by Laird Barron
“And…that’s it. I handed in my resignation the next day. Didn’t give two weeks, which royally pissed off Coolidge. Nelly dropped me like a hot rock and went steady with one of the defensive linemen, not that I cared at that point. I had nightmares until Thanksgiving and would come to in the middle of the night with the cold sweats. Don’t think I got more than four hours sleep an evening during that stretch.”
3.
Lying awake later that night, Don stared into the dark. Michelle snorted and mumbled; Thule curled on the bed at their feet, a ninety-pound lump. The dog twitched and moaned with each flash of lightning, each crack of thunder rolling down the valley. Blue-white pops and sizzles illuminated the room, sent bony shadows of tree branches raking across the ceiling, across the bedcovers and Michelle’s humped form; spectral claws intent upon peeling back the sheets to have at sweaty, naked flesh. Don counted between the stroke and the clash—one, two, three, BOOM! The jar of water on the dresser vibrated, and his dentures bobbed, distorted in the momentary glare. At least the rain had slackened and the wind died down to intermittent gusts.
His joints throbbed and he contemplated taking another pill to quiet the pain. Instead, he flopped over to spoon with Michelle. She smelled strongly of night sweat and something deeper; a dank, earthy taint that caused him to recoil and breathe through his mouth. Her hand clamped his forearm, an unconscious gesture. Her flesh was cold, like a fish left to smother on a wet clay bank, a pike hoisted from the depths of a northern lake.
He lay there and held his breath, listening hard to the night sounds, the creaking timbers, the faint, mournful jangle of wind chimes smacking against clapboard. Someone giggled in another room; the laughter drifted through the vent and reminded him of the twins as toddlers whispering their plots and schemes. A frog croaked just outside the window, perhaps trapped in the lee of a dormer, its complaints joined by a dim chorus from the yard among the weeds and the shelter of the magnolias; a gloomy litany, magnified somehow by the acoustics of the storm. The frogs seemed disturbed of late, didn’t they? Perhaps, like dogs, they sensed impending disasters. Mice skittered in the secret hollows of the walls and Don wondered if they should get a cat, then he was asleep.
4.
The storm front passed through before dawn and sunrise lighted the bedroom in pinks and blues. Don could not remember his dreams, but knew they’d been rough from the bags under his eyes when he shaved. His hands quivered with exhaustion and he nicked himself three times and had to stick bits of toilet paper to his face to stem the blood. Making up the bed, he discovered a muddy handprint on his pillow and clods of dirt in the sheets. He frowned and stripped the sheets and dropped them in the linen basket.
A chorus of exclamations brought him downstairs in a hurry. It seemed Kurt had gone sleepwalking during the night—probably in response to the filthy weather and his reliving that decidedly unnerving tale. This happened to him as an adolescent; he occasionally woke up in the closet or the pantry, or the attic. This time he wound up in the greenhouse, sprawled between the tomatoes and the squash. Michelle had stumbled into the kitchen to get an early start on breakfast preparations and discovered the back door ajar.
Kurt didn’t have an explanation and decided he must’ve tripped and knocked himself in the head; a lump swelled over his right ear and he’d received a number of scrapes. Worst of all, a damned rat had bitten him in the hand and arm—nasty punctures, too. That meant X-rays, tetanus and rabies shots and the unhappy revelation rodents had invaded the green house. Don scratched his head over that one. He hadn’t seen any rats around. They were obviously lurking in the cellar or the barn prior to this incursion. Oh, well, while Kurt was getting the needle, Don would nip over to the hardware store and purchase rat traps and poison.
As the others mobilized to pack Kurt into the Rover for a hospital visit—except for Argyle, who sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee with liberal dollops of whiskey—Don grabbed his plaid coat off the hook and noticed that the cellar door hung open by a couple of inches, revealing a wedge of musty darkness. He resented the chill that ran through him, reduced him to a cub scout shivering before the campfire, and slammed the door with his hip on the way out.
Everything turned out okay—Kurt claimed to have heeded the call of nature in the predawn hours, although he must’ve been inebriated because he couldn’t put together what had happened to him after he ascended the stairs. Don, who’d spent ten minutes running around frantically searching for the car keys, until he stuck his hand in his pocket and found them, sympathized completely.
Don saw Michelle to the SeaTac airport on the Wednesday before Labor Day weekend. By his calculations he would be home alone with Thule and the mice for the better part of seven weeks. Luckily, his mornings and early afternoons were full with the panels and the seminars at the Museum, and though he inherently despised the insufferably dull nature of these activities, they provided a respite from his recent bouts of nerves, his spikes of nyctophobia and short-term memory loss.
Don’s memory was faulty during normal operating hours, but his dreams were an entirely different matter. Though these dreams evaporated within a few minutes of waking, while in progress they unspooled in Technicolor with a grainy, yet vibrant and coherent inexorability that forced his mind’s eye to rewind and play events from the ancient past.
On the night Michelle left for Turkey, Don drank some white wine that had languished in the cabinet for the gods only knew how long—the bottle label had peeled away. It was Kurt’s tale of teenage terror, the gangly apparition at the department store that triggered Don’s own dream, perhaps. Whatever the cause, he dropped like a stone into a deep slumber and his consciousness was whisked back to 1980.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Exhibit in the Mountain House
(1980)
1.
Don surfaced from a nightmare of drowning in the dark, and realized somebody had called his name from the far bank as he drifted the Yukon in his leaky old Zodiac raft.
He glanced around somewhat wildly—had he even heard another human voice? This was deep, dark wilderness, miles from the nearest native village, much less the summer cabins or suburbs of white men. He was also drunk off his ass. Seemed as if he’d been floating forever and anyway it was during the Luminous Period so all bets were off. Time was nebulous. Time glowed, trailed sparks.
He would not feel better on the return flight to Olympia. Looking down at the busted skulls of nameless ranges, his thoughts were lizard-thoughts. The DC-10 bucked and flexed while he peered through foggy glass at the interminable sweep of prehistoric America and pondered how it resembled the folds and cockles of a calcified brain. Black Hills Dakota was the legendary heart of the world. This, then, the utter north, could be the brain of the world. Forward arc of the Ring of Fire, Land of Ten Thousand Smokes.
For now, he flickered between the plane and the raft, future and present; between nursing a brandy over the black and white wasteland, and sprawling shit-faced at the bottom of a raft, gawking across the flat muddy expanse of river to a sheer bank and its fence of cottonwood trees.
The park service boys had warned him about restless natives back at Kyntak Landing. A Gold Rush mining outpost crumbled into a historical asterisk, Kyntak Landing was comprised of a Quonset hut, a handful of outbuildings and a radio tower in the foothills of the Brooks Range. Alaska had its share of these relics; graveyards of the Frontier spirit.
The rangers suggested in not too gentle terms Don was looking to get his head blown off. The veteran of the pair, the one who did the talking, said some of the locals held a grudge that went all the way back to the days of Seward. The man doubtless knew what he was talking about, he appeared at least a quarter native himself. He couldn’t grasp what possessed anyone to raft from the Yukon headwaters 1200 miles to the Canadian border if not for hunting or shooting nature photographs.
Don didn’t carry a rifle or a camera. Didn’t have much more than traveling clothes and a Navy sea bag jamme
d with C rations, a case of Wild Turkey and a genuine leather flask of rye straight from his pal Argyle Arden’s bathtub back in Olympia. He declined to mention the plastic baggie of peyote buttons tucked in his shirt pocket under the pack of Winston 100s. Another of Argyle’s essential survival kit items. Don, my lad, if you wanna vision quest, here’s your ticket. As the kids said in our day, Happy trails, muthafuckah! Neither did he inform them that he’d spent some months among the Yukon tribes, back when he was doing grad work, and knew a thing or two about the unpleasant side of Alaskan race relations firsthand.
Was he an experienced outdoorsman? He’d hiked canyons in New Mexico with a burro looking for copper veins; he’d gone camping in the Cascades a few weekends as a kid. He’d inherited several boxes of Field and Stream from his granddad. He knew how to use a John Wayne, so he figured his bases were covered.
Is it a dare, Mr. Miller? You out to prove something?
Don chuckled and promised them it wasn’t a dare, wasn’t a suicide ploy, nothing like that. Maybe a midlife crisis come five or six years early. He needed space, needed room to breathe, needed to sort some things out. A fellow couldn’t ask for much more space than the interior of the Land of the Midnight Sun.
The rangers grimly dusted their tall hats and left him to his own devices, promised to send word to the family if and when he disappeared.
Actually, it was a dare, at least in part. He was here because he made a list once—the Twelve Labors. Granddad had commanded him to write down a dozen things he wanted to accomplish before he died. The Do or Die List. Granddad had been keen on that sort of thing, did the very same himself, only instead of screwing Debbie Harry and navigating the Yukon it was making love to Louise Brooks and climbing Mount Everest. Granddad had gone after thirty-plus years of twilight decline; then he got the twenty-one gun salute, Old Glory folded into a sandwich wedge and presented to his dry-eyed daughter, the obligatory sendoff in the Daily O.
So here Don floated, on a sabbatical from his job as a managing consultant at Pacific Geo, as it were, assuming one could take a break from doing basically nothing and go on vacation, getting piss-drunk and living out number twelve on a list of childish feats of derring-do that only grew exponentially fanciful should he happen to survive the current enterprise. Trying to impress a dead man when he didn’t even believe in ghosts, trying to exorcise demons when God was the least of his manifold fears.
The first night out he beached on a gravel bar, made a bonfire from deadwood, and uncapped the Wild Turkey. He saved the good stuff, the genuine moonshine, for later. This was autumn in Alaska and the nights got bitter when the light finally gave up the ghost. He sat wrapped in an army blanket, slugging his booze and watching the stars burn coldly in the gulf.
His dreams were torments, full of fire and demons and reed music.
Next, there was a fuzzy period where he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t keep his eyelids fastened for more than a few seconds. Newtonian law was intermittently enforced, it faded in and out like a degrading radio signal. Euclidian geometry became elastic to say the least. He hallucinated natives in war bonnets stalking him from the bank. He hallucinated cottonwood logs were Nile crocs waiting for him to dip his grimy hand in the cold water. He hallucinated a spider dangled beneath the blurry white sun on a strand of razor wire. The wind whispered in an old baby’s voice even when the air was still as lead. The wind’s voice tickled and crooned in his bones, subsonic, subatomic. The deepest cavern in the world is the human heart.
The Luminous Period.
Luminous was the entertainment industry argot of the month, the watchword for that which was all style and no substance. Prose was luminous. Film was luminous. The river, grey as a quivering lung, was luminous grey. Don suspected his brain was grey too. He didn’t know if it was luminous; sure as hell felt like it quivered with every throb of the pulse in his temple.
Alongside stark weather and mosquitoes, a man can expect bad dreams, nightmares perhaps. He knew there was a season for everything. He admitted himself as being foolhardy, but Mother hadn’t whelped a fool, had she?
Certainly a man could expect bad dreams and even nightmares when he’d been swilling homemade rotgut hooch from a leather flask like the old boys in coonskin caps did it in the 1840s. A white man was letting himself in for danger floating down the Yukon River in a rubber raft, a leaky Zodiac; drinking dirty whiskey and sucking peyote buttons and it was no wonder he had dreams that weren’t exactly bedtime stories. When they fractured at the point of consciousness he would be hurled from the saddle, rouse to the slosh of bilge water, the omnipresent nothingness that permeated the atmosphere like white static.
Problem was, as the trip progressed he couldn’t always be certain when reality ended and dreams began, couldn’t be certain at any given moment whether or not he’d crossed that thin black line. Couldn’t stop drinking the firewater or eating the devil plants.
The motor dead as three o’clock and he wasn’t particularly concerned. He was sliding toward the sea; King Arthur sans horns, hounds, or the epic pyre. He wasn’t sure how to classify his condition. A midlife crisis? Too bad, so sad it hadn’t manifested as a yen for a Jaguar and a fling with a nubile secretary half his age.
He didn’t give a damn about fancy cars, or manly adventures, not even this one, really. As for nubile young women, well, as he’d muttered a time or two during his long marriage—I didn’t go blind when I put on the ring, baby! That said, Michelle was the only woman for him. God knew, he could barely handle her. The idea of an affair was laughable, exhausting, depressing, and knowing Michelle as he did, scary.
She’d inhabited his dreams the past two nights. A younger version of herself from college days that truly wasn’t much different on the surface from the woman of fifty. Michelle was possessed of an ageless charm reminiscent of great classical beauties such as Sophia Loren, Jacqueline Bisset, or Elizabeth Taylor. Her skin remained flawless and taut, her hair sleek and dark as the proverbial raven’s wing. For her, age burned from the inside. Gazing into her eyes, there was no mistaking her for a naïve girl. He wasn’t entirely sure that such a girl ever existed.
He’d met Michelle Mock in the spring of 1950. This was during their junior year at university. Don’s classmate and best friend Custer Bane was pursuing a coed majoring in sculpture and she’d invited him to a show in the Ballard neighborhood; a house near the water, currently rented by a professor named Louis Plimpton, a man Don would come to know quite well. At that juncture, he was just another faceless instructor Don had heard speak once and estimated as dry as the chalk he scratched on the board. Custer explained that Professor Plimpton was a scientist, but had eclectic sensibilities when it came to art and culture. Scuttlebutt was the prof dipped his toe into all kinds of exotic sensations.
In any event, Custer needed a wingman, and so Don rode across town in the fellow’s jalopy along with four other guys from school. Somebody passed around a bottle of vodka and the lot of them were toasted and singing bawdy roadhouse ditties when they piled from the car and descended on the wine and cheese event.
Don remembered the clapboard house being dark as a pit, illuminated by candles and a couple of paper lamps tinted red like a boardwalk brothel. Many of the windows were blocked with plywood; stars glinted through a hole in the roof. There was a cold hearth, some rickety furniture, and a natty couple entwined on the couch. A man in a dinner jacket slouched in a doorway. A glass of absinthe dangled from his left hand. He grinned and patted Don’s cheek, pointed him toward the bead curtain and a claustrophobia-inducing stairwell that led to the real party.
The basement was a labyrinth of subdivided cubbyholes and closets, exposed pipes and chipped cement; cobwebs and dust and lots of shadows, and an overwhelming smell of mildew. The guests, a mix of college kids and their off-campus pals and some creepy-types that gravitated to such spectacles, had gathered in a long, skinny L-shaped section to admire a handful of wax sculptures and oil and charcoal paintings that resembled lousy Pi
casso imitations. A flautist sat cross-legged on a mat and played. The air was heavy with smoke from the candles and cigarettes.
Professor Plimpton stood at the heart of the gathering next to a display of rusted bedsprings, wax drippings, and copper tubing with his arms clasped behind his back. A short, wiry man in a blue suit. He kept his gray hair tied in a pony tail. He ignored the trio of undergraduate supplicates arrayed before him and nodded at Don. His smile was quick and sharp; much sharper than the softness of his features or voice would indicate. “Young master Miller. Glad you could tear yourself away from the quarry.”
Don was exactly buzzed enough to second-guess his own recollection—they hadn’t met, had they? He grinned noncommittally at the professor and waved the way a man does from a speeding car, or from the deck of a boat to acquaintances on the shore.
“We meet again,” a beautiful girl in a mohair sweater said to Don, her breasts flattened against his shoulder as she leaned in to fix him with her dark, dark eyes. Those eyes belonged to a much older, more worldly soul than fresh-faced Michelle Mock, however precocious she might’ve been in stodgy 1950.
A magical moment, in a black way. It was as if they’d known each other forever. Don was neck deep in trouble before he even opened his mouth to stammer his name. She smiled and held his hand and said she already knew, they’d taken a philosophy class together. He didn’t believe it—surely he’d remember sitting in a room with this gorgeous woman, and she grinned in a sexy, feral manner and said maybe she’d worn glasses and a sweater.
“I blend in when I want to,” she said. “I’m the hidden figure in the grotesque of a tapestry. Look closely and I’m the one sitting in the background under a tree, naked, drinking from a horn.”