The Croning

by Laird Barron

  Kurt stumped into the kitchen and caught him red-handed. “For the love of Christ and the Apostles, hand that over quick!” He barged into the pantry, snatched the bottle and reduced its contents by a quarter. “I hope you haven’t become a closet lush, Dad,” he said after wiping his mouth with his knuckles, then registered they were currently holed up in a pantry the length and width of a janitor’s closet. “Literally.”

  “Well, gee, son. I don’t guzzle whiskey like soda pop.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I need to mellow. My blood pressure’s through the roof the last few weeks. We might lose a contract to Airbus and the machinists are threatening a walk-off. Another strike! Can you believe that garbage? They get a sweet new contract three years ago and look how they repay us. Extortionist bastards.” Given Kurt’s lofty position and the attendant responsibilities, hypertension seemed an obvious occupational hazard.

  “Ah, well, I live with your mother.” Don retrieved the bottle and had another dose. Before he knew it, the bottle had run dry and he was beginning to take the entire hullabaloo quite philosophically. He and Kurt eventually emerged, snickering at their own witticisms like a pair of prep school cadets, and tackled the daunting task of dragging a half dozen bags up the stairs, a chore that proved surprisingly hilarious, all the more so when Kurt admitted five of them were his.

  After the second trip to the attic, Don slumped on the double bed, which Michelle had taken pains to beautify with new sheets and a counterchange quilt, and tried to catch his breath. He considered himself in decent shape for a flabby-assed geezer. He ran every other day and lifted a set of dumbbells Kurt had left in the garage. This, however, was a bit much. He put his head between his knees. Thunder crashed much closer than before. From this height, the crow’s nest as it were, the storm was impressive. The roof seemed as if it might be torn apart at any moment. Gray, bloodless light came through a single window smudged with grime and fly droppings.

  The room was crowded by racks of mothballed clothes, bookshelves crammed with moldy picture books and magazines such as Life and Time—and an array of antique dolls. Aunt Yvonne had been a collector; some of the dolls went back to the Civil War; she’d even acquired a wooden Indian, the kind shopkeepers once set on the sidewalk. It waited in the shadows, dust-caked, its termite-riddled aspect rather ghoulish, hatchet-edged and emaciated; the portrait of a Cherokee chief cut down by starvation and smallpox, an angry soul condemned to haunt the attic.

  Tucked in an alcove was an ancient Westinghouse projector alongside dozens of film canisters whose labels were mostly illegible due to yellowing and that awful Mock handwriting. Those few that proved comprehensible were pure argot: Hierophant Exp. 10/38; Mt. Fuji Exp. 10/46; Crng (Beatrice J.) 10/54; Astrobio Smt. 5/76(keynote T. Ryoko & H. Campbell), Ur-trilobite organizational patterns (L. Plimpton) 8/78, Ekaltadeta spinal column, Duin Barrow 11/86, CoOL 9/89, and so on. Stacked in the corners were dusty wooden crates and steamer trunks papered with stamps from exotic ports of call. A handful of these objects were newer, holdovers from Michelle’s expeditions to Africa, Malaysia, Polynesia, and a dozen other regions.

  Several oil paintings lay under canvas, propped against an easel, and largely unfinished; the labors of an unknown artist. The pieces were disquieting. Impressionist work; the subjects were deformed humanoids dwarfed by unwholesome man-beast figures and indistinct objects of unremittingly baroque dimensions. These latter struck him as tribal renderings of anthropomorphic gods and the cyclopean ziggurats wherein such beings would naturally dwell, the whole as filtered through the lens of someone possessed of a Western European sensibility. Possibly someone with a psychological disorder or a deviant fetish for the grotesque. He’d avoided mentioning the paintings to Michelle for fear she’d form a morbid attachment to them and insist on hanging the “masterpieces” in prominent locations.

  Even worse was a poster-sized black and white photograph of a tall, gangling figure in half profile looming over a misshapen dwarf against a featureless background of white and gray. Both wore stiff suits and Homburgs; the freakishly proportioned thin man, whose hands and neck possessed all too many joints, wore rimless black glasses while the dwarf grinned at the camera through a devilish beard. The photo was likely shot during the Prohibition or Depression era going by the striations and patina of composition, although identification was difficult due to yellowing and a layer of dust. R & friend was scribbled in the corner. Don didn’t care for either of the men and wondered who they were and what became of them.

  He smiled wryly—if this was what Mock men looked like in their declining years, no wonder they maintained a low profile. Behind the photograph were several others, but these were scorched and ruined, edges curled and charred from flame, giving the impression someone had tossed them in a fire and then relented too late, and neither heads nor tails could be discerned regarding the subjects.

  “I see you never got around to clearing out this junk.” Kurt lighted a cigarette. “It’s stuffy as hell in here. And those bloody dolls. They scared the crap out of me when I was a kid.”

  “Ahem, you can’t smoke in the house.” Don widened his eyes melodramatically and drew his thumb across his throat. He pointed at the floor where muffled laughter occasionally echoed through the grillwork vents. “It’s the law.” He’d quit tobacco periodically since Sputnik.

  Kurt puffed vigorously with the rapturous expression of a satiated addict. “Screw going outside in this shit. If I don’t have a drag my head will explode. Want one?”

  “Lord yes.” Don practically snatched the proffered cigarette. They smoked in contented silence for a bit and Don’s whiskey buzz began to evaporate, usurped by the rush of nicotine. He said, “So, what’s the occasion?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, we get Holly once a year, if we’re lucky. And you, you’re always busier than a one-armed paper hanger. But here both of you are; out of the blue I might add. So, what gives?”

  Kurt puffed smoke from his nostrils. “Mom threatened us. You telling me you aren’t in on it?”

  “Postcards suit me, son. I cherish my peace and quiet. Threatened you how?”

  “With being disinherited, what else?”

  “She’s too late.”

  “Ha-ha. I’m kidding—she asked Holly to visit, not me. I came because I want to talk.” Kurt dragged on his cigarette, face screwed up in concentration, as it always had when he confronted a problem too big for his eminently prosaic brain. “It’s…Well it’s weird.”

  “Uh-oh,” Don said. “Quick!” He crushed his cigarette and hid the evidence in the front pocket of his shirt and frantically swiped at the smoke circling his head.

  “Oh, boys,” Michelle called from the landing. Backlit by a lamp, her shadow flickered on the ceiling where the stairs slanted downward. “How’s it coming?”

  “Er, ahem—fine, dear! Almost done,” Don said, fighting the itch in his throat, the maddening urge to cough.

  “Fabulous. Come right down, if you please. Holly has another trunk on the porch and we can’t have her spraining something trying to lift it, can we?”

  “Right, right, she’s a delicate flower,” Don said. He shrugged at Kurt. “Hold the thought, eh?”

  “Yeah,” Kurt cracked the window enough to create a whistling suction and smoke streamed forth into the maelstrom. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  7.

  There came a golden and crimson break in the weather. Black and purple for miles all around, Jupiter’s gory eye fixed directly overhead. The girls sent Don and Kurt into town for emergency supplies—more wine coolers and candles.

  Don decided to make the best of a raw deal and took Kurt to visit Grandpa Luther, a chore he’d neglected for six months, much to Michelle’s growing irritation—she coming from the blood is thicker than water set. Don shrugged off her disapproval, turtled stubbornly. Luther had been a force of nature and Don didn’t like visiting the old man’s patch of dirt. It reminded him of his own crow’s feet, how
the flesh of his triceps had begun to loosen, dimpled and pallid as a plucked turkey.

  Kurt drove him to the cemetery and said, “Hey, do your thing. I’m no good with this sentimental crap. I’ll get the booze and swing around to grab you in a bit.”

  Don lingered a moment in the entrance lot, breathing in the salt tang mixed with decomposing soil and wet grass. He walked slowly then, a bouquet of parti-colored supermarket flowers drooping from his fist. On the left was the mausoleum, a low, brick rectangle, crosses graven at intervals where windows might’ve served. To the right, a dirty white marble Christ knelt upon a knoll, hands clasped, face upturned. The stone split along Christ’s jaw and temple; a scar. Perhaps this was his portrait after Golgotha, the wounds yet sharp. Behind the statue, a storm fence leaned crookedly, a spine of plastic slats and mesh separating the cemetery from a warren of duplexes and tract houses.

  Numerous bedroom windows overlooked this field of crumbling markers; he considered the irony of how at night the living and the dead slept crown to crown. Did the flimsy barrier represent something more than its makers intended? Possibly a subconscious demarcation between the Here And Now and the Hereafter.

  Passing a naked flagpole near the granite Civil War Monument, he came toward the oldest sections, the plots where the founders of Portland were buried. The rough-cropped turf was largely innocent of paths. Those that existed were uneven, asphalt-rutted from the crush of years, and slimy with needles and pollen. Trees reared in disorderly copses. Evergreens dominated, limbs heavy and low, creaking as the wind nudged them. Birches hunkered as poor relations at a banquet, their mottled skins cold and white, black branches haggard even in summer. Periodic attempts to dress up the grounds were evidenced by the symmetrical shearing of hedge trees.

  Markers radiated unevenly to the cardinal points—rain-slick headstones of marble and granite, and a few of dull metal. Most were simple affairs, comprised of names and dates etched in rock. Gray plates lay half-sunken in the turf; hungry green moss filled the grooves and hollows of the most venerable carvings. Under these markers, in the wet, dark soil, nested the bones of pioneers and politicians, fishermen and fishwives, cowboys and bankers, immigrants and vagrants, ancient dowagers and newborn daughters, boys lost at war, girls lost in the cannery, atheists and parishioners alike.

  Beyond the brief fields of colonial interment, he approached the cemetery’s opposite flank, the newest portion. His grandfather’s plaque was simple—a plate bolted to a flat wedge of stone. It said:

  LUTHER ANGSTROM MILLER

  CAPTAIN UNITED STATES ARMY

  BORN AUGUST 3RD 1882

  DIED JANUARY 14TH 1977

  They’d buried his wife in Bellingham in the family plot, so it was only Grandfather here.

  “Brought you some flowers, Grandpa.” Don arranged the flowers in what he hoped was a decent presentation. The ground was too wet to sit.

  1945 was the year the world raveled for Don, the year he’d gone to live with Luther in the old homestead cabin among the hills outside of town. Mom wrecked her car and Dad went off the deep end, volunteered for some kind of suicide mission on a remote and long since forgotten piece of island real estate in the Philippines—the true circumstances of his death buried in a government vault for forever plus a day. Don’s older brothers, Colin and Robert, were out of the picture by then: Colin moved to Wallachia and became curator of the venerable museum of natural history ensconced in Castle Mishko; Robert ran away and did a tour with the Marines, then joined a commune in San Francisco in the latter ’60s and disappeared completely except for a half-dozen bizarre letters he sent to ‘Whom it may concern’ across the next three decades. Younger brothers Stephen and Ralph spent the summer across the pond with Aunt Muriel, a London socialite. Don’s long-lost sister Louise had also disappeared into the world, touring Eastern Europe in the company of rich, urbane men, although she too wrote occasionally; last anyone heard she’d emigrated to Central America in the 1980s and performed relief work on behalf of the archdiocese.

  Luther had taught Don to smoke in the summer of ’45 when the boy was fourteen. Luther was suffering through his third year of retirement from the military and picking at a book of poetry he’d been writing since WWI. The brass had sent him to pasture after a long run—the time was nigh for a fresh vision, younger, more ruthless men were needed; bastards even sneakier and more bloody-minded who could face the intricacies of a rapidly changing intelligence-gathering model. His wife, Vera, died the winter previous and the big house on the hill seemed cavernous with just the old man and grandson for inhabitants.

  Grandfather’s bitterness was tempered by a keen black humor, a refined, yet earthy, knack for self-deprecation that, in the final analysis, bolstered more than condemned. We’re ants. Not even ants. We’re gnats, kiddo. Don’t neglect your prayers. He’d chuckle his horrible, phlegmy chuckle and clap Don’s shoulder as if they were junior officers sharing a wry joke.

  They didn’t discuss family. Instead, they debated where Don should go to college, what he’d do for a profession. At the time, Don had his eye on Rogers and Williams with a mind toward oceanography. The reality became four years at Western Washington State and two more in Stanford and getting hitched to sweet Michelle in between. Luther footed what his three scholarships didn’t cover. Those summers with Granddad when school was out were from another life, but he recalled them with a clarity that frightened him.

  The weather was apocalyptic. Sluggish days framed by metallic skies and brown grass. Dog days of heat and flies. Flies crawled everywhere, buzzed inside light fixtures, made mountains of their corpses in the porcelain coverlets, clung as blue-green tapestries upon the ancient screens; humming a death drone.

  Luther sat on the porch during the worst, empty and half-empty glasses gleaming around his feet, the flowerbox above his head, scattered like tiers of candles in a medieval church. He slumped in the sweltering blue shade, chain-smoking and draining bottles of scotch without seeming effect, always dressed in a conservative suit, of which there were perhaps a dozen in his closet. He flipped his tie over his shoulder, eyes muddy behind thick-rimmed glasses. The Philco crackled from the living room, carrying fragments of baseball heroics through the screen door. He glowed in the dead light, a shade of himself, the dimming bell of a supernova. The steady fossilization had crept into his face, marbled the veins of his once delicate hands. Those hands had hardened into the knotty, blunt-fingered hands of the elderly, the spent.

  Don knew things about Grandfather, there were many things to know. Luther Miller was, in some murky era of prehistory, a minor legend. The massive house his own grandfather, Augustus, had built in the spring of 1878 was a repository and a testament of the rich mythology steeping the Miller lineage. Don had many occasions to examine the artifacts cluttering the study. Diplomas from Columbia and Princeton; yellowed certificates and dusty ribbons awarded by the U.S. Army. Besides the requisite family snapshots and wedding pictures, there were galleries of black and white photos of Luther as a whip-thin young man in an officer’s uniform set against exotic backdrops—ruined cathedrals and monasteries, crumbling plazas and pyramids, Old World markets, desert encampments and jungle fortifications, destroyers and camel trains. In these pictures everyone was burned by the sun, everyone smoked cigarettes, everyone was armed and smiling like movie stars between takes in a historical production. And a hundred more, until the photos merged into a camouflage pattern that gave him a headache and a profound sense of inferiority. Grandfather had done things, and in the doing the man himself was shaped and scarred, his blood thinned, his emotions rarefied.

  Luther didn’t say much about that part of his life either. He didn’t talk about his year in China as a liaison to the Shanghai Municipal Police, his affiliation with the likes of Fairbairn and Applegate who became close friends. Nor his missions in France during the First Great War, never spoke of the papers he had authored, the congressional reports he had participated in. If asked, he shrugged and told the curi
osity seeker that his life was archived in the Army record—look it up. And that particular statement was a fitting summation, in Don’s mind. Luther Miller was a ponderous, open book with some of the pages carefully removed, others encoded.

  That filthy, humid summer of ’45 was the summer of the bloody war in the Pacific that would end in the bloom of two new suns, the annihilation of innocence, even in savagery. Luther taught him to smoke by example. And once, when the old man was so drunk his speech became deadly precise, his movements the functions of an automaton, he instructed Don to dress sharp and they drove the Studebaker into Olympia. Luther gave him a tour of the State Capitol, introduced him to a smattering of men in Brooks Brothers suits and Rolexes and smelling of expensive after-shave. Important men who smiled and shook hands with Luther, addressed him almost reverently, turned beaming eyes and shark teeth bared in shark grins upon Don.

  Through it all, Luther smiled a windup smile Don found alien as the ice in dark canyons of the Antarctic, and called everyone by his or her first name. This ordeal lasted minutes, it lasted hours. When it was over and they were driving back into the hills, Luther, both hands locked on the wheel, asked what Don thought of the esteemed representatives of the people. After his grandson muttered whatever answer, Luther nodded without removing his eyes from the road and said, There is not enough rope on this wobbling ball of shit to hang those bastards. The conversation ended there.

  Don trudged back to the entrance. Night fastened upon the cemetery; lamps fizzed alight, mapping the perimeter. Again the breeze freshened, damp in his mouth. Branches groaned as if to promise, Go to your warm house and leave us here in the dark. Do not worry, friend, you will be back for a much longer visit one day.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Séance

  (Now)

  1.

  It grew late.