by Laird Barron
No martinis for Don. The day-shift bartender, a hulking bruiser named Vern, took one look at his pale, sweaty face and mixed tomatoes, lime and ice in a shaker and had the waitress deliver it to his booth with a complimentary plate of gourmet crackers. Ronnie threw back his shaggy head and laughed good-naturedly at Don’s misery; he ordered an import beer and a Caesar salad (God knew why he bothered, the boys nicknamed him Cub on account of his behemoth pear-shaped torso and copious patches of wiry black hair that grew wild and the fact he packed enough lard to hibernate) and plunged into an earnest monologue regarding the latest remote sensing device, a prototype model designed by some firm in Norway, and he was practically salivating about the possibilities. Don nodded and smiled noncommittally and thought about the government men, the spooks, who’d braced him at the reception.
What was it with all this recent weirdness? Montoya (and why was that name so familiar?), Cooye, Bronson Ford, and Louis? Poor Louis. So much for the story about a coronary conclusion, although one wit said long ago that the ultimate cause of all death was heart failure. He sipped his hangover antidote and tried not to worry where it was leading, or how Michelle might be involved. Grandpa, that secretive coot, had loved her dearly. Don paused now to speculate whether it was the out-to-pasture spymaster in him that responded to her so well.
What if Frick and Frack were right? Everybody knows Sinatra worked for the CIA on his road shows. Michelle travels to a lot of dicey places on her little special visa. It’s the perfect cover for an operative. Goddamn those guys for putting such moronic suspicions in his head.
For dessert, he passed an envelope full of aerial photographic plates to Ronnie and watched with guarded interest as the bearded man unclipped his glasses from his shirt pocket. Nine plates were a sequence depicting Plimpton’s farmhouse shot via satellite, or so Don assumed, but they lacked time signatures and that was odd, very odd indeed. The photos zoomed in by a magnitude of ten, and the final image reduced the peak roof to X-ray transparency and captured Plimpton on his bed, revolver to his temple, face contorted as if he were shrieking.
The tenth through twelfth pictures tracked a car on a winding coastal highway. The final shot was a dramatic overhead zoom, another muddy X-ray that dissolved the cab and caught a man staring up at the camera which could’ve only been mere inches from his gaping mouth. Ronnie shuffled them repeatedly and that was obviously no help. His jaw tightened and he squinted in confusion.
“So, what do you make of them?” Don said. Ronnie had served in the Navy as a communications specialist; it seemed worth a shot.
“You want my opinion? I mean—Jesus. Military satellite? Does NASA have anything like this?”
“Dunno what else they could be.” Yes, Don was an expert in the field of high tech imaging, although that expertise hardly extended to more clandestine or esoteric applications.
“But this material. What the hell—swear to God it’s synthetic parchment…” Ronnie flexed a plate between his hands. “You can roll it into a tube, cantcha? Whoa.”
Don was equally mystified. He’d certainly never encountered any photographic print on the order of this stuff that flexed and deformed like a weird, Nuclear Age vellum. He said, “Sure, sure. We got eyes in the sky that can snap a picture of your driver’s license from twenty miles up. Infrared; ultraviolet; electromagnetic; X-ray; and so on. These photos could’ve been taken from an orbital spy sat, I suppose.”
“Unless they’re fakes. I mean—they gotta be fakes.”
“I wish.” If the plates were forgeries Don hadn’t been able to deconstruct their artifice via training or equipment. He concluded what they depicted was horribly authentic.
“Jesus, H. Do you know these guys?” Ronnie glared at the shots of Louis and Cooye in their final moments of extremis. “Where’d you get these anyway?”
“They said I couldn’t tell anybody or they’d roll ’em in a carpet.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. Look, a couple of spooks cornered me this weekend. Cloak and dagger to the hilt. My guess is that these plates are a warning. I can’t figure their angle—”
“Watch your butt. Sounds like shysters. You see ID? No ID, then who knows. Couple of conmen running a scam.”
“Do me a favor. You still tight with that guy on Whidbey Island?”
“Ferrar? Yeah.”
“Maybe you could get him to run an analysis for me.”
“I’ll give him a call—but I bet my ass he’ll want a look at this radical shit.” Ronnie meticulously slipped everything into the envelope, held it in his giant hands with something like reverence.
The men finished lunch and drifted back to the office, promising to keep in touch over the next few days before separating to follow their routines.
Don’s punishment descended near quitting time when Wayne appeared at his door with a carefully smooth expression and informed him that he’d be flying to the Peninsula in the morning alongside an impromptu team consisting of a lawyer, a medical doctor and an architect. Some kind of difficulty with mapping the mountainous region for mineral deposits.
AstraCorp was commissioned to record seismic data, take water and mineral samples, the usual. The camp was rugged and the crew a notoriously surly bunch, but the wrap-up would only require two or three days—a week tops, ha-ha. Sorry about the last-minute notice, but you know how these things sneak up, right, right? By the way, didn’t Don minor in psychology back in the days of the dinosaurs? Don explained that he’d taken a course in abnormal psychology related to the stresses inherent in remote wilderness and subterranean operations conducted over lengthy durations. And as his boss absorbed this, Don said, “This is all rather mysterious, isn’t it, Wayne?”
Wayne rolled his eyes and blustered that consultants were a continual pain in his ass—just do your job and keep a sock in your pie hole, thank you.
Don didn’t bother to react, simply shrugged and gathered his papers, left an hour early to drive home and pack. He tried to summon the conversation with the agents in Spokane; they’d expressed a hell of a lot of interest in the Slango operation, and here he was a few days later, heading there for an in-person visit. The coincidence bothered him.
He stalked into the farmhouse, what he couldn’t help but consider Michelle’s house, loosening his tie with mounting frustration, spied young master Kurt, home from college classes, flopped on the couch, plugged into a cassette player and reading a Heavy Metal magazine with a fancifully-endowed cartoon princess on the cover. Potato chip wrappers and empty pop cans littered his area, crumbs and puddles sprinkled the coffee table. Don guessed he’d actually skipped university for the day and hopped a ride with one of his degenerate upperclassmen friends, of which it seemed he possessed locust hordes. Don didn’t bother to upbraid him; he gritted his teeth and went upstairs to undress, shower and gobble aspirin.
Clad in socks and shorts, he sat on the unmade bed, listlessly tracking the slant of heavy red light through the circle window, how it transfigured the knots in the paneling to frozen eyes, the imperfections in plaster to howling mouths, hollowed cheekbones and teeth. His gaze traveled to a framed portrait of a smiling woman in aviator glasses. Dear Mum back when she looked the part of an MGM silent film starlet. An ancient picture, because the boyish iteration of Dad lurked at the edge of the frame—a fuzzy smirk and half-raised hand, bare-chested like a marble cast of Hercules made flesh. A murderous Adonis with Sphinx eyes, on loan to the United States Army Rangers despite his natural proclivity toward the sciences. In those days, Dad had been more interested in meeting new and fascinating people and then killing them. Cheerio, mates. Need someone shot, guvnah? Don beheld a stranger wearing a familiar face. What didn’t you tell me, Pop? Why did you have to go mad and get yourself shot to pieces? And Gramps, you grizzled old sonofabitch, how dirty was your laundry anyhow? Nanking, what the hell were you doing in Nanking?
Holly called as he was moping before the mirror, taking gloomy stock of his stretch marks and graying chest
hair. He had to run for the phone in the hall. After the operator connected them and ascertained Don would accept the charges, Holly said, “Mom there?” It was a lousy connection. Music honked and bleated in the background. His precious Holly was seldom far from a pub and its gallery of dashing riff-raff, folk-rock singers and beret-wearing activists.
“Hi, honey. How’s France treating you?”
“Yeah, hi, Don. It’s Glasgow—didn’t you get my card? Mom there?” Her accent was decidedly cosmopolitan; she sounded exactly like a BBC broadcast woman who announced special foreign news bulletins.
“She’s at work, as I’m sure you’re aware, honey.”
“Huh. I called the university earlier.” Doubtless she had called multiple times—Holly interrupted her mother’s work at least thrice weekly to report on current events or petition for more cash. It was endemic of her pathology.
“Ah, I dunno then. Everything okay?”
“What?” Her voice elevated in competition with the riotous music. Highlands metal.
“Anything wrong?”
“No! Everything’s great! Tell Mom I’ll try again tonight!”
“Love ya.” The line had already died. Don threw the phone against the wall; it burst into several satisfyingly jagged pieces that might’ve been chunks of Big Wayne’s skull in a happier world. He pulled on a shirt. He scooped the remains of the phone into the wastebasket and idly pondered the best way to keep this faux pas from his hawkish wife. He immediately discarded the notion. She knew all.
Michelle rumbled in, equally pissed at the world. Something about a woman working in a man’s field and how academia in general and anthropology in particular could use a nice purgative. Her mood had been savage since they’d returned from the trip to Spokane. She went straight to the liquor cabinet and fixed a drink and sulked at the kitchen table. Don pecked her cheek on his way to making a sandwich and casually mentioned that he’d be flying out of town for the better part of a week. She shrugged and smoked a cigarette, flicking ashes into her empty glass. She only perked up when he mentioned Holly called and immediately wanted to know if he’d gotten a number. He’d failed to do so, as per usual, and her glower became truly and awesomely terrible to behold.
Don fled the kitchen. He retreated to the armchair across from Kurt, who eyed him with the suspicion of a magpie. Don gestured for the boy to kill the tunes which leaked from his earphones at what were likely brain-bleeding decibels and said, “What do you think of the neighbor boy—Bronson Ford? You like him?”
Kurt frowned, an expression that had the unfortunate effect of squeezing his features into those of an anthropomorphized albino rodent. “BF? I don’t hang with kids, Pop.”
“Really? He lives right next door—”
“Um, he’s like, what, twelve or something?” Kurt rolled his eyes.
“I thought maybe you saw him around.” Don chafed to ask whether the Rourke boy had access to illicit drugs (obviously he did) and if the little refugee might be moonlighting as a junior dope pusher. Yo, sonny, you scoring grass from that Ethiopian kid down the road? Oh, and by chance have you seen a pair of goons lurking in the shrubbery? They look like a couple narcs.
What was it the thugs in the cheap suits at the reception had said? He couldn’t pin it down, the conversation was a static-laden mumble. The thought of them frightened him a little. But so did thinking of that Bronson Ford boy. As a matter of fact, thinking of the boy caused his hands to shake. He folded his arms to hide them from an oblivious Kurt and renewed his vow to cut back on the booze forthwith.
“Get real.” Kurt jammed in his earphones. After a thoughtful moment, he lifted one muff and said to Don, “Jeezus, Pop. You and Mom are acting weird.”
Speaking of weird, that night as Don and Michelle lay in bed after a brief, furious screw, she lighted a cigarette and regarded him as she lolled in her rumpled teddy, one leg still draped over the footboard where Don had flung it. “You’re going where?”
“Nowhere. Place in the Olympics.”
“Sounds like somewhere.”
“Slango Camp. Old site in the mountains. Astra C is running some tests. Wayne asked me to fly in and check on the team. You haven’t heard of it, huh?”
She studied him and her eyes were huge and dark as they became after sex, or when she was furious, drunk, or working voodoo on him. “I’ve heard of Slango.”
“Oh. Wayne says.”
“I’m tired of Wayne bossing you around.”
“Because it interferes with your bossing me around.”
The room was lighted by a black candle she’d taken from the dresser drawer. Her face reminded him in its wildness of the expression she’d worn that one night at the Wolverton mansion, except less vulnerable. Her snarled hair and cruelly glistening lips, the marble tautness of her neck and bare shoulders, were those of a pagan goddess etched into one of the woodcuts she so diligently collected. A drinker of blood, killer of men, harvester of skulls, and fecund as the dark soil of the ancient forest. She was a savage druid contemplating whether to fuck him or slice his heart out with the wavy obsidian knife she stashed under her pillow. This spooked him, but it also made him hard again.
She said, “I wonder if he knew I was flying to Russia this week.”
“He doesn’t. And if he did, he wouldn’t care. Wayne suffers from an increasingly common malady among management—rectal cranial inversion.”
Michelle stubbed her cigarette into a bone ashtray she’d balanced on a cushion. She slithered on hands and knees across the bed and mounted him so he was pressed against the pile of pillows. As his cock went in, her eyes rolled back and she gripped with her knees and leaned down to kiss him softly. She said into his mouth, “Quit.”
He grabbed her waist and she slapped his hands away, snatched his wrists and pinned them to the mattress. “Quit? I can’t.” He spoke with some difficulty.
She bit his lip and moved her hips. “There’s a village way out in the taiga, in the mountains. These aren’t Inuit folk. Boris Kalamov made contact with them nine months ago, although I have a hunch he’s lying on that score. He’s a cagey bastard; might’ve found them years ago. He claims the people have seen outsiders three times in the last decade… trappers who didn’t have a blessed clue they’d stumbled across a bloody miracle of modern anthropology. Kalamov is the only scientist on the planet who is aware of their existence. He told me, that’s it. Lou was his confidante and now that Lou is gone… I’m going to participate in a ritual with the natives. Maybe. Depends on whether Kalamov can pull the matriarchs over to his side.”
“Kalamov…I thought he was ruined. The debacle…”
“The man is tough as a cockroach. Can’t kill him. Keeps coming back for more. He got tortured by natives once. Lived to tell.”
“Baby, you’re killing the mood.” Don thrashed a bit; he couldn’t break her bruising hold. Age was draining the life from him while she just got stronger.
“My mood is fine.” She licked his ear and ground against him. The ceiling over her shoulder blurred into soft focus. “Don, your hair is going white. A whole shock right down the middle. When did that happen? It’s sooo sexy.”
He was sure he didn’t know. Not even a flash of Bronson Ford looming taller than a basketball player, his face that of a shark, could derail the moment.
When they were done, Don’s manhood felt as if it had been used for football practice. Wheezing, he said, “What kind of ritual? Better not be a fertility ritual or I’m going to be jealous.”
“I don’t have their word for it,” she said. “It’s a croning. After a fashion.”
“What’s a croning?”
“Don’t go to Slango.”
He cleared his throat and hummed “Baby Please Don’t Go.”
After she’d drifted away into dreamland he arose and went to the toilet to urinate. A light flickered on the drive leading to their yard. He squinted, trying to discern a real shape in the black-on-black landscape. The light flared again—the eye
of a penlight inside the cab of a car parked down the driveway. Don froze, not certain of what to do next. Moments later the car drifted away without engaging its headlights, reversing down the road and vanishing into the night.
The next morning Michelle headed for Siberia. Everything was different after that.
2.
Don arrived at the Olympia Airfield as night receded into its cave. He experienced several seconds of disorientation when attempting to penetrate the snowy gap between slapping off the alarm on the dresser and climbing metal stairs into the cabin of a company jet.
Standing atop the platform, he glanced over his shoulder at the gravel parking lot which arced before the radio shack and the row of beige hangars gone blue-gray in the filtered light of dawn. He tried to pick his car from the silhouetted lumps of vehicles and failed—wait! Ronnie had driven him; Don abruptly recalled the morning talk show beamed live from Seattle, the dingy and desiccated air freshener bobbing from the rearview mirror, a thermos of coffee and Schnapps in the console between them; a mudslide and flashing red lights and his confusion boiled over again. White-gloved hands floated from the darkness of the cabin and politely ushered him inside the plane, sent his disjointed and inchoate misgivings away in a cloud of smoking dust.
The jet was a four-engine model, manufactured in the ’50s judging by its appearance, equipped with a bar and a young attendant named Lisa whose presumably lovely features were squashed under layers of makeup and mascara. Three fellow passengers shared the accommodations.
Don recognized each of them from the list of names Wayne’s secretary had printed for his reference, and in turn they’d been briefed regarding his role as the liaison dispatched by HQ to crack the whip and right the ship: A droll elderly lawyer named Geoffrey Pike; Dr. Justin Rush, an urbane gentleman with glistening hair and a Clark Kent smile; and the hotshot Oklahoma archeologist Robert Ring, a rangy, athletic man who claimed one of his ancestors was a famous Chinese noble exiled from the motherland. Perhaps five years younger than Don, Robert Ring dressed like a model in a Field & Stream catalogue—plaids and corduroy; his deep dark tan didn’t appear to have come from a shake n’ bake spa; undoubtedly the byproduct of skiing or bicycling or royal heritage, and his grip was intimidating.