by Laird Barron
I lingered over the coaster and then put it in my pocket. “This is a little odd, professor. Not exactly my normal brief, so to speak. I take it this Smyth character is missing, or else you’d go ask him yourself.”
“It is possible the fellow’s dead, although we suspect he’s very much alive. In hiding, we think. Took a powder into the Alaskan wilderness during the spring of 1967. There are more recent accounts, multiple sightings of a man matching Smyth’s description.”
“Seven years is a long time to be on the lam. The cops want him?”
“The authorities don’t possess evidence to implicate him in any nefarious dealings, such as the disappearance of my patron’s daughter. My patron suspects otherwise, naturally. That’s where you come in.”
“Maybe Smyth’s got an aversion to overly aggressive film buffs.” I smiled, but he didn’t seem amused. “So, I’m going to put together a team and fly all over the ass end of Alaska, hunting for some guy basically nobody’s ever heard of…”
“Ralph Smyth, Ralph Smyth, surely you recall…” Professor Gander buffed his signet ring and waited for the light to dawn in my presumably Neanderthal brain. Fucker wore a cardigan and rimless glasses. He’d gone prematurely white like Warhol.
“Surely I do not.” I took a gulp of Redbreast. Glass number three. I’m not a heavy drinker, but suffering the good professor required extreme measures.
“A poor man’s Lon Chaney, Sr. who eked a career from getting violently offed in a dozen Hammer films. What he’s famous for, however—”
“Nothing, apparently,” I said, a teensy bit drunk already.
Gander bared his mismatched and silver-capped teeth. He wanted a taste of my blood, it could be assumed. “Bravo, Cope. The man is famous for nothing. What he’s infamous for is his final role in a French-Canadian art film. Ardor. An exceedingly liberal interpretation of Dracula. Ten years ago this spring Ardor premiered at a Quebec festival, then sank into obscurity. It is reviled by critics and forgotten by the public. Have you seen it? Amazing work.”
“Oh, by art, you mean smut, eh? I dig.”
“Yes, a pornographic movie. Rated X for sex and violence. A notorious piece of cinema, even by genre standards. Banned in many countries. Only a few copies rumored to survive, etcetera, etcetera.”
“I’m sorry I missed this one. A porno retelling of Dracula. What will they think of next?”
“The forces at work in the world are endlessly inventive. Artistic autocoprophagy is here to stay.”
I studied him through the haze of his untouched cigarette, preferring not to dignify his comment with a response. I made a mental note to look up autocoprophagy.
He said, “Why don’t you come by my place tonight and I’ll show you the film? I’ve got a bootleg reel. A few colleagues and some friends of the university will be in attendance. You can mingle, make new acquaintances. A fellow in your line can always use new connections, and a better class of them, too.”
“You and your cronies going to gather around the campfire to watch a stag flick, huh?” I said. “A banned stag flick. That’s a relief. I prefer the company of miscreants.”
“There’s another item we’ll need to discuss,” he said. “The client is a dear friend of mine. That’s why he’s come to me in the wake of the law’s failure to rectify his concerns. Regardless, I’ve reason to believe Smyth went to Alaska on a specific mission. He’s a bibliophile and an antiquarian. His home, which he abandoned, was stuffed with extraordinary…items, shall we say? By all means extract the information my patron requires, but if you can bring home any significant papers or relics, or lacking that, photographic evidence of said, you’ll be generously compensated.”
“Well, in that case, here’s another coaster.” –
—I drove over to the professor’s house around nine. Late enough that people would’ve settled in, but before any craziness had gotten started, or so I hoped. Gander struck me as a buttoned-down freak. Perhaps a Wally.
The address he’d scribbled on a coaster led me to an old mansion in the U-District, set back from the street. Parking is hell in the U, so I left the car in a likely spot and walked three blocks. The windows were dark and I wondered if it was the right place until Gander’s housemaid answered the bell and greeted me by name. More of a gasped epithet, really. Her face was pale. She held a candle in an ornamental bowl.
The maid led me to a study eerily illuminated by a silver screen on the far wall. She fled. I got the impression of antique furniture and lots of bookcases. A throng of silhouettes was back-lighted by the screen. I whiffed cherry pipe smoke and fancy cologne, a hint of marijuana.
A film played for this crowd of rustling shadows. Its frames jumped, were poorly spliced; the scenes were muddy and marred by frequent cigarette burns; the color flickered. Tiny subtitles and a strange, scratchy orchestral symphony accompanied the grunts and cries of the actors, all a half-beat offset from the action itself. Somebody was fucking somebody. Somebody was murdering somebody. Cocks everywhere, thrusting into every opening. A guillotine blade dropped through the neck of a devil clown. Gore splashed the thirteen dancing brides of Dracula and flecked the camera lens. Darkness flooded in. For an instant the gallery dissolved and I became dislocated, a bullet shot into the vacuum of deep space.
The lights came up while the film kept running. Someone said, “Jesus Christ!”
I beheld a congregation of the crème de la crème of UW faculty; fifteen or so middle-aged dudes in sweaters and slacks, drinks and smokes in hand, all of them sniffing in my direction like moles. The departments of anthropology, psychiatry, and literature were well-represented.
Horror stretched Gander’s face in all kinds of unpleasant directions. “What are you doing here?” He gestured as if to ward away an evil spirit. “What are you doing here? You can’t be here.”
I wanted to tell him to piss off, he’d invited me, but I couldn’t speak. There was too much blood in my mouth. I looked down and realized I was naked and covered in blood. I extended my arms like the Vitruvian Man and the room rotated. Centrifugal force pinned me in place. On the screen, washed out, yet immense and wicked, naked Dracula embraced naked Renfield and crushed the life from him. The camera zoomed in on Renfield’s glazed eye, penetrated the iris into the secondary universe, the anti-reality. It was snowing there, in Hell. I was in there, in Hell, in the snow, waving to myself.
A white glow ignited on my left where the doorway to the long hall should’ve hung. Instead, an ice field bloomed through a porthole. So bright, so beautiful, filling up my brain with fog—
—The team assembled at the Bull Moose Diner in downtown Bethel, Alaska to plot a final sequence of site flyovers. Alaska is a big place. We were running out of places to search for our quarry, though. If I couldn’t find Smyth in the next few days, that might be curtains for the expedition.
The frigid Alaskan winter wasn’t doing my mood any favors. Relocating to western Washington for a vacation didn’t sound half bad. I could take Conway to Lake Crescent for a romantic idyll, or hiking along Hurricane Ridge. Or maybe we’d hole up at my house and drink wine and watch the rain hit the windows.
Is retrieving the bones of a person treasure hunting? Or would you call it grave robbing? Conway posed this question with a smile — he could afford to smile because he didn’t know the half of what I did for a living. That was the last time I’d seen him in the flesh. He’d spent the night at my place on Queen Anne Hill. The next morning would find me aboard a jet to Anchorage. He lived across town in North Gate; sold insurance to corporations. The job took him out of my life about as often as mine took me out of his. We’d been lovers for three years. I’m tallish and homely; he’s shorter and handsome enough to model if he wanted. He’s a man of his word and I’m shifty as they come. The arrangement worked, barely.
Grave robbing? Maybe Conway had it right. Over the past decade I’d flown thrice around the world in the service of numerous scholarly profiteers of the exact same mold as Professor Ga
nder. Missions revolved around wresting artifacts of historical significance from the locals, or better yet, absconding with said relics before the locals even suspected chicanery. Sometimes, this job being an example, I was sent to retrieve a real live person, or extract information from said. You never knew. My chief talents? A willingness to follow orders and endure a not inconsiderable measure of privation and hardship along the way. I don’t balk at getting my hands dirty. Runs in the family. Granddad shot people for the Irish mob back in the Roaring Twenties; made an art of it, or so the legends go. I’m not even close to being that kind of a hardcase, just sufficiently mean to get matters across when it’s called for.
The future would take care of itself. Meanwhile, here I sat in Bethel with a string to play out: four sites within striking distance of the village. Gold Rush mining camps abandoned since World War II, except for infrequent visits by tourists, researchers, and ne’er-do-wells. That last was us. My comrades were more inclined to the business of looting and pillaging native artifacts under the guise of academic inquiry.
“A sentient being isn’t an artifact separate from the universe,” said Moses as he counted out bills for the waiter. None of us had the first clue who he was speaking to. “Sentient beings are the sensors of the universe, its nerve endings. A colony of ants, a gaggle of geese, a city-state, are the places where enough sensors amass and the universe becomes self-aware.” He paused with a scowl. “Somebody needs to kick in another two bucks.”
That was doubtless Maddox who’d skimped on the tip. I tossed a five-spot on the table to save time and frustration for all concerned. Prior to this assignment I’d not worked with any of them. I preferred the Southwest states. My Alaska network was weak, forcing me to rely on a subcontractor in Juneau who’d made the initial referrals. Over the months I’d gotten to know this group, on a superficial level, at least. This line of work doesn’t engender intimacy, it heightens eccentricities. A man becomes known by his foibles, his personality tics. Illusions of bonding or brotherhood are perfidious.
Pilot John was a boozy loser who’d washed out of life in Vermont. Maddox was a boozy loser who’d gotten dumped from the faculty at the University of Anchorage for a variety of sordid offenses; one too many coeds had dropped her panties for him, I gathered. Moses, our Yupik guide, was a boozy loser who’d blown his Western State degree and done five years in the pen for grand larceny. Nowadays he guided hunters and hikers and nefarious types such as me, even though his expertise lay somewhere in the area of philosophy and he didn’t know an iota more about snow than anybody else schlepping around the Yukon Delta. Parker, I couldn’t figure. Didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, so what did he do? Clean as a whistle except for some domestic bullshit with a younger brother. His specialty was photography and he knew his way around the Northern Territories. The mystery was why a smart, clean-living guy like him couldn’t get a reputable gig. Punching his brother in the kisser wasn’t a satisfactory explanation for why he’d become persona non grata.
I hate mysteries, but the solution to this one had already suggested itself to me. What to do with my conclusions was the problem—
—I kicked in a lot of doors and looked under a lot of rocks to discover five pertinent facts of the Ralph Smyth case.
Fact One: He’d received training as a playwright and dramatic actor and it hadn’t helped. His oeuvre mainly consisted of crappy black-and-white monster flicks that would’ve mildly entertained my twelve-year-old self. His shtick was playing second banana to the main villain. He chewed scenery as Igor or Renfield in at least half the movies and as an enforcer, arm-breaker, or button man in most of the others.
Fact Two: Smyth had had the reputation as a real sonofabitch. Small-time actor, yet connected behind the scenes. His father had owned majority interest in a lighting and set-making company. Money opened all the right doors. Ralphie baby was chummy with Karloff, Lugosi, and Cushing, and every two-bit producer that came down the pike. He enjoyed conning young, naïve starlet wannabes. He seduced them, screwed them, strung them out on dope and then turned them over to one of the slimeball directors for further abuse and exploitation. Molly Lindstrom, so keen to escape the tyranny of daddy dearest, was another fly in Smyth’s web. She vanished six months after principal photography wrapped on Ardor. The authorities looked into it, Burt Lindstrom being important and such. Never came to anything.
Fact Three: The case went cold and Smyth dropped the acting gig and disappeared into the woodwork. His trail wound all over, from Juneau, to Anchorage, to Fairbanks, and west toward the bitter coast. He was a ghost with many aliases: George Renfro, Ogden Shoemaker, Bobby Stoker, and Gerald Bluefield were the popular ones. He had plenty of cash and Alaska isn’t the kind of place where people ask a lot of prying questions. There was a long line of secretive white men seeking some grand destiny in the wild.
I grudgingly admitted Professor Gander was correct in his assessment that Smyth was on the trail of something big. He was a man of disconcerting depths. For example, our long-lost actor hadn’t simply starred in the much reviled Ardor, he’d written the script and sold it to the studio. Uncredited to boot. He’d allegedly gotten wasted at a cast party and told a grip that the Dracula legends were rooted in fact. Yeah, Vlad the Impaler, said the grip. Smyth laughed and said, Not the Tepes horseshit. Think the Devil’s Triangle. Think the sailing stones of Death Valley.
Fact Four: Nine people had gone missing in the various regions of Alaska coinciding with Smyth’s travels. Drunks, lost hunters, adventurers. Folks nobody would miss unless, like me, one paid attention to patterns. My man Smyth was a pervert and a cad of the worst sort. Sorting the old papers he’d lovingly collected on ritual cannibalism and human sacrifice, I suspected he was also a murderer.
Fact Five: There are six quarts of blood in the body of a man and I’m low, very low. Now I know I should’ve stayed in Seattle with my true love—
—Sprung joints of the plane seethe smoke. Flames streak from the cowling that’s half nosed into the ice. The smoke is black and thick. The column rises several feet, and then spills down over the ground, pressed hard by the frigid temperature. Visages of devils float in the tide and shoot forth hot red tongues. The wind whips it until it boils. Concupiscent curds of death. Where oh where is my shirtless and muscular roller of big cigars? Call that bastard in here on the double! I have my second chuckle of the day in celebration of wit undimmed by the impingement of certain doom.
We’ve trudged a good distance inland. The plane is a toy. My glove blocks sight of it easily. We are even farther from the brightening stars. The blue-black horizon has enfolded the ocean like a curtain dropping onto a stage. Moses leads. Parker and Maddox drag me and our pitiable remnants of gear on a canvas tarp salvaged from the wreckage. My knee is sprained; my back is in spasms. I can but hope that’s the worst of my injuries. We’ll know tonight when the universe freezes and the aspirin supply disappears.
Pilot John screams way back there where we left him in his pyre. I can barely hear him over the rising wind and the crunch of boots in the snow. The men stop in their tracks and gaze back across the flats. Vapor wisps from their mouths. For a moment they resemble a lonely trio of caribou, separated from the main herd and bewildered at a sound foreign to their existence.
“Hey, he’s not dead,” Maddox says to Moses. His tone is reproachful.
Moses pulls down his hood. His face is broad and dark. His mustache is silver with frost. He frowns. No, he definitely doesn’t look like a man who wants to believe what he’s hearing. He stares wordlessly into the gathering darkness, into the coal at its heart.
“Oh, no. Moses, you said he was dead.”
“That’s the wind.”
“No, it’s him. God help us.” Maddox crosses himself.
Parker glances from man to man. “What’s happening?” He really doesn’t get it. His hat has fur-lined earflaps; maybe that’s why.
“Pilot John is frying,” I say through gritted teeth. Nobody says anything for a mi
nute or so. The screams have stopped. My hunch is the unlucky bastard woke up to his flesh popping like bacon, then promptly succumbed to smoke inhalation. Here’s hoping. I can’t help myself; I quote from the poetry of that long dead Yukon sage, Robert Service: The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest they ever did see was the night on the marge of Lake Le Barge I cremated Sam McGee!
Moses raises his hood again. His coat is a really nice homemade one with a wolf ruff and more fur trim at the wrist and ankle openings. It’ll take him a lot longer to freeze to death than it will for everybody else. He starts walking again, toward the foothills of the Kilbuck mountains. I can’t help but imagine them as tombstones.
“Shouldn’t we stay with the plane?” Parker says this for the third or fourth time. He managed to save his best camera and carries it on a lanyard around his neck.
“We’ll die in the open.” Moses doesn’t glance backward. Shoulders squared, head lowered, he plods on.
“Gonna buy it either way,” Maddox says, low and grumbly. Not a protest, it is an utterance of fact.
“Somebody might see the smoke,” Parker says. His is the faint and fading voice of reason swallowed by the wilderness and the indifference of his comrades.
“C’mon,” Maddox says. A bear of a man, red-eyed from lack of drink. He and Parker grasp the edges of the tarp and begin dragging me again.
According to the maps, long ago there was a village around here. I’d hoped to find Smyth or some clue regarding Smyth’s whereabouts. The village has crumbled, or the ice has buried it. No trace of the fish camps or the mining camps either. A cruel wind blows, scouring the ice to dirt in spots and making brick ramps of the snow in others. The wind doesn’t ever really stop in this place. It has, like Sandburg’s grass, work to do erasing all signs of human habitation. The wind is the tongue of a ravening beast. It licks at our warmth, the feeble light of our miserly souls.
Our company founders and staggers and scrambles onward. It is dark when we tuck into the shelter of a rocky crevice. Nearby, the face of the mountain is glaciated. Water oozes and steams over ice stalactites and we lap at it. My lips are already cracking and it’s only been a few hours. This kind of weather leaches a man, withers him to a husk.