by Laird Barron
So, he tasted his drink and gloomily acknowledged that the tremor in his hand, the faint sickness in his soul, meant she was getting under his skin in a big way. He sighed and smiled at her and vowed, for the umpteenth time so far, not to say anything stupid, or misanthropic, or inane.
The angel on his shoulder laughed and laughed at that one.
* * *
Full darkness arrived. They migrated outdoors.
She took a pack of Camel No. 9s from her coat and lighted one. She smoked and watched him from the corner of her eye. He stood on the sidewalk and breathed heavily. He felt as winded as a prizefighter who’d survived into the later rounds. A cold breeze dried the sweat on his brow. The moon drifted over the black curve of the horizon. Full and radiant as a searchlight, the moon smoldered in the void, frozen as close to them as it would be for another million years.
The couple moved on after a while, stepping through bands of shadow cast by the interlaced branches of lithe potted magnolias and oaks. Many of the shops were locking up. The watchmaker and the baker hunched behind cold display cases, counting tills. A girl in an apron pushed a broom and smiled wistfully. Small groups of college kids drifted between the soft neon oases of bars and restaurants. There were fairy wings, a toga, some glitter and face paint, but few had bothered to get dressed for Halloween. A man played a violin in a second floor window over a darkened bookstore. The musician was a brawny, shirtless lad. Sweat wisped from his glistening shoulders. He nodded gravely and sawed with vigor as they passed.
“Love it,” she said. “My brother plays the cello. Damned good. Make you cry.” Her shoulder bumped his. “Ah, now check it. This used to be a swell art gallery.” She indicated a deserted shop front. The placard promised the impending advent of a chain Irish pub. “Alas, the poor Krams. I knew them, Horatio. Lived here their entire lives, had local artists and poets in all the time. Robert Creeley read here, once. The Robert fucking Creeley. Nobody wants art, though. Nobody wants poetry. What they want is another bloody pub the same as every other cookie cutter pub. I hear the Irish mob had a hand in running my friends out.”
“Where’d the owners go?” he said, thanking God she’d taken the pressure off him by cursing. He put his hands into his pockets, then took them out again. He wished he’d remembered to bring gum. His bum knee hurt. A panel van rolled by, slow as a shark on the cruise. Its plates were splattered in black mud.
“Yonder.” She waved in the direction of the Catskills.
“That reminds me. There are caves nearby.”
“Caves everywhere around these parts.”
“Something about the mafia or Prohibition I overheard. Maybe the War of Independence. My memory is shot.”
“Hm. There’s also the Iron Mountain facility. They store all kinds of documents in some limestone caves in Rosendale. Hush-hush stuff.”
“Aha.” He watched the van’s taillights dwindle. “I also heard some murders happened here in town. Gruesome was the word.”
“Sure. Those are still going on, though. Have been since the ‘70s. Cops never bagged anybody. Never will.”
“Serial killer?”
She stopped. Her face was luminous as if animated by the prospect of blood. He fell in love a little bit, then and there. “Uh, huh. Creepo snatches hikers and joggers and street people. Leaves them in the woods. Maybe seven, eight years ago, a Boy Scout troop stumbled upon eleven decomposed corpses in a cavern along the Wallkill. What kinda merit badge do you get for that, I wonder?”
“Hold up a sec. The ‘70s? Forty years, give or take. That seems like a long time for one guy to be about this sort of business.”
“I bet it’s a family thing,” she said. “Pop passes it down to the eldest son the way tradesmen did it during the agrarian era. Some kind of whacked traditionalist.”
“Lurid as lurid can be, yet, it never made the national news…”
“It made the news. Twenty-four-hour cycle is the problem. Today it’s a mass grave, tomorrow it’s back to celebrity meltdowns and the peccadilloes of the rich and the beautiful.”
He stared at the moon and thought about her explanation.
“Are you here to research the case?” she said.
“No. My book is about an ornithologist. He dies in a valley in the mountains. Birds eat him.”
“Ah, you’re researching birds.”
“I’m here for you.”
Her turn to scrutinize the moon and not say anything.
They kept on. Residential houses now — old, Gothic models that he’d noticed were common here in the Hudson Valley. Iron fences and lush, neglected yards. Televisions flickered blue in certain windows, projecting phantom lovemaking, train wrecks, explosions, murder. Fires flickered inside jack o’ lanterns. Lawn gnomes crouched with feral aspects in the long, wet grass.
He loved how she walked. Somewhere between a sway and a shuffle, arms swinging loose, head turning on a swivel in the manner of every professional fighter he’d ever known. She possessed a sort of animal grace that wasn’t conscious of itself, but alert to everything occurring within its environment. Heat emanated from her in waves.
He shivered. “Do you go armed, considering the situation?”
“Yeah, sometimes. When I’m not sure of where I’m headed or who I’m meeting. Then I carry a blade.”
“Got it on you now?”
“Nope.” She kind of smiled and patted his arm. “Didn’t figure I needed it. Besides, I’m a weapon. You’re safe as houses with me.”
“I’m sure.”
“Ask me where I got the knife.”
“The knife you should be packing, but aren’t?”
“Ha-ha, I did carry it this afternoon when I met the realtor.”
“Okay. Where did you get the knife?”
“From the Sneaky Fucking Russian.”
“Let me guess — he’s a karate guy.”
She grinned. “Right on. Speaking of the mob, this dude’s got the swagger. Broken nose and gin blossoms, wears heavy jewelry and a track suit. Thick accent. Eyes like pennies. A scowl mean enough to make a Spetsnaz drop his AK. Kinda skulks around. He asked me out about a hundred times when he arrived at the dojo. He got more and more belligerent about the whole thing. Finally, he exploded and demanded to know what was wrong with me that I wouldn’t date him. Shouting and stomping his foot, the whole routine. I told him this was unacceptable behavior and to piss off before he got kicked out onto the street. Very tedious.”
“Ah, an old school Eastern gentleman. I like those guys all right.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah. They tend to be tough, loyal, no nonsense types. I got a soft spot for that. He’d probably make a great boyfriend after you slap him around a little.”
“Sure, it isn’t you he’s trying to feel up when you’re sparring.”
“Fair enough. Does he know you call him the Sneaky Fucking Russian?”
She snorted and laughed. “Uh, no. Are you going to listen to the rest of the story? I’m not finished.”
“Tell me.”
“So, right. A couple of months go by. The Sneaky Fucking Russian keeps training, but he avoids me like the plague. Won’t so much as glance in my direction. One night he comes over to me with flowers and a small box wrapped in a bow. I’m thinking, oh shit, here we go again, but he holds up his hand and says, no, no, I was wrong to speak to you in that manner. You are strong American woman and I am the dirt under your shoes. I am not fit to kiss your foot. Then he gives me the box…”
“Thus the knife.”
“Yep!”
“What kind is it?”
She shrugged. “What do you mean? It’s a knife.”
“I mean is it a Randall, a Gerber, a Ka-Bar…?”
“Oh. Well, I don’t know. It folds.”
“You should get a fixed blade and keep it on you.”
“Thanks, Dad. I told you, I’m a weapon.” She was quiet for a long moment. “Death doesn’t frighten me. I’ve died plenty of times.”
“How does that work?” He squeezed her hand and let it go. “You feel warm enough.”
“Everybody has died. When I was six I went sledding and hit a concrete retaining wall under the snow. Felt my neck crack and everything faded to white. When the world came back into focus I was right as rain, but…”
“I understand,” he said. The booze made him a bit giddy. He remembered a long ago storm on Norton Sound, the rasp of diamond-bright snow scouring the ice, a universe of white; his hands were blurred shadows groping for purchase, and all around him, inside him, a constant dull roar. “And for a few hours after you came to, everything was in too sharp focus. Everything was too real.”
“Yes! Too shiny, too present. I felt like a ghost floating through a world that had materialized to accommodate me. By the next day I’d forgotten. Sometimes it comes back when I dream, or at odd moments.”
“Like tonight.”
“Maybe a little.” She gave him a sidelong glance. Her eyes were ringed like a raccoon’s and they shone with wary innocence. “The portal opens on All Hallows. Tonight is the night to do a séance or summon a spirit, if that’s what floats your boat. All possibilities are viable.”
“How many times has it happened? The return from the dead bit?”
“Three. You?”
He considered. “Eleven or twelve.”
“Jeez, dude! What the hell were you doing before you started writing?”
“Misspending my youth. Drinking, fighting, whoring around. Tramping across ice packs and climbing mountains. The usual for where I grew up.”
“Can’t leave it there. Tell me a story.”
“Oh, how about I do that on our next date? Give you something to look forward to.”
“What makes you think there’s going to be another date?” She smiled. “Come along, now.”
“I drowned once when I was a kid,” he said. “Fell in the creek. Dad had to press the water out of my lungs and get me going again. Another time, very late in the winter, I was training a string of huskies on the Susitna River. The ice gave way under my sled and I went into the black water as deep as my chest before the team somehow dragged me free. There wasn’t any bottom to that river. That current is strong and it’ll suck you under. Basically a miracle I survived. Got shanked in a bar fight in Dutch Harbor. A deckhand stuck me with a big ass filet knife. Except that’s not quite what happened — damned if the point didn’t bounce off my chest. Not even a bruise, but I saw my life go pouring out onto the sawdust floor anyhow. There you go. Three stories for the price of one.”
She chewed her thumbnail and kept walking, half a stride ahead. She said, “I’m a bitch after you get to know me.”
“How many dates in is that, would you say?”
“Usually halfway through the first one. I like my space. Everything tends to be about me, me, me.”
“Everything?”
“I’m all I’ve got.”
“You’ve been fucked over. That’s coming through loud and clear.”
“With a vengeance,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
“Thought it might be useful information. I’d hate to disappoint you down the road.”
“That doesn’t sound so selfish.”
“I like to make people smile, but I hate them too. Ah, the essential dichotomy of me. It might drive you crazy. You’ll love me, but you’ll be a mad dog.”
He chuckled. “The damage was done long before we met. Are you happy?”
“I’m happy and I’m never bored. I’ve always thought I was meant for great things. But, all that happens is I keep getting older.”
“You’re in a rut. Press your face to the grindstone and that’s all you can see. Same friends, same colleagues, same scenery. The years roll over into one another. Happiness and misery become intertwined.”
“I like my rut,” she said.
“People always think they do. It’s either that or slit your wrists.”
Street lights stretched farther and farther apart. The night deepened. They came to a bridge with rusty girders. The water below gleamed in moonlit streaks.
“I’ve lived in this town for twenty years and never walked across this bridge,” she said.
“Tonight is the night?” he said. “For séances and a bridge crossing?”
“Yeah. Watch out for the Hessian.” She pulled her collar tight and winked.
* * *
He counted sixty-six steps, measuring each stride with the precision his father, a Marine, had instilled within him. Being slightly drunk concentrated his mind, oddly enough. Seventy-six steps saw them atop a gravel embankment that functioned as a turnout for cars. A heavily trodden path began a yard off the white line of the road and immediately forked. One path descended to the river; the other climbed a hillock toward a copse of gaunt trees and a jumble of rocks. She plucked his sleeve and led the way upward.
The largest, flattest stone shone white. She brushed aside a litter of dead leaves and primly seated herself upon its surface and beckoned him. For a time they sat, shoulder to shoulder; she smoking, he watching the lights of the town and the headlights sparkling along the road. The wind rose in brief gusts and branches moaned in the surrounding woods.
“This is romantic,” he said, putting his arm around her. She didn’t move one way or another.
“There was a grove here once,” she said. “During colonial times those white settlers who followed the Old Gods cultivated this hillside, planted oak and sage and conducted druidic rituals. Naturally, the Christians eventually squashed them. Hanged the ’witches’ from the trees, or drowned them in the river. An inquisitor razed the grove to ash and this stone became known as the White Spot.”
He raised his head to examine the few scraggly trees that poked from the dense soil, claws raking free of a grave. “Nothing good grows here, I take it.”
“Stunted, emaciated shadows of the grand oaks of days gone by. The ground is cursed, but I come here all the same. I feel drawn like a flake of metal hurtling toward a giant magnet. There’s a current in the earth, a conduit. It speaks to my blood.”
The moon floated across the near pane of sky, visibly traveling like a golden sail on the night sea. She inclined her head toward him and they gazed into each other’s eyes. A charge arced from her and into him. His vision doubled. He beheld himself kneeling before her naked form, lips pressed to her sweet hip while the great and deathly blizzard that nearly killed him once raged against the walls of a landlocked cabin. He had the sense of the moon plunging toward the earth, the dissolution of himself within the following shockwave. As he dissolved, the lilac taste of her was the last artifact of his being to go into that good night. A dog or a wolf howled the howl of death.
She touched his neck and her hand was cool. She said, “What’s wrong?”
“Must be the Great Conjunction, or too heavy on the booze,” he said, shuddering free of the illusion.
“No conjunctions tonight. Plenty of single malt, though.” She laughed and kneaded his arm. Her fingers were very strong.
“I like your bruises,” he said. “Sexy as hell.”
“You are a little nuts, aren’t you?” she said and kissed him on the mouth. She was sweet with lip gloss and smoke and spearmint gum.
His toes curled. He thought of the Stevens poem about the wind in the hemlocks and the tails of the peacocks and the dead leaves turning in the fire as the planets aligned and turned outside the window. Fear and exultation turned within him. The wind and the cold in his chest receded, growling.
She separated from him slightly and said, “And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.” She licked her lips. “Sometimes I can read minds. Ever since that sledding accident.”
He caressed her cheek with the back of his hand. “Precognition. Usually during dreams, but occasionally when I’m walking down the street or chatting on the phone…Zaps me like a bolt from the blue. Too unpredictable or else I’d hop a plane to Vegas and rake it in. Eerie, though.”
“That explains your perspicacity.”
He kissed her again.
Finally, she said, “All night I’ve had a feeling of impending doom.”
“I’d say everything has turned up aces so far.”
“Maybe, maybe. Can’t last. Romance with me is fraught with peril. Consider yourself duly warned.”
Clouds rolled across the stars and covered the moon.
“Hm, the gods agree,” he said noticing the abrupt and precipitous chill that slithered over his flesh and into his bones. He felt her breath against his face, but could barely see the shine of her eyes.
She trembled and tightened her grip on his arms. “All the lights are out. Everywhere.”
The chill intensified as he realized that she was indeed correct. While they’d been distracted, a vast, cosmic hand had erased the town with a sweep of darkness. Fog and cloud covered the world. The rock vibrated beneath them and small stones cascaded away toward the water. In the near distance a metallic shriek rent the silence. Its echoes died quickly and the land stilled.
“What the hell?” he said.
“Earthquake,” she said. “We get them now and again.”
He stood and smiled with faint reassurance. “The witching hour is upon us. Let’s start back. I can see pretty well in the dark.”
They inched along the path, and gradually were able to discern enough of the landscape to make the road and approach the bridge.
“You’ve probably already written a story about this while we walked down the hill,” she said.
“Of course,” he said. “Although, I don’t have an ending.”
She took his hand and led him onward.
The shadowy lines of the bridge materialized amid the bank of fog that boiled up from the river. As they stepped onto the partitioned walkway, his heart began to drum. He imagined the previous tremor had sheared the bridge in twain and that in a few more paces he’d swing his foot over murky nothingness and fall. There wouldn’t be a cold river awaiting his plunge; only the endless void between stars.