by Laird Barron
“What?”
“Bird watching, picnics, travelogue rubbish. Nothing interesting.” Don winced at the paucity of creativity in his fabrication. He couldn’t fathom his embarrassment. Michelle wasn’t particularly enamored of his rock collection or his treatises on glaciations, was she?
“Bird watching?” Kurt frowned. “This must be from one of Mom’s trips. Yeah, right here—Papua, New Guinea. Crng (Lynn. V) 10/83. What’s on it?”
“You’ve seen your mother’s slides. This is probably the same, but longer.”
“Ugh. The bloody slideshows; how soon we forget.” Kurt chucked the canister in with its mates. A couple minutes later, he whistled to Don. “Hey, Pop. Check this out.” He waved an envelope of photographs he’d discovered in one of Michelle’s waterproof belt pouches; the kind she carried when afoot in jungles and deserts. The pouch had been mixed up with the film canisters. “I was doing a wee bit of snooping when we were over last week. Win is so taken by Mom’s adventurous ways and I showed her some of the stuff she’d left here. Anyway, I came across these. See, these were taken in the ’30s or ’40s judging by the car there, and the house…”
Don accepted the photos; less than a dozen low quality black and white shots of the house with a Model T parked in the yard, and the barn a gray rectangle in the background. Other photographs featured pastorals: the field; the hill and stream; one from atop an elevated vantage in the valley. The last four were murky, overexposed—the dim interior of a forest revealed as an indistinct gallery of ghostly trunks; a pile of misshapen stones backlit by sunset; and two more of a person standing near the stones, facing the photographer, arms spread in a vee, a dark, indistinct object dangling from his or her left hand—a satchel, a sack, something lumpy. These last were shot in darkness at the edge of a bonfire. The figure was terribly out of focus; a blurry white cloud mottled in splotches of black.
“Aren’t these odd,” Don said, eyes widening as he realized the person was in the buff. Only flesh gave forth such a diffuse, moist glimmer. He checked the reverse; someone had written in faded ink: Crng Patricia W. 10/30/1937. He intensely disliked these pictures, and could tell Kurt felt the same. He slipped them into the envelope and put the envelope into his pocket for future perusal.
“Those rocks are familiar,” Kurt said, oddly excited. “When I was a kid. Holly and I got turned around in the woods. That’s where I saw them. In the woods.”
As Don recalled, those two had done more than gotten turned around: they’d been lost for nearly eight hours, wandering circles in the densely wooded hills where one hollow and briar patch soon resembled another. Luckily, they’d happened upon the creek and followed it home at roughly the time Don had gotten dressed to come hunting for them. They were ragged and dirty and traumatized, but essentially unscathed. The incident had become something of a family legend, although none of them spoke of it in recent years; a childhood experience Holly had grown resentful of and preferred to ignore—and pointedly suggested that others do the same.
“Pop, what about this? I found it last time I was here, took it home. Like I said—I was snooping. Occupational hazard.”
“Eh, what do you have?” Don adjust his glasses as Kurt reached into his jacket and produced a book and handed it over.
“It’s…actually, I’m not sure. Got me thinking, though.”
The book proved to be an almanac of some manner, quite slender, its black cover embossed with a cryptic broken ring in crimson bronze. Don loathed and dreaded it on sight, was instantly repulsed such that he took an involuntary backward step and nearly fell. He’d seen this symbol. Lord knew where, for the details remained obscured in the muck and mire of his porous recollection, yet branded with a white hot current into his gray matter and muscle memory.
You’ve most definitely seen it, chum. Here? No, not here. Not here— elsewhere, in a book, at a gallery, a film… He doubted the memory spawned from any of the schlock cinema he’d so loved; this was too raw, too visceral.
It wasn’t pleasant to contemplate the mysterious circumstances of his prior encounter with the broken ring, the skeleton of a demon Ouroboros. Grappling with the fact his brain increasingly resembled Swiss cheese each passing day hurt like hell; grasping the notion that this rune had meant something once, probably during his adventurous youth, and that it had frightened him, cowed him, was worse. Don Miller didn’t consider himself as a particularly brave man in his dotage; nonetheless, he’d possessed more than his share of grit in the old days. If this mounting sensation of terror had taken root back then, dear lord, what could it mean?
He clenched his teeth and opened the book. The title page said Morderor de Calginis with a notation this was the fifth printing, 1959, and authored by Divers Hands. The pages were thin and pulpy and contained endless tiny monospaced font paragraphs detailing queer and unusual locations across Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. In the appendices were numerous occult diagrams and hand-scrawled maps. The Black Guide, was the rough translation from Latin. He rolled it on his tongue and it tasted bitterly familiar as an epithet. The Black Guide.
Abruptly, and with the galvanizing force of an electrical current zapping him, a piece of memory returned. Michelle bought the almanac at a shop in Enumclaw, tickled by its novelty. The family was on vacation for the summer. He couldn’t remember if they’d actually tried to track down any of the listed sites. It seemed probable, but the specific details evaporated as he strained to dredge them. There was more to dig up, more to unearth. He snapped the almanac shut and tossed it aside. He wiped his hands on his pants, rubbing at an invisible taint that had already seeped into his blood, already spread a chill through him.
“Pop, what’s the matter?”
“Hmm? Nothing, Son. Too much blood to the ol’ brainpan. Stuffy, isn’t it?”
“There’s some really nutty entries in there. I read part of one on the Valley; typeset about split my skull, though. Gonna need glasses as thick as yours. Some of it is explicit and kinda hokey. Other parts, not so much. Raised the hair on my neck. The Waddell Valley chapter mentioned a house and a rock, but only in passing. The Sanguine Stone. Have to look up the name of the house; something to do with children. Damndest thing, too. It’s supposed to be within a few miles of here.”
“The other shoe droppeth. Your motives become clear. Helping me clean, the camping trip…”
“C’mon, Pop. Don’t be like that.”
“Children, huh?”
“Yeah,” Kurt said and rubbed his chin. “House of the children of old leaves…Nah, that’s not it, but close. Damndest thing, though. I swear to shit it’s impossible to locate entries in there after you close the thing. Like they move around.”
“Uh, well, some of the worst typesetting I’ve ever seen. Should use a magnifying glass when you read it.”
Kurt said, “Right. I’m hungry as a bear. When do we eat?”
Don fixed ham sandwiches while Kurt lugged the boxes downstairs and out to the barn. They rested on the porch and smoked cigarettes. Late afternoon had already come sweeping down from the Black Hills and the breeze was chilly. He cast sidelong glances at his son. Conversation was always difficult, points of commonality sparse and shallow. He considered relating his previous night’s adventures and couldn’t summon the energy to bear the incredulous response, the lecture about living so far removed from civilization that loneliness had surely begun to play tricks on his mind.
“Mom call you yet?”
“No,” Don said too quickly, eager for any bridge. “She gets involved in sightseeing, or what have you, and forgets, I think. I might not hear from her until she flies back.”
“Jesus, Dad. Next thing you know it’ll be separate beds.”
“Well, she does snore…”
Kurt took a deep pull from his bottle of beer. His eyes were slits, focused on the field, the flattening grass, dry as baked straw. Don realized Kurt had drunk the six-pack with mechanical efficiency.
Don also stared into th
e field. He remembered Kurt in kindergarten, their first summer here; he’d raced into the field, charged headlong into a hole hidden by that tall grass. Minutely serrated edges of grass blades dug a trench across the last three fingers of his left hand as he tried to brace against pitching on his face. Kurt had staggered back to Don and Michelle, blood leaking from his fist. They drove to the clinic, the one that used to be on Prine Road but had been bulldozed and replaced by a mini-mart liquor store. Kurt got stitched by Doc Green, two or three dozen and he didn’t shed a tear. He observed the operation with the innocent fascination peculiar to most children of that age. Don noticed Kurt make a fist now as he stared bleakly at the undulating grass. “Okay, then. Ready for round two?”
They cleaned up in silence and went back to work.
That evening, they ate hamburgers for supper and watched John Wayne in The Fighting Seabees until nearly one in the morning. The television was a beast; a home entertainment center in a long box, an oversized coffin, complete with a Philco radio and record player. He and Michelle picked it out from the Sears catalogue in 1971 and they’d recently gotten an adapter when the FCC decreed all old sets had to be digitally compliant. A couple of burly Italian gentlemen had originally brought the set in a van and spent the better part of two hours maneuvering it through the house and into the parlor on a dolly. Afterward, Michelle made a pitcher of ice tea and little cocktail sandwiches and they all sat around and watched Leave It To Beaver. Don had spent many a sleepless night sacked out at the foot of that behemoth. He drank a cup of tea and soaked his aching feet in a pan of water with mineral salts and fell instantly asleep.
He dreamt of becoming lost in the dark woods, of being chased by children with knives, of stumbling through the trees and falling among rocks piled high in a clearing, of lying helpless as a turtle on its back as the sun boiled red and dripped away into blackness.
In the morning, he heated coffee while the floors were yet cold and starlight leaked through the window. He warmed milk in a saucepan for Thule, who waited patiently beneath the table, his long pink tongue nearly dragging. Don hunched at the table and studied the photographs. He didn’t like them any better than before, and even less when he considered their at least tangential relation to The Black Guide. Eventually, he stuffed them into the envelope and dropped it into a drawer and set to fixing breakfast.
5.
Monday, Labor Day, was more of the same. They began at daylight and quit only when darkness stole over the land.
Kurt collapsed on the couch during the ten P.M. news and fell asleep with his mouth hanging open. Don left the television on for white noise, not tuning in to whatever atrocity the media had fastened on today. He idly rued the fact he’d lost track of current events—on the domestic front, he was aware of the current president, but had not a clue what the man’s policies were; when it came to foreign events, he was marooned on a lee shore. If pressed, he seriously doubted his ability to quote the latest big ticket crises; he couldn’t even name the current Canadian prime minister. The whole political mess, the universal squalor, the essential pettiness of mankind oppressed him and he’d submerged himself in work and writing and books.
When the late show started, Don rose and went to Michelle’s study. He hadn’t exactly planned to bust in. The day’s events had effected a sea change in him that eluded definition. He thought of Bluebeard’s young bride, of locked doors and dire warnings, and smiled feebly. The image of Michelle as Bluebeard was far less amusing than it might’ve seemed.
The door was locked; not to bar Don, who knew better than to disturb her things, but from ingrained habit of raising nosy, destructive children. Fortunately, he knew she kept the key in a decorative dish full of antique and foreign currency such as Buffalo nickels and rupees. It had been a while since he last entered the study. He’d probably ventured inside less than a dozen times since they began spending summers at the house. Michelle discouraged it, claiming it as a sanctuary. She professed fear her unorthodox filing system (scattered papers and open texts everywhere) would be disrupted by a careless intrusion.
The room was large and stuffy in the manner of chamber a 17th century historian might’ve called home. Ceremonial spears and knives, and pink sandstone figurines of Brahma, Shiva and the celestial court contributed to the East Asian and British-India motifs. Michelle tried to hang one giant wooden fertility mask specific to an Aboriginal tribe deep in the Australian Outback over their headboard until Don emphatically put his foot down; there it stood, canted in shadow, grinning terribly behind a wicker shield. She’d developed a love for Aboriginal art in recent years; she accumulated carvings and etchings, figurines of skinny, cadaverous Dreamtime spirits, an authentic didgeridoo (despite it being verboten among the tribes for a woman to play the instrument), and a boomerang cut from light, lacquered wood.
Leather and clothbound tomes weighted floor-to-ceiling shelves, overflowed her desk, a relic she’d imported from the British Consulate in Indonesia, which had in turn recovered it from a local museum that specialized in artifacts from the days of the East India Company, and it might very well have originally furnished the office of a company governor. Also upon the desk were a skull, an hourglass full of white sand, and a laptop; paper weights and inkwells, a calligraphy kit in a teak box, and cubes of sealing wax. Maps and parchment cascaded amid the piles of books.
The majority of the documents were scribed in Greek, German, and Latin. Michelle collected scholarly papers much as her aunt had collected dolls; a substantial portion of the material was purchased from European libraries and churches and private dealers; the remainder were transcriptions she endeavored during her spare moments. He was struck simultaneously with childish wonder and claustrophobia, the latter sensation serving to fend his natural curiosity more than Michelle’s mild neuroses could’ve managed.
He ran his hand over the spines of Michelle’s books, brushing fine dust from them, studying the titles, albeit randomly, uncertain why he’d chosen to snoop among her belongings, or what he expected to find. Most of it proved to be the usual fare: thoroughly pedestrian texts, a goodly deal of which he’d personally acquired for her, such as The Golden Bough. Then there were the books Michelle had secured during her travels; primarily accounts by obscure (to Don, at any rate) anthropologists and daring explorers regarding remote expeditions to jungle tribes, replete with illustrations and the occasional photograph. Nonetheless, the majority of the books came with the house; these latter comprised fragments of the celebrated Mock collection. According to Michelle, Aunt Babette’s portion, for example, rivaled the archives of a city library.
He’d counted seventeen encyclopedias in five different languages, and two hundred textbooks of varied subjects that ranged from architecture to metallurgy. There was a lesser sampling of esoteric manuscripts detailing occult practices and theory by authors of formidable stature. Among them, Dee’s Liber Loagaeth and De Heptarchia Mystica; and Trithemius’s Steganographia; and a smattering of other masters, the likes of Agrippa, de Plancy, and Mathers. Don dabbled in comparative religion and European folklore as an undergraduate, had taken semi-permanent residence in off-campus bookstores and antiquarian shops—this morbid preoccupation with the macabre and the uncanny served as a useful counterbalance to his overwhelmingly rationalist bent, plus, it impressed the hell out of Michelle, who was quite scandalous when it came to reading habits. On the other hand, he suspected such hoary tomes might be a contributing factor to his nyctophobia.
Spread across one wall and a portion of a bookcase was Michelle’s great genealogical map in progress; a colossal mosaic consisting of dozens of parchment scrolls taped together at the edges. The Mock family tree branched and forked and branched again like multitudinous veins radiating from a burst capillary, the whole of this diagram taller than Don and twice as wide. Quite obviously the ongoing project of successive generations, it began in quill and was illegible to Don’s eye, what with bleeding ink and moisture and mold discolorations, and, not the lea
st of which, the fact it vacillated between various foreign dialects. Also, despite the enormous amount of labor, it seemed raw and incomplete; many of the branches and tributaries dwindled to dead ends and question marks. Michelle had checkered its width and breadth with pushpins and sticky notes.
To supplement her drafting, she had stacked ten or eleven books of the Mock family history on a worktable and nearby stools. These dense, leathery tomes belonged to a nineteen-volume series normally tucked in a corner behind a low stand surmounted by a flock of stuffed Canadian geese. The books were products of exemplary craftsmanship. A number of her ancestors had earned livings as printers and lithographers, including several of moderate renown; a handful served at the courts of French and Spanish Kings, and, according to legend, the Vatican itself during the latter days of the Renaissance. These nineteen volumes purportedly documented the Mock lineage and historical accomplishments, warts and all, and would constitute the primary source of Michelle’s genealogical inquiry.
He asked her once if she intended to write a book; this exasperated query came on the heels of a particularly unpleasant summer wherein she’d locked herself into the study and refused to come forth for days at a stretch, leaving to him the housework, the bills, the raging bundles of hormones the twins had metamorphosed into when Mom and Pop weren’t paying attention. Haggard and ill-tempered, she snapped something to the effect he was a blockhead. You are a Goddamned blockhead, was how she put it, in fact. He agreed with the correctness of her assessment; however, this in no way explained the nature of her obsession, nor mitigated her dereliction of duty. She’d given him a long, wintry look, the coldest he’d ever received prior or since. Then she said, Leave a girl her secrets, Don. And he had; although neither of them were kids at the time of the exchange—Kurt and Holly were seniors and already had their letters of acceptance to college. Don pretended disinterest in his wife’s endeavor; a disinterest that became more or less reality as the years rolled by and they settled into their respective roles with clearly delineated boundaries. Accommodation had ever been a cornerstone of wedded bliss.