The Croning

by Laird Barron

  KEEP OUT! THIS AREA

  HAS BEEN SPRAYED WITH PESTICIDE!

  DANGEROUS TO PEOPLE & PETS NEXT 14 DAYS!

  YOU ARE ON PRIVATE PROPERTY!

  The sign migrated about the perimeter of the farm and had done so perpetually for several years.

  A yellow lab trotted past and lifted its leg to hose a baby Douglas fir before moving on, snout to the earth. Thule strained at his leash and whimpered excitedly. The lab’s owners, a couple of yuppie kids in matching polo wear, ambled along a few dozen yards behind Don, placidly oblivious to the cryptic sign or their wayward pet. Far off, somewhere beyond pickets of greenery, a saw whined. Everything smelled humid and bittersweet and gnats danced in his hair.

  The workers who tended the farm were around this morning. A crew of seven or eight arrived every few weeks to clean the undergrowth, trim the branches and remove any diseased specimens. The laborers were uniformly male, organized by a patriarchal countryman with a barrel chest and a frightful scowl. They wore coveralls and wide-brimmed hats and swung machetes with the casual efficacy of butchers.

  Don assumed them to be Hispanic because he’d heard them conversing in Spanish, albeit overlaid with another language he couldn’t identify. He’d never spoken to the workers, just nodded in passing; a friendly smile or wave, which was always reciprocated. His Spanish was bad to nonexistent. That last detail aggravated and mystified him in equal measure since the day last winter he’d rummaged through some long-lost files and discovered journal notes he’d written entirely in Español during his youth. These were field notes he’d taken while surveying a cave system in the Aleutians during the Nixon administration. Long time gone, but god… How did a man forget a language? How did a man forget he’d even once known that language? Wracking his porous brains, he couldn’t dredge much detail regarding the expedition either. Darkness, a cavern, him suspended by a line above an abyss, his headlamp beam not touching anything solid, the drip and gurgle of water everywhere…He blinked and shook himself as Thule did after coming in from the rain, and kept moving. Moving forward from a past that became more the realm of a shadow life every day.

  Today, he spotted a couple of the younger men near the road, and instantly knew something was different, wrong somehow. Thick and broad, their coveralls caked in dust and sap. Flat, sallow faces already alight with sweat, they muttered and hacked at dead limbs, dropped them into wheelbarrows like tangled stacks of deformed arms and legs. Yes, there was a difference in their movements, a queer, vaguely inimical aura radiating from them and their half smiles that resembled sneers. He glanced down and noted that Thule’s fur was ridged and ruffled as when he was pointing toward a threat such as a hostile dog or an unknown critter in the bushes.

  The pair gradually became aware of Don’s presence and ceased their labors to study him and converse furtively. One called out in a shrill, fluting voice to his brethren hidden among the deep rows and the eerie cry was immediately returned from several, widely scattered locations.

  His mouth, my God! Don gasped and averted his gaze from the man uttering the strange bird cry; the fellow’s mouth shuttered like an iris, a toothless hole as big as a fist. The other man licked his lips and slid his machete against his pants leg in the manner of a barber stropping a razor.

  Don nodded with a sickly smile, pretending obliviousness of this most palpable unwelcome and ambled onward as fast as dignity permitted. Their deadly obsidian eyes swiveled to track him until a curve of the road intervened. He spasmodically gripped the pepper spray in his pocket. His teeth chattered.

  Too many joints in their necks. He hadn’t noticed that during his previous encounters with the crew. Both of these men had possessed the same deformity, and a crazy, paranoid thought occurred to him—the pair were actors, doubles in a film who stand in for the name actor, always filmed from behind, or in soft focus. Put a uniform on someone and that person could pass as your best friend from a distance. Crazy and paranoid in spades. Who the hell would bother to impersonate migrant laborers on a country tree farm? Why did he have a sneaking suspicion he’d seen them before under different circumstances?

  They watch. They watch you, Donald. They love you.

  The impingement of this unbidden whisper from his subconscious galvanized him even as he crammed it back down into the cellar with his childhood fears of spiders and the boogeyman. He trotted all the way back to the house, racing the storm, the devil.

  5.

  A pot of coffee later, Thule growled and headlights turned into the driveway. Don squinted at his watch, Here they are.

  Kurt and Kaiwin arrived in a rental car. Kurt owned four cars, including a Lexus and a classic, fully loaded Mini Cooper that formerly belonged to a B List action star; but as he once remarked, it’d be a cold day in hell before he’d risk one of his babies on the back roads around Olympia. The sky had brightened by inches, outlining the soft shapes of the barn, the trembling magnolias. They emerged from the car and splashed through a mud puddle and burst into the kitchen.

  Kaiwin was dark-eyed and slender, delicate, yet wiry, like a dancer. She dressed simply in a peach summer dress and sensible shoes and no makeup and appeared much younger than her likely age. Her purse was transparent plastic, the current affectation of trendy metropolitan girls and girlish women everywhere. She stood nervously, wiping raindrops from her eyes. Her eyelids were painted a delicate butterfly-wing blue.

  Thule sniffed her warily, and then wriggled and frantically kissed her hands. Don, who beyond a short conversation at the wedding reception, hadn’t chatted with the lady, accepted her then and there sans reservation. Kurt’s judgment was suspect. On the other paw, anyone good enough for Thule was A-okay in Don’s book.

  “Pop. We made it. A real shit storm out there.” Well into middle-age, Kurt was nonetheless tall and bronze and built like a power lifter; he’d played ball in high school and college, a first team linebacker at the University of Washington. He might’ve been on his way to a business meeting, such was the elegance of his hand-tailored suit, the slick blue-black sheen of his three-hundred-dollar haircut; the kind of haircut the governor himself might’ve favored. “This is Winnie.” He put his massive arm around her fragile shoulders. She nodded and smiled a bright, superficial smile.

  Don had to wonder exactly how fluent her English might be. He gave her a kindly smile and told them to hurry up and grab a seat. He took their coats and poured more coffee, although it developed Winnie wasn’t much for coffee, tea being her preference, and in that case, Kurt no longer drank coffee either. More for me, Don said, and scrounged in the cupboards until he unearthed a rusty tin of herbal tea that likely gathered cobwebs before the kids ever left for college.

  Once Kurt and Winnie were sipping their tea, Don washed potatoes and started peeling them, a task he’d become rather adept at over the years, if only as a matter of self-preservation. Michelle was many things, but a cook wasn’t one. He made small talk, noting Kurt’s expression of mild boredom; the lad drummed his fingers when his attention began to wander. Don had always harbored the suspicion his son suffered from attention deficit disorder. Michelle disagreed, noting that Don wasn’t a sparkling conversationalist and an appreciation of rural life certainly hadn’t trickled down through the paternal genes. Nonetheless, he’d always wanted to try Ritalin on the boy in the interest of science. He inquired about his son’s job as the vice president of operations at an aerospace contractor in Seattle.

  Kurt’s was a position that required extensive travel—the company outsourced its manufacturing of electronic components to Taiwan and China, which was incidentally how he met Winnie. The youngest daughter of a minor Hong Kong executive, they’d sat adjacent at a dinner party. The marriage date was arranged a mere six months later.

  Kurt’s job also necessitated absolute secrecy and draconian security procedures. He showed Don the back of his left hand. “The company implanted a chip under the skin, right there—microscopic, like a grain of rice. It has my security clearance,
medical information. They track it via satellite so I can move freely throughout our office and from building to building. There are a dozen checkpoints, sealed doors, security elevators, you name it. It’d be a flaming nightmare without this puppy.”

  “Are they tracking you now?” Don said. He looked at the ceiling.

  “Uh, no, Dad. That’d be an infringement of my privacy. I’m on vacation for Pete’s sake.” It was always difficult to tell whether Kurt’s exasperation was a reaction to Don’s dry needling or impatience with his father’s presumed ignorance. Kurt was far from stupid, but even farther from imaginative.

  “Yeah, but how do they know where you are, who’re you’re talking to? Jeez, this could be a nest of commie spies.”

  “I signed a nondisclosure form. Standard procedure. The penalty for violating that is about twenty-five years and forfeiture of my left nut, minimum. Besides, we provide ops a detailed itinerary of where we’re going and what the purpose of the visit might be. Bloody hell, this tea tastes like rotten leaves. Winnie, you don’t have to drink that.” He gently extricated the teacup from Winnie’s hand and slid it across the table. Her eyes glinted dangerously, a glint that subsided almost in the exact same instant. Kurt remained oblivious. “We got any of that coffee left?”

  6.

  Holly and her girlfriend Linda arrived around nine o’clock during a respite in the weather. Holly, independent and rugged as ever, piloted the ancient Land Rover her mother once shipped to South Africa for a six-month odyssey across the Dark Continent; she’d bequeathed it to Holly as a college graduation gift. Don guessed the engine had clocked enough miles to reach the moon and slingshot back to Earth.

  Holly leaped from the truck and seized her father in a bone-crushing embrace. Short and stout, her hair a shaggy blonde shot with gray; her tanned face bore the pits and pocks of an adventuresome existence. Like her mother, she possessed a quality of essential agelessness, a quirky, youthful passion toward life that did not engender frailty, be it physical or otherwise. Her eyes flashed with bleak humor, no doubt born of twenty-odd years as an elementary school teacher.

  “Hullo, brother,” she said when Kurt ambled onto the porch, smoothing his fantastical hair. She socked him in the arm, hard, and Don winced in sympathy; he’d roughhoused with her when she was a teenager and even then her scarred fists were clubs.

  Kurt grunted and rapped his knuckles on her forehead and Don stepped between them to defuse the semi-playful aggression before matters escalated and his children were rolling in the mud pulling each other’s hair and biting; his role of referee had become reflexive over the years of broken noses and bruised egos. Nothing changed; they would hit the big five-oh come December, and yet they reverted to adolescence at the drop of a hat. The friend, Linda, joined them on the porch. An attractive, albeit hard-bitten, woman with a buzz cut. She wore a heavy flannel shirt, khakis and logger boots. She shyly said hello to everyone and her voice was quite soft; she meticulously enunciated in a fashion that suggested European nativity.

  Rain closed in again mere moments after the luggage was unpacked and piled inside the front entryway. The house had many smallish windows, but the structure was built to 19th century standards. The rooms, staircases and connecting halls were low-ceilinged, narrow and dark, especially in dismal weather. A house of nooks and crannies, funny doors and storage cabinets in unusual and unexpected locations. Throughout childhood, Holly expressed an abiding fear of certain rooms. She complained of scratching and whispering emanating from her closet and the staircase that led to the attic. Some nights she refused to sleep in her own bed.

  The cellar was right out because she swore that once when she ventured down to fetch a jar of preserves, the venerable tomcat Boris (whom they’d inherited along with the house) had chuckled from his perch high up on a wine rack, and crooned, I’m a good kitty. Boris wandered off one day not long after that alleged incident and they didn’t get around to bringing home another cat, despite the perennial mice problem.

  Kurt had mocked Holly by saying maybe what she heard was one of Mom’s little people. Don immediately shushed such talk with uncustomary bluntness. Mention of The Little People, so called, was strictly verboten around the Miller household. He knew from bitter experience precisely how sensitive his wife was regarding even the most innocent slight of her decades-long investigation into the existence of uncontacted tribes and hidden cultures. As a man well-acquainted with similar foibles, such as cryptozoology, he tended toward sympathy.

  Yet Michelle had pursued the topic with evangelical zeal, albeit in quasi secrecy, as only cryptobiologists such as her once great friend and mentor Louis Plimpton and the more radical members of the scientific community like renowned kooks Toshi Ryoko and Howard Campbell could be trusted to keep a straight face while discussing such esoteric theories. Thank the heavens she’d later given up before it wrecked their marriage and drove herself or Don, or both of them, to lunacy.

  These days, Don didn’t often think of Michelle’s quest, that apocalyptic obsession she’d cultivated during her early years at university of proving the existence of a particular extant family of men, likely tribal, who dwelt on the hinterlands of civilization—the Antarctic, deep in the jungles of New Guinea, or the amid the wastes of the Gobi, or, if her painstakingly collated sources were to be trusted, in all of these places. The theory was absurd, of course, and would’ve gotten her laughed out of mainstream academia had she not also demonstrated reliable brilliance in traditional research, or if she hadn’t written two nonfiction books that sold sensationally and garnered overwhelming critical praise. The powers that be chuckled at her Hollow Earth theories and wrote them off as regrettable, but perhaps essential kookiness in an otherwise genius scientist.

  To the twins, the mountains of data, dry as chalk and coupled with thousands upon thousands of hours logged on planes, boats, and in hard library seats, had always boiled down to “Mom’s looking for little people!” Cute when the kids were kids and Michelle’s optimism and humor were peaking, less so with each passing year, until finally at a family dinner she’d grimly announced sans preamble that her research (thank the gods a sideline to her real work) had all been a wild goose chase and was officially terminated. Henceforth, her spare time would be devoted to a genealogical survey of her extensive family tree. Afterward she drank half a bottle of white wine and fell asleep on the living room floor. The subject was seldom mentioned in the wake of that extraordinary evening and within weeks everyone stopped talking about it altogether.

  As for Holly’s contention she’d heard the cat talking, Michelle scoffed; as with many old houses, the pipes knocked and moaned, shrews nested in eaves, and above all, kids were endowed with hyperactive imaginations.

  Don seldom reproached his daughter, however. He too dreaded the attic and the cellar. There were other little incidents, a string of them, in fact, that he wrote off as a product of his phobias, or, when expedient, promptly forgot. He’d become very good at putting these unpleasant details from his mind until the next time Michelle went away and it was late and the power flickered and something bumped in the night—a tipped chair, a cracked vase, the tinkle of glasses moving in the kitchen cabinets, things of that order. Items went missing; food, forks and knives. The knives bothered him; it was always the big ones, the butcher knives and the cleavers. Sometimes Thule whined like a puppy and glared at the walls and the ceilings. Then Don’s fears came home to roost.

  He bustled room to room clicking on lamps. The cheery glow comforted him, although the light could only do so much as the cubbies and corners lay in deepest shadow. His foremost lament regarding life at the old Mock residence was the fact he couldn’t utterly banish the darkness.

  Soon chaos descended. Luggage lay strewn from the front door to the landing below the attic which doubled as a guestroom. Kurt and Winnie agreed to accept residence therein, although he grumbled at the tight quarters, predicting he’d whack his skull on the beams. Holly told him to shut it and be a troop
er. He responded with a colorful epithet. They preferred to converse while each was in a separate room, if not on a separate floor, which necessitated shouting, and set the dog to barking and bounding up and down the stairs. Michelle loudly admonished them to lower the racket because she was hung over. The phone rang off the hook. As it was never for Don anyway and Michelle refused to answer the bloody thing, he appointed Holly receptionist pro tem, and she in turn passed the buck to poor, shell-shocked Linda who walked around in a daze with a pencil stub in hand.

  “Argyle is coming for dinner,” Linda said. “He’s bringing champagne.”

  “In this weather?” Don said as thunder rumbled. Argyle Arden was a phylogeographer who’d retired from Caltech, then again from Saint Martin’s, and currently served the Redfield Museum as a consultant. The kids still referred to him as Uncle Argyle.

  “He won’t drown,” Michelle said. “Besides, we can’t leave him alone in that huge house of his; we’re bound to lose power. Can you get that suitcase for Win, dear?” She’d drawn Winnie, Holly, and Linda away from Kurt on some pretext or other. They sat on the leather couch in the parlor with a box-worth of photo albums spread open on the chairs and the floor. The quartet seemed perfectly content to camp there indefinitely.

  “Which one?” Don morosely eyed a full set of matching designer luggage.

  “The heavy one.” Michelle waved absently.

  They all looked heavy to him. He decided this was his cue to slip away and take his arthritis medicine with a belt of Glenlivet he’d cunningly cached in the pantry behind a row of mason jars and cans of stewed vegetables. He didn’t indulge much these days; just when stressed. He poured a triple, estimating this would suffice as an anesthetic until Argyle arrived to rescue him from the clutches of his wife and children.