by Laird Barron
“Should you what, Mr. Hyjak?” Mr. Speck took down a bottle of vodka and sniffed, unimpressed.
“Should I kill the music? It’s agitating Butch. Butch, you aren’t chill. You’re uptight.”
Mr. Speck stoppered the bottle. “Kill the music?”
“Yeah. I mean, if it’s all right.”
“The signal isn’t playing at a decibel you are capable of registering. Listen carefully. Yes? The music, as you perceive it, ceased minutes ago. It’s in your head. Your neurons are chasing phantoms.”
“Beautiful,” Butch Tooms said. His fist relaxed. He stared into the gloom and smiled.
“Oh yeah?” Mr. Hyjak said. “Then what’s he listening to?”
“Nothing,” Mr. Speck said. “Echoes of dust falling in a mausoleum in ancient Greece. Your mother climaxing at the moment of your conception. A rabbit decomposing in a bog.”
“Oh, crap,” Mr. Hyjak said. “You aren’t kidding. I can’t hear it anymore.”
“Rubbing your ear won’t help.”
“Oh, crap. Crap!”
“The signal can be damaging. Especially when it transcends the spectrum of physics that operate here.”
“Look, wait. He’s — Butch isn’t on a full dose, right? There are levels of progression to the action threshold. That’s what I was told. We control his escalation with incremental micro-doses. Safe as houses as long as the doses are small. Right? Right? Damn it, you told me to play the recording!”
“Are you British?” Mr. Speck said. “My survey suggested milk-bland USA.”
“No, I’m — you see, my dad—”
“Calm yourself. Death will be among us tomorrow, the next day…soon. Horrors piled upon horrors. Such is the way of the universe.”
“Horrors!” Butch Tooms said.
“Everything’s okay?” Mr. Hyjak said. “I’m bleeding.” He wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “I’ve got a nosebleed. Bad one.”
“A real gusher,” Mr. Speck said.
“Am I dying?”
“No, your brain is softening. The signal is squeezing your frontal lobe the way clay is compressed when the earth shifts. Water oozes from its pores. Perfectly normal. The gray matter must become malleable for our purposes. Malleable, Mr. Hyjak. Be brave.”
Butch Tooms also bled. It dripped from his chin and spattered his toes. He continued to gaze serenely into the grave-cold heart of the cosmos, or wherever. Shadows near the far wall thickened and changed and glimmered purple. Purple-black. Voluptuous, unctuous rings of mute, irradiated darkness. The men’s faces dimmed.
Mr. Hyjak spilled blood from his cupped palm. He glanced around. “Oh. Oh! The music. It’s back! Radical!” He swiveled his hips and arms in a counter rhythm to a low hiss emanating from the speakers.
Mr. Speck inclined his head. His glasses cracked and reflected the purple dark.
Meanwhile (small get-together at Ronnie Diamond’s pad):
“Like, we were all sitting around a campfire in the mountains and Abraham Vile started in with ghost stories. Drinkin’ cocoa and making s’mores and here he comes with the spooky stuff. Ghost stories. I hate em, man…”
“Why you hate ghost stories...?”
“My mom died when I was little…”
“How she die — oh, right. Big C…”
“Man, I told you before, she die of the cancer…!”
“What I said. She got cancer…”
“After she did that, she used to come into my room all late at night and shit, and hang upside down in my closet. The door would swing open and she’d be in there between my sweatshirts and snow jackets, grinnin’ at me, pasty-faced as fuck. That’s why…”
“Your mom ain’t no ghost. She a vampire…”
“See this pistol…?”
“That’s a pellet gun…”
“Yeah, that’s right. I blow a hole through your head. Dump you in Rabbit Creek…”
“I’d come back as a ghost and fuck you up…”
“Man, you’re outta beer,” Jeff Vellum said, staring disconsolately into the fridge. The pale light rendered his broad features vaguely moon-like. “This is our last fling before we part ways for college and you’re dry.” He wandered away in defeat.
“Oops,” Jimmy said. “Jackie’s gonna nut him for returning empty-handed.”
“College, my ass,” Esteban said, trying not to slur. Jimmy, Jackie, Jeff, and J — the four J’s. He’d downed a man’s portion of a sixer of Bud. “Some of us whose names don’t begin with J are headed for vocational school after a pit stop in the military and glad for it. This isn’t the last fandango, man. Tooms’ shindig, tomorrow night. Tomahawk Park Survivors bash.” The prospect didn’t thrill him — he’d toned down the old drinking game and his current heroics were sure to exact a stiff price.
“Make a beer run?” Jimmy said. “Anybody got any cash? I don’t.”
“I’ll just put it on my Diner’s Card,” Ronnie Diamond said. “No worries.” He’d played offensive tackle, all state. His hair hung long as his daddy’s (doing fifteen to life in Spring Creek). He owned a hand-me-down Harley (dead uncle) and an El Camino (jailed uncle).
“Diner’s Card?” Esteban said.
“Yeah. I got a Diner’s Card. Check it, dude.”
Esteban and Jimmy looked at each other.
“Ronnie, I thought you were broke,” Jimmy said. “You owe me twenty bucks.”
“Right, but I got plastic.”
“Wait, what are you talking about?” Esteban said.
“What are YOU talking about, man?” Ronnie said with sudden panic in his eyes.
“But when you have to pay the balance—”
“The balance?”
Jimmy cracked up. “Yeah, pay it down at the end of the month. What did you think, dumbass?”
“Like, it’s money in a bank, only negative.”
“Ronnie, that’s not—”
“Y’know, you spend a hundred bucks and you can’t spend it again until you put some money back.”
“No, dude, no. It’s a short term loan. The company charges interest.”
“Oh, dear God.” Ronnie’s color drained to match his dingy white tee.
“Thanks for the beer!” Timbi Showalter yelled from the sofa.
“Hurrah!” Abraham Vile yelled from the opposite end of the sofa. He had a can in each hand. The stereo blared “I’m Not in Love.” Some of the kids were pretending to dance. Mainly they were content to grind against one another.
The doorbell rang. Cassidy Sloan and Lucius Lochinvar waltzed into the kitchen. Sloan shoved past the boys. She rummaged through the fridge, her habitual frown deepening.
“Where’s the damned beer?” She slammed the fridge and rummaged through the cabinets.
“Hey.” Esteban kissed Lucius’ cheek. She gripped his hand, hard. He didn’t like the dark-bright glare in her eyes. “What’s the matter?”
“Absolutely nothing. Ronnie, where’s your mom?”
“Beatrice got called in to the hospital,” Ronnie said. “Sloan! No way, dude, that’s Bea’s secret, double secret, stash. Don’t fucking touch that shit; she measures it with a dipstick.”
“I would too, with you around, you fucking lush.” Sloan unscrewed the top and had a jolt of Mrs. Diamond’s private stock of Johnnie Walker Black.
“Let’s go,” Lucius seized Esteban’s arm.
“Uh, baby, I’m not quite done—”
“You’re done.”
“She got all the testosterone in your relationship,” Jimmy said.
“Not all… a bunch,” Esteban said.
Lucius dragged him through the house to Ronnie’s room where everybody had piled their jackets on Ronnie’s bed. She pushed him down and unbuckled his belt one-handed. Her eyes grew shinier by the heartbeat.
“Sweetie,” he said as she shucked his jeans. “I’m not complaining, but why?”
“Dunno. It feels important.”
“I don’t—”
She squeezed his
throat. One squeeze and done. She raised her skirt and mounted him and he lost his train of thought.
Somewhere, Sometime V (Probably New England, the early Aughts):
From the mind of Lucius Lochinvar Mace
Esteban and the kids think I ran away from home. Wish I could tell them the truth that every night after Tomahawk Park and every night after the post high school bash at the Toomses has taught me cheating death isn’t necessarily the way to go.
Here I am at the end of the road and no brakes.
Doctors C & R put me through a battery of tests. Psychological, physical, chemical. They strap me into a machine called the Black Kaleidoscope and send my consciousness into astral projection mode. A sort of regression therapy.
Some tech gives me a horse needle of happiness and then the drip goes in smooth, trickles down my throat and into my heart. The tech slips red headphones over my ears and right off the bat I recollect all kinds of neat shit like…
…how my brothers and I exchanged jewelry for Christmas and weapons on birthdays and that sweet moment when I punched Jackie Brock in the kisser in middle school. I slashed my knuckles on her braces and stood over her, her limbs like matchsticks at odd angles to one another, and uttered a curse May you come back as a chandelier—hang by day, burn by night! Two and a half decades of water under the bridge and I still savor that moment, hold it in my mouth like the sweetest liquor…The day Jessica came into the world, my firstborn, lovely angry doomed daughter. I’m sorry, kid, for what will come…
Problem is, I can’t stop, can’t even slow down and memory unravels around me at 16X speed. A phantom wind tears me to ribbons with razor shards of my past misdeeds. Dr. Campbell had cautioned that whatever resides within a traveler gets writ large inside the Kaleidoscope and I’d stifled a giggle thinking of Yoda dispatching Luke to that cave in The Empire Strikes Back. Laughing out the other side of my face now.
Oh, the misery of an eventful life. The things you discover when blood is oozing from your nose and the silver screen of your mind’s eye collapses inward and reveals an ice sheet and a red nail bed of horizon. A figure in an anorak with the hood up approaches.
My dead uncle, Bradley, says, Your daughter is born of evil, your sons will be sacrificed as I was sacrificed. I loved your mother. True confessions of the dearly-departed. His blackened hand sears my cheek with cold. Doesn’t seem to matter he’d gotten obliterated in Vietnam, he’s put himself together again. I convince myself that the blast had hurled him into a parallel universe. That’s what ghosts are — souls who’ve reconstituted a frequency up or down the radio dial. Death as we know it is simply a process of osmosis, a trickle charge into a cosmic battery. Hard to tell whether that’s a pleasant thought or a preview of Hell.
Three non-human intelligences interfere with the course of life on Earth the way little kids play with ant farms. Your doctor friends are in the know and they are only aware of two of the players. You’re at the end of your rope, sweetheart. We’ll be together real soon.
Uncle Brad hums a strange melody; a Saturday kid’s show actor summoning cardboard flying saucers from the interstellar divide. It gives me the mother of all ear worms. Ice buckles and groans and stars rush toward me.
I crash back into the here and now, fling the headphones aside and draw down with Beasley’s (the unhandsome, but spectacularly virile bodyguard/valet to the scientists) spare Saturday Night Special that I’ve taped against the small of my back, uncomfortable to say the least, and aim it at Dr. C. I’m no Annie Oakley. Still, I feel better holding the gun, feel more in control, illusory as that might be. Somebody had neglected to tick the box next to Propensity for Violence on my chart. Goes to show that psych evaluations aren’t all created equal.
“Mr. Beasley and his unsecured firearms,” Dr. C says, disappointed. He’s survived cannibals, cultists, intestinal parasites, kidnapping and torture in the Far East, and decades as second-fiddle to his senior partner, the infamous Dr. R. A girl with a gun doesn’t scare him unduly. “Do you mind?” He strikes a match from the case he keeps in his coat pocket and lights his pipe. “I didn’t foresee this variable. My calculations need a double-check. Is that weapon loaded, Mrs. Mace? Does your family know where you’ve run off to? Does your husband?”
“Don’t worry about them. The fam is used to my comings and goings.”
“Yes. They assume you’ve run away with one of your many flings. Excellent cover. Do you maintain the façade for their protection or your convenience?”
“A little of column A, a little of column B.”
I divide my attention between him and the rear wall of the interview room. A fractal three-dee print adorns the otherwise bare wall. Psychotropic dope still swims through my consciousness. It puffs in tiny cotton detonations and clouds my blood with lead sinkers. The whine of a drill bit scratches at my brain, high and thin. Muzak of dead stars.
“Who the fuck is behind that wall?” I say.
“You are under the influence of a powerful hallucinogen. It has rendered you more volatile than usual. There is nothing behind the wall.”
“Try again.”
“A friend of some friends.”
“Not helpful, doc.”
“I could tell you, but then you’d have to kill yourself.” He smirks and inhales from his pipe. A cold, contemptuous gesture from a wizened child who fried ants with a magnifying glass. Also, possibly, a dare.
I take his dare and cock the hammer. I swing the barrel until it points where the red and gold panels intersect behind the print. “What. What is behind the wall?”
“I am sure you remember your old friend, Mr. Speck. His interference helped transform you, mutate you.”
“He’s gone.” My mouth tastes sour. Suppressed memories of slaughter and mayhem yammer and boil behind a psychic dam I’ve built with drugs and raw willpower.
“Speck is gone, yes. Amanda Bole yet lurks; we know not where. Those two had enemies, or rivals, if you will. Competing interests for the hearts and minds of Terra. Some of them are here with us, recording this conversation. These…neighbors have emerged from the deep places to observe and advise. Ostensibly our friends mean well. However, their temperament is hazardous to the health of obstreperous primates.”
“Show me the man behind the curtain.”
“You’ll regret it instantly.”
“Will I?”
He breathes out a cloud. “It is worse than you can imagine.”
“Bullshit. I’ve seen the worst.”
“Wrong, my dear. Look, if you’re going to be a prig, put the gun into your mouth and do us both a favor. Or shoot me first, if you please.”
“Fine, Mr. Wizard. I call.” I squeeze off the entire magazine into the fractal print and whatever alleged monstrosity lurks behind the thin paneling. Bull’s eye.
Fuck me running, the doctor knew whereof he spoke. It is worse.
4. Rally, Washington. Spring, 1977 (Sample from Massacre)
The gang from Alaska ran amok an entire day at Tomahawk Park with only one major casualty (Jude Kowalski busted his arm on a concrete water slide) and a few bumps and bruises (the aforementioned slide and a go-cart duel between Keith Norse and Jimmy Flank that concluded in a six cart pileup and a tire fire). The park had operated since 1957 and garnered a reputation for shoddy construction, incompetent employees, and third world safety standards. Everyone agreed (as bandages and casts were applied) that it had exceeded expectations.
After showering away (most of) the chlorine, everybody chowed on burgers. Small groups formed and slipped away for a secluded beach on the river. Ronnie Diamond and Esteban recruited a half-dozen warm bodies to secure driftwood for the epic bonfire. Jeff Vellum ignited the sucker with a splash of unleaded gasoline. The resulting fireball could’ve been sighted from space and singed his eyebrows off. Somebody with a fake ID had secured a keg of the good stuff and plenty of cases of PBR and Colt 45 for backup. Mr. Three Trees and Mr. Hyjak got Mrs. Buntline crocked on margaritas at the Fat Bo
y so the kids could have their fun unimpeded. Esteban heard Butch Tooms (courtesy Daddy Tooms’ bankroll) slipped the so-called chaperones a C-note to make it happen.
Meanwhile:
Threnody Rudnick and Molly Vile stayed behind in room 119, an end unit on the wing that lay in gloom beneath a stand of Douglas firs. The light over the door also happened to be broken, ensuring a multitude of shadows to cloak young ne’er-do-wells, Bobby Flank and Vern Oglesby. The boys (hockey players both) peeped through the window and a narrow divide in the drapes, watching as the girls laughed drunkenly and undressed one another. Led Zeppelin played “Black Dog” as Molly Vile leaned in and laid a kiss on Rudnick.
“See, told ya,” Vern said.
“I hope Butch don’t catch us,” Bobby said. His head was on a swivel for Butch Tooms.
“Be totally worth it.”
“Getting maimed isn’t a fun way to end a vacation.”
“He wouldn’t maim us, he’d murder us.”
“Goddamnit, they aren’t taking off their bras,” Bobby said after a while.
“Give it a minute.” Vern hesitated. “Dude…You hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Sounded like…sounds like…”
“Aw, I think you’re right — they’re just going to neck. What a gyp!”
“…a whistle. You don’t hear it?”
“Man, this is PG bullshit,” Bobby said. “I vote we haul ass to the beach and get lit.” He realized Vern wasn’t crouched beside him anymore. “Vern?”
To Bobby’s right, a door slammed and a car engine fired. Lights twinkled across the parking lot. To his left, the great black mass of trees inhaled the light and gave back scents of sap, fir needles, and deathly must.
A night bird screamed. Chimes jangled. Wind chimes? He strained to determine the direction and proximity. The sound changed. Whistling? Pipes? The melody floated from the woods, near then far. His muscles went rigid and he gripped the window sill. His nails dug in and split. The sinews in his neck spasmed and he bit through his tongue.
A shape rose from where it had lain in a bed of dead leaves. Its eyes collected sparks of sodium fire. The shape seized Bobby. It pried his jaws apart and formed a seal with its own mouth, and drank. Bobby remained a statue. A vein in his temple pulsed, pulsed...