of this."
"Too early for that kind of talk."
"The hell it is. I ain't faint-hearted, but this is a bad fix. The boy is sure enough in mortal danger. Judging what happened to them dogs, we might be in trouble."
Luke Honey had no argument with that observation, preoccupied as he was with how the fog hung like a curtain around them, how the night abruptly surged upon them, how every hair of his body stood on end. He realized his companion wasn't at his side. He called Mr. Williams' name and the branches creaked overhead.
An unearthly stillness settled around him as he pressed his hand against the rough and slimy bark of a tree. He listened as the gazelle at the waterhole listened for the predators that deviled them. He saw a muted glow ahead; the manner of light that seeped from certain fogbanks on the deep ocean and in the depths of caverns. He went forward, groping through coils of mist, rifle held aloft in his free hand. His racing heart threatened to unman him.
Luke Honey stepped into a small grove of twisted and shaggy trees. The weak, phosphorescence rose from the earth and cast evil shadows upon the foliage and the wall of thorns that hemmed the grove on three sides. A statue canted leeward at the center of the grove-a tall, crumbling marble stack, ghastly white and stained black by moss and mold, a terrible horned man, or god. This was an idol to a dark and vile Other and it radiated a palpable aura of wickedness.
The fog crept into Luke Honey's mouth, trickled into his nostrils, and his gorge rebelled. Something struck him across the shoulders. He lost balance and all the strength in his legs drained and he collapsed and lay supine, squashed into the wet earth and leaves by an imponderable force. This force was the only thing keeping him from sliding off the skin of the Earth into the void. He clawed the dirt. Worms threaded his fingers. "Get behind me, devil," he said.
The statue blurred and expanded, shifting elastically. The statue was so very large and its cruel shadow pinned him like an insect, and the voices of its creators, primeval troglodytes who'd dwelt in mud huts and made love in the filth and offered their blood to long dead gods, whispered obscenities, and images unfolded in his mind. He threshed and struggled to rise. A child screamed. The cry chopped off. A discordant vibration rippled over the ground and passed through Luke Honey's bones-a hideous clash of cymbals and shrieking reeds reverberated in his brain. His nose bled.
Fresh blood is best, the statue said, although it was Luke Honey's mouth that opened and made the words. Baby blood, boy child blood. Rich red sweet rare boy blood. What, little man, what could you offer the lord of the dark? What you feeble fly? His jaw contorted, manipulated by invisible fin gers. His tongue writhed at the bidding of the Other. A choir of corrupt angels sang from the darkness all around-a song sweet and repellent, and old as Melville's sea and its inhabitants. Sulfurous red light illuminated the fog and impossible shapes danced and capered as if beamed from the lens of a magic lantern.
Luke Honey turned his head sideways in the dirt and saw his brother hoeing in the field. He saw himself as a boy of fourteen struggling with loading a single shot.22 and the muzzle flash exactly as Michael leaned in to look at the barrel. Luke Honey's father sent him to live in Utah and his mother died shortly thereafter, a broken woman. The black disk of the moon occulted the sun. His massive .416 Rigby boomed and a bull elephant pitched forward and crumpled, its tusks digging furrows in the dirt. Mother stood in the entrance of the tent, wings charred, her brilliant nimbus dimmed to reddish flame. Arlen regarded him from the maze of thorns, his face slack with horror. "Take me instead," Luke Honey said through clenched teeth, "and be damned."
You're already mine, Lucas. The Other cackled in lunatic merriment.
The music, the fire, the singing, all crashed and stopped.
Mr. Williams leaned over him and Luke Honey almost skewered the man. Mr. Williams leaped back, staring at the Barlow knife in Luke Honey's fist. "Sorry, boy. You were having a fit. Laughing like a crazy man."
Luke Honey clambered to his feet and put away the knife. His scooped up his rifle and brushed leaves from his clothes. The glow had subsided and the two men were alone except for the idol which hulked, a terrible lump the darkness.
"Sweet baby Jesus," Mr. Williams said. "My uncle told me about these damned things, too. Said rich townies-that weren't followers of Christ, to put it politely-had 'em shipped in and set up here and there across the estate. Gods from the Old World. There are stories about rituals in the hills. Animal sacrifices and unnatural relations. Stories like our hosts told us about the Blackwoods. To this day, folks with money and an interest in ungodly practices come to visit these shrines."
"Let's get away from this thing," Luke Honey said.
"Amen to that." Mr. Williams led the way and they might've wandered all night, but someone fired a gun to signal periodically, and the two men stumbled into the firelight of camp as Mr. Liam Welloc and Mr. McEvoy were serving a simple dinner of pork and beans. By unspoken agreement, neither Luke Honey or Mr. Williams mentioned the vile statue. Luke Honey retreated to the edge of the camp, eyeing Mr. Liam Welloc and Dr. Landscomb. As lords of the estate there could be no doubt they knew something of the artifacts and their foul nature. Were the men merely curators, or did they partake of corrupt ceremonies by the dark of the moon? He shuddered and kept his weapons close.
Dr. Landscomb and L
ord Bullard had wrapped Mr. Wesley in a cocoon of blankets. Mr. Wesley's face was drawn, his eyes heavy-lidded. Lord Bullard held a brandy flask to his companion's lips and dabbed them with a handkerchief after each coughing jag.
"Lord Almighty," Mr. Williams said as he joined Luke Honey, a plate of beans in hand. "I reckon he's off to the happy hunting grounds any minute now."
Luke Honey ate his dinner and tried to ignore Mr. Wesley's groans and coughs, and poor Scobie mumbling and rocking on his heels, a posture that betrayed his rude lineage of savages who went forth in ochre paints and limed hair and wailed at the capriciousness of pagan gods.
There were no stories around the fire that evening, and later, it rained.
***
Mr. Wesley was dead in the morning. He lay stiff and blue upon the leanto floor. Dr. Landscomb covered him with another blanket and said a few words. Lord Bullard wept inconsolably and cast hateful glances at Luke Honey.
"Lord Almighty," was all Mr. Williams could repeat. The big man stood near the corpse, hat in hand.
"The forest is particularly greedy this season," Mr. Liam Welloc said. "It has taken a good Christian fellow and an innocent child, alas."
"Hold your tongue, Mr. Welloc!" Scobie's face was no less contorted in grief and fury than Lord Bullard's. He pointed at Mr. Liam Welloc. "My grandson lives, an' I swear to uproot every stone an' every tree in this godforsaken forest to find him."
Mr. Liam Welloc gave Scobie a pitying smile. "I'm sorry, my friend. You know as well as I that the odds of his surviving the night are slim. The damp and cold alone…"
"We must continue the search."
"Perhaps tomorrow. At the moment, we are duty bound to see our guests to safety and make arrangements for the disposition of poor Mr. Wesley's earthly remains."