The Croning

by Laird Barron

  “Oh, Argyle,” he said to the empty air. “I already miss you, you old goat.” He might’ve wept then if not for the numbness of body and spirit. He’d looted the bathroom dresser for ancient prescriptions and located a bottle of Demerol. What had he needed it for? Standing in the threshold of the living room, acutely aware of its cramped artificiality, the thinness of the walls, he swallowed half a dozen pills and chased them with a shot of cooking sherry. Exhaustion weighed upon him. His thoughts were jagged, dark bits of glass tumbling through storms of goose down.

  He ventured into the cellar and down the rickety steps, his way lighted by a cheap, dirty bulb. The dilapidated stacks of rotten shelving and corroded jars of preserves were as he remembered, and so too the dirt floor and the cobwebs. He was alarmed, but hardly surprised to find the narrow tunnel boring through the south wall where a rack of odds and ends had once dominated. The opening forced him to duck and it smelled damp and ripe.

  There was an interruption of time and movement and sound; a cigarette burn in a film followed by a sheared reel. Then power was restored and he stumbled and caught himself at the threshold of the living room. His eardrums popped with a painful pressure change. Though the room seemed stable, his innards sloshed about as if he were falling at terminal velocity.

  “Time is a ring,” Bronson Ford said. The dwarf was seated in Don’s favorite wingback, orientated toward the fireplace so that his face was hidden. Bronson Ford’s right hand dangled over the armrest. His gray fingers were so long and sharp they brushed the floorboards. His timbre was rich and modulated. Gone was the broken English, the intimation of mental deficiency. It was a voice rife with the kind of animus and evil that only a deranged genius could emit. Soft as the wind soughing through the canopy and it reminded Don of the men at the tree farm, Mexicans, Hondurans, wherever they hailed from; dark men with wide hats and black-handled machetes, their peculiar fluting cries, the cant of some ancient song that rose and drifted among the green galleries. “We travel the ring, forward and backward, molding it like plastic. Your Michelle can do it too, to a minor degree. She has taken the fumbling infant steps across the lightless expanses as a part of her initiation. Very difficult to maintain any semblance of humanity after one has glimpsed the Great Dark.”

  Oh, Jesus. He plucked that from my mind. “Frankly, I hadn’t thought of you in years.” Don grabbed a brass flower vase off the shelf and moved toward Bronson Ford, fully intent upon cracking his nemesis across the back of the skull. Three steps into the room the lights shorted and went dead and an icy breeze ruffled Don’s hair.

  Bronson Ford chuckled from somewhere in the distance and the sound echoed as if from the depths of a cavern. “It won’t last, this clarity of thought. You are suffering from permanent brain damage. This lucidity is a ray of light through the clouds. Soon to be extinguished. Enjoy the interlude.”

  Don halted, partially crouched, blind, heart thudding, waves of vertigo threatening to topple him. He was overwhelmed by the impression of vast, subterranean space. “Who are you?” The way his words traveled and traveled before rebounding from a wall intensified his queasiness. Faint sparks of starlight refracted from a ceiling that might’ve been within arm’s reach or thousands of feet distant.

  “Michelle’s fascination with you has eluded me. Then, I gaze into your eyes and note that indeed your double helix spins precisely the same as a certain ancestor. He was a spy. This runs in the family. Your father and grandfather were spies.” Bronson Ford’s voice drifted, echoing from afar, then crooning near Don’s ear. “Should you happen to see young master Kurt again feel free to tell him neither man was particularly brave or wise or noble. Luther knew a couple of things, guessed a few more. We never considered him a threat to our plans. As for your father… A grunt who died for God and Country with the same amount of panache and self-awareness as a driver ant sacrificing itself for the colony.”

  “I say again, who are you?”

  “One who is interested in your species. The bogeymen in your histories and legends. We are far older than you can imagine and have haunted you since you were protoplasmic slime bobbing on the tide line. My kind are epicures. We revel in sensual pleasures, be it as gourmands or sybarites. We sup of blood and fear, we rejoice in flensing away that which occults the truth. Pointless to repeat what you already know. Wolverton and Rourke told you everything. Your recognition of these facts is a chemical bloom that lights your cerebral cortex with fireworks. It is this dawning of horror upon primitive minds that gives me my greatest frisson. I have lived thousands of your own lifecycles and the taste of your revulsion and horror never grows stale.”

  “Right. We’re ants and you’re the kid with the magnifying glass. Is that really all there is to this? I’d hoped the universe either had a grand scheme or was at least monumentally indifferent. This Olympus crap is rather disappointing.” Don still clutched the vase, hoping for a clean shot. He feared to take another step lest he tumble from a pinnacle of stone into a chasm.

  “Despite our superiority to you, we remain but a cog in the gears. We aren’t gods, although the distinction is insignificant from your perspective. Whatever our discrepancies as one life form to another, you are certainly handy to keep around. From your babies we draw nourishment—my feast of blood and terror. From your adult population we are provided research and sport. A select few of your kind supply the raw materials to replenish our eternal line. These we decorticate and realign through agony and degradation unto an aesthetic pleasing to our traditions. These lucky few, the prime exemplars of humanity, are made immortal. The offer has been extended you in the past. You most ungraciously refused. A stubborn breed, the Millers.”

  Don flung the vase toward Bronson Ford’s monologue. He hoped for a cry of outrage, a thud, anything. No response was forthcoming. He waited several seconds and said, “Where are my wife and daughter, you scoundrel? Argyle and Hank?”

  “Your associates languish upon a metaphorical anthill. They will endure a right Christian Hell for ages to come. Those fools are beyond help. Your women…That is a more delicate matter.”

  “If you aren’t a god, you’re damned well the black Pope. You must want something of me if you’re making house calls.”

  Bronson Ford’s answering cackle was thunderous. A section of the darkness rippled with pale fire and multitudes of stars wheeled as if through a pane of warped glass. Alien constellations shimmered and contorted as a black stain spread across them; there was the sun burning low and red, the solar system and its decaying planets, Earth…

  Earth was cloaked in a poisonous crimson mist. The oceans were stagnant soup. Festering jungles of maroon and ochre covered one hemisphere; sterile volcanic deserts the other. Most cities were buried under shifting sand or rotting vegetation or had fallen into pits in the earth. Structures that remained intact were webbed in foliage, gummed in amber glaciations, and contorted into spicate towers that bore scant resemblance to their original shapes.

  Primates gathered in these marginally habitable regions, but as Bronson Ford’s lens swooped to magnify them it became clear these hapless wretches were twisted out of plumb much as the skyscrapers were. The masses shuffled toward a ziggurat the size of the Empire State Building. The mighty ziggurat was constructed of flesh and bone from countless sentient corpses. A dripping black tunnel to Elsewhere opened at its heart. In clots, then droves, the approaching stick figures elevated and were sucked into the shuttering iris. They shrieked as flies shriek.

  “Do you understand what awaits in the waning days of your civilization? That viscid hole in the altar doesn’t lead to my home. Nay, little man; this is a mouth of our father, Old Leech. That venerable worthy rouses every few epochs and demands provender. Soft, screaming humanity is among the sweetest. What you witness here is only the beginning of the end. The Great Dark will arrive and cocoon your world as it cocoons ours. Terra will be hollowed and refined as we hollow and refine sapient flesh, and the planet shall be added to the Diaspora, dragged fr
om its orbit of Sol, and taken away. This is what always happens.” Bronson Ford revealed himself highlighted by a shaft of bloody radiance, a monstrous and bloated giant perched atop a slag heap of bones that floated on the surface of an illimitable void. His eyes and mouth were portals that mirrored the iris in the ziggurat, the void itself. He was de Goya’s Saturn, Polyphemus, and Satan sans horns. His flesh appeared to be multiple skins stitched together like a quilt. He cracked a smile of benign malevolence.

  Don’s tongue was dry. He tried to sound brave. “Lucky for me I’ll be long dead. Everyone I know will be gone.”

  “A reasonable observation. Alas, alack for you, one that isn’t necessarily correct. The Diaspora won’t reach local space for eons. However, it is possible for me to make certain you and those you cherish are preserved to bear witness firsthand of that most dread gloaming. Tell me, little miller, wouldn’t you rather be a beneficiary of the inevitable conquest rather than a victim? What of your mate? I am exceedingly curious to discover how much you love her. The females of the Mock line have served us adequately. Yet, I sense her affection for you might prove an impediment to her ultimate absorption unto our ranks. The poor woman is so inordinately fond of you, my ancient antagonist. Frankly, I despair that we’ll wind up having to devour her alive. Divided loyalties are simply not done in my homeland.”

  Don had an inkling of what lay in store. Creatures such as Bronson Ford could easily snuff lives or snatch what they desired. That wasn’t their preference, however. These devils, like all devils, were manipulators. Time and space stretched before them in an endless wasteland. Ennui was the only enemy immortal monsters possessed. They sought victory through the corruption and damnation of the soft, the innocent, the weak. He considered leaping forward and falling to his doom or precipitating a violent reaction from his demonic adversary, anything to avoid the fate that awaited him as surely as did the grave. Instead, he heard himself say, “Name your bargain.”

  “It’s a small thing.” At this, Bronson Ford laughed again, relishing a nasty private joke. “The trade is painless, for you. I’ll guarantee the scion of the Mocks maintains her current status as liaison and at the end of your natural life you’ll be brought into our fold, forever reunited with her. In return, you’ll grant me the precious little gift I traditionally accept as recompense. Refuse and wifey goes on the anthill with Uncle Argyle and hapless Hank, and Frick & Frack, to name a few, while you regress into diapers and perish, drooling and raving, in some dump of a hospice. It has always been about the child. Give me that pound of flesh, so to speak, and we’ll be even.”

  When it hit Don what was being proposed, what child the creature meant, the strength ran from him and he sank to his knees. “But for the love of all that’s holy, what you demand isn’t even mine to give.”

  “Oh, don’t fret about the details. As you say, we take what we please. I just want to hear you say it.”

  “I can’t.” Don raised his hands in supplication and wept. For an instant he beheld a vision of Michelle naked and alight with angelic radiance, hovering in space. This was Michelle as she’d been in the flower of maiden-hood. She smiled at him and faded away. The next vision was of a child squalling as claws sharp and steely as darning needles pierced its flesh and blood flowed. “I can’t. I can’t.” Don clouted himself about the forehead and temples. He tore at the remnants of his hair. He prayed for dementia and oblivion, tortured by the knowledge his faculties would deteriorate only after he’d been forced to make his hideous choice.

  Bronson Ford merely grinned and waited for the old man to choose.

  5.

  Someone found him on the dirt floor of the cellar, dehydrated and unconscious. Besides a few contusions and abrasions, Don was physically sound. His mental acuity wasn’t so intact.

  Time passed. Don lay first in a bed at home, dutifully nursed by Michelle, then toward the end, his family transferred him to a private room at a hospital in town. He was scarcely aware of the external world, surfacing at odd intervals to note a familiar television jingle, the voice of a loved one, or the tap of rain against the window. He vaguely registered the frequent vigils of his family and almost came fully awake during one visit by a pair of men in dark suits and glasses. The men asked a series of questions and were eventually ushered out by the ladies in white. Occasionally he overheard scraps of conversation between his family and the doctors. A bland fellow in a smock kept referring to encephalitis and vermiculate perforations of the brain, and terminal. There were many tears.

  Lucidity smote Don like a lightning bolt one late afternoon, and when it did, he realized he must be dying, although his senses were muffled in gauze and it was difficult to concentrate, much less evaluate his predicament.

  The sun was a blood-red band sinking fast. The hospital room lay in darkness except for the beam of light that illuminated his narrow bed. His immediate family stood in the gloom at the foot of the bed—Kurt and Kaiwin and their baby boy; Michelle and Holly to the opposite side. Poor Holly had been in some kind of accident; a wicked scar peeped from the vee of her blouse. The scar was pink and raw.

  Don struggled to focus. He was happy that the bed lay in the sunlight because the darkness was so cold. He’d never liked the dark.

  Kurt came around and kissed his cheek, followed by Holly and Kaiwin who did the same. They each whispered endearments to him and hugged Michelle on the way out. Michelle stopped Kaiwin and convinced her to leave baby Jonathan with his grandma. “You look so exhausted, honey,” she said to Kaiwin.

  The door snicked shut and grandparents and grandchild regarded one another in the dying red light. The infant crawled on the bed. The pleasant vacuum of Don’s mind began to fill with ice.

  “Sweetheart,” Michelle said with infinite tenderness. Her red lips gleamed. Her hair was black and lustrous as it had been in youth. She leaned forward and scooped the baby up and pulled him into the shadows. She whispered, “I love you. Thank you.”

  Don wanted to reply that he loved her, more now than when they first met, wanted to profess that he’d love her forever and a day. Speech was impossible. His breath slowed and he wheezed and choked as his heart labored. The sight of the baby wriggling in Michelle’s arms paralyzed him with horror. He couldn’t remember why.