by Laird Barron
"Yah, okay. We came, we saw, we got rubbed by poison sumac. Time to move along before we bake our brains."
"I didn't see any sumac."
"Like you'd recognize it if it bit you on the ass, lady."
"Oh, I would, I would. I wanna take some pictures of that." Helen thrust the camera at the barn. Here was her indefatigable fascination—the girl collected relics and fragments, then let the images of sinister Americana stew in her brain until inspiration gave birth to something essay-worthy. The formula worked, without question. She was on her way to the top, according to the buzz. Harper's; Poetry; The New Yorker and Granta—she was a force to be reckoned with and it was early in the game.
"There it is, fire when ready."
"I want to go inside, for a quick peek."
"Ah, shit on that." Wallace's nose itched. The folds of his neck hung loose and raw. A migraine laid bricks in the base of his skull. "It isn't safe. I bet there's some big honking spiders, too. Black widows." He hissed feebly and made pinching motions.
"Well, yeah. That's why I want you to come with me, sweetness. Protect me from the giant, honking spiders."
"What's in it for me?"
She batted her lashes.
"A quick peek, you say."
"Two shakes of a lamb's tail," she said.
"Oh, in that case." Wallace approached the barn. "Interesting."
"What." Helen sounded preoccupied. She fiddled with the camera, frowning. "This thing is going hinky on me—I hope my batteries aren't dying."
"Huh. There's the driveway, and it's been used recently." The track was overgrown. It curved across the field like a hidden scar and joined the main road yonder. Boot prints sank into softer ground near the barn, tire treads and faint marks, as if something flat had swept the area incompletely. The boot prints were impressive—Wallace wore a 13-Wide and his shoe resembled a child's alongside one.
"Kids. Bet this is a groovy spot to party," Helen said. "My senior year in high school, we used to cruise out to the gravel pits after dark and have bonfire parties. Mmm-mm, Black Label and Coors Light. I can still taste the vomit!"
Wallace did not see any cans, or bottles, or cigarette butts. "Yeah, guess so," he said. "Saw a squirrel skeleton. Damned thing was in one piece, too."
"Really. There're bird bones all over the place, just hanging in the bushes."
"Whole birds?"
"Yup. I shot pictures of a couple. Kinda weird, huh?"
Wallace hesitated at the entrance of the barn, peering through a wedge between the slat doors. The wood smelled of ancient tar, its warps steeped in decades of smoke and brutal sunlight, marinated in manure and urine. Another odor lurked beneath this—ripe and sharp. The interior was a blue-black aquarium. Dust revolved in sluggish shafts.
Helen nudged him and they crossed over.
The structure was immense. Beams ribbed the roof like a cathedral. Squared posts provided additional support. The dirt floor was packed tight as asphalt and littered with withered straw and boards. Obscured by gloom, a partition divided the vault; beyond that the murky impression of a hayloft.
"My god, this is amazing." Helen turned a circle, drinking in the ambience, her face butter-soft.
Along the near wall were ranks of shelves and cabinets. Fouled implements cluttered the pegboard and hooks—pitchforks, shovels, double-headed axes, mattocks, a scythe; all manner of equipment, much of it caked in the gray sediment of antiquity and unrecognizable. Wallace studied what he took to be a curiously shaped bear trap, knew its serrated teeth could pulp a man's thighbone. Rust welded its mouth shut. He had seen traps like it in Argentina and Bengal. A diesel generator squatted in a notch between shelves, bolted to a concrete foot. Fresh grease welled in the battered case.
Was it cooler in here? Sweat dried on Wallace's face, his nipples stiffened magically. He shivered. His eyes traveled up and fixed upon letters chalked above the main doors. Thin and spiky and black, they spelled:
THEY WHO DWELL IN THE CRACKS
"Whoa," Wallace said. There was more, the writing was everywhere. Some blurred by grease and grit, some clear as:
FOOL
Or:
LUCTOR ET EMERGO
And corroded gibberish:
GODOFBLOATCHEMOSHBAALPEEORBELPHEGOR
"Honey? Yoo-hoo?" Wallace backed away from the yokel graffiti. He was sweating again. It oozed, stung his lips. His guts sloshed and prickles chased across his body. Kids partying? He thought not. Not kids.
"Wallace, come here!" Helen called from the opposite side of the partition. "You gotta check this out!"
He went, forcing his gaze from the profane and disturbing phrases. Had to watch for boards, some were studded with nails and wouldn't that take the cake, to get tetanus from this madcap adventure. "Helen, it's time to go."
"Okay, but look. I mean, Jesus." Her tone was flat.
He passed through a pool of light thrown down from a gap in the roof. Blue sky filled the hole. A sucker hole, that's what pilots called them. Sucker holes.
The stench thickened.
Three low stone pylons were erected as a triangle that marked the perimeter of a shallow depression. The pylons were rude phalluses carved with lunatic symbols. Within the hollow, a dead horse lay on its side, mired in filthy, stagnant water. The reek of feces was magnificently awful.
Helen touched his shoulder and pointed. Up.
The progenitor of all wasp nests sprawled across the ceiling like a fantastic alien city. An inverse complex of domes and humps and dangling paper streamers. Wallace estimated the hive to be fully twelve feet in diameter. A prodigy of nature, a primordial specimen miraculously preserved in the depths of the barn. The depending strands jiggled from a swirl of air through a broken window. Some were pink as flesh; others a rich scarlet or lusterless purple-black like the bed of a crushed thumbnail.
Oddly, no wasps darted among the convolutions of the nest, nor did flies or beetles make merry among the feculent quagmire or upon the carcass of the horse. Silence ruled this roost surely as it did the field.
Wallace wished for a flashlight, because the longer he squinted the more he became convinced he was not looking at a wasp nest. This was a polyp, as if the very fabric of the wooden ceiling had nurtured a cancer, a tumor swollen on the bloody juices of unspeakable feasts. The texture was translucent in portions, and its membranous girth enfolded a mass of indistinct shapes. Knotty loops of rope, gourds, hanks of kelp.
Click, click.
Helen knelt on the rim of the hollow, aiming her camera at the horse. Her mouth was a slit in a pallid mask. Her exposed eye rolled.
Wallace pivoted slowly, too slowly, as though slogging through wet concrete. She shouldn't be doing that. We really should be going.
Click, click.
The horse trembled. Wallace groaned a warning. The horse kicked Helen in the face. She sat down hard, legs splayed, forehead a dented eggshell. And the horse was thrashing now, heeling over, breaching in its shallow cistern, a blackened whale, legs churning, hooves whipping. It shrieked from a dripping muzzle bound in razor wire. Wallace made an ungainly leap for his wife as she toppled sideways into the threshing chaos. A sledgehammer caught him in the hip and the barn began turning, its many gaps of light spinning like a carousel. He flung a hand out.
Blood and shit and mud, flowing. The sucker holes closed, one by one.
2.
"You're a violent man," Helen said without emphasis. Her eyes were large and cool. "Ever hurt anyone?"
Wallace had barely recovered his wits from sex. Their first time, and in a hot tub no less. He was certainly a little drunk, more than a little adrenalized, flushed and heaving. They had eventually clambered onto the deck and lay as the stars whirled.
Helen pinched him, hard. "Don't you even think about lying to me," she hissed. "Who was it?"
"It's going to be you if you do that again," he growled.
She pinched him again, left a purple thumbprint on his bicep.
Wallace
yelled, put her in a mock headlock, kissed her.
Helen said, "I'm serious. Who was it?"
"It's not important."
Helen sat up, wrapped herself in a towel. "I'm going inside."
"What?"
"I'm going inside."
"Harold Carter. We were dorm mates," Wallace said, finally. He was sinking into himself, then, seeing it again with the clarity of fire. "Friend of ours hosted an off-campus poker club. Harold took me once. I wasn't a gambler and it was a rough crowd aiming to trim the fat off rich college kids like ourselves. I wouldn't go back, but Harold did. He went two, three nights a week, sometimes spent the entire weekend. Lost his shirt. Deeper he got, the harder he clawed. Addiction, right? After a while, his dad's checks weren't enough. He borrowed money—from me, from his other buddies, his sister. Still not enough. One day, when he was very desperate, he stole my wallet. It was the week after Christmas vacation and I had three hundred bucks. He blew it at a strip club. Didn't even pay off his gambling marker. I remember waiting up for him when he straggled in at dawn, looking pale and beat. He had glitter on his cheeks from the dancers, for God's sake. He smiled at me with the game face, said hi, and I busted him in the mouth. He lost his uppers, needed stitches. I drove him to the hospital. Only time I ever punched anyone." Which skirted being a lie only by definition. He had flattened a porter in Kenya with the butt of a rifle and smashed a big, dumb Briton in the face with a bottle of Jameson during a pub brawl in Dublin. They had it coming. The porter tried to abscond with some money and an antique Bowie knife. The Brit was just plain crazy-mean and drunk as a bull in rut. Wallace was not going to talk about that, though.
They lay, watching constellations burn. Helen said, "I'll go to Washington, if I'm still invited."
"Yes! What changed your mind?"
She didn't say anything for a while. When she spoke, her tone was troubled. "You're a magnet. Arizona sucks. It just feels right."
"Don't sound so happy about it."
"It's not that. My parents hate you. Mother ordered me to dump your ass, find somebody not waiting in line for a heart bypass. Not in those words, but there it was." Helen laughed. "So let's get the hell out of here tomorrow—don't tell anybody. I'll call my folks after we settle in."
Wallace's chest ballooned with such joy he was afraid his eyes were going to spring leaks. "Sounds good," he said gruffly. "Sounds good."
Wallace stood in the gaping cargo door of a Huey. The helicopter cruised above a sandy coast, perhaps the thin edge of a desert. The sea was rigid blue like a watercolor. A white car rolled on the winding road and the rotor shadow chopped it in half. He recognized the car as his own from college—he had sold it to an Iranian immigrant for seventy-five dollars, had forgotten to retrieve a bag of grass from the trunk and spent a few sweaty months praying the Iranian would not know what it was if he ever found it. Was Delaney driving? Wallace wondered why a Huey—he had never served in the military, not even the reserves or the Coast Guard. Too young by a couple of years for Viet Nam, and too old for anything that came about during the bitter end of the Cold War. Then he remembered—after the horse broke his leg, he had been airlifted to Harbor View in Seattle.
Soundless, except for Mr. Woo's voice, coming from everywhere and nowhere. God had acquired a Cantonese accent, apparently.
"Mr. Wallace, you are very unlucky in love, I think," Mr. Woo said from the shining air. He was not unkind.
"Three strikes," Wallace said with a smile. He smiled constantly. No one mentioned it, but he was aware. His face ached and he could not stop. "Gracie divorced me. Right out of college, so it doesn't count. A practice run. Beth was hell on wheels. She skinned me alive for what—ten years? If I'd known what kind of chicks glom onto real estate tycoons, I would've jumped a freight train and lived the hobo life. You have no idea, my friend. I didn't really divorce her, I escaped. After Beth, I made a solemn vow to never marry again. Every few years I'd just find some mean, ugly woman and buy her a house. Helen's different. The real deal."
"Oh, Mr. Wallace? I thought you live in big house in Olympia."
"I owned several, in the old days. She took the villa in Cancun. Too warm for me anyway."
"But this one, this young girl. You killed her."
"She's not dead. The doctors say she might come 'round any day. Besides, she's faster than I am. I can't keep up."
"A young girl needs discipline, Mr. Wallace. You must watch over her like a child. She should not be permitted to wander. You are very unlucky."
The chopper melted. Mr. Woo's wrinkled hands appeared first, then a plastic bag with Wallace's suit on a hanger. A wobbly fan rattled above the counter. "Here is your ticket, Mr. Wallace. Here is some Reishi mushroom for Mrs. Wallace. Take it, please."
"Thanks, Woo." Wallace carefully accepted his clothes, carried them from the dingy, chemical-rich shop with the ginger gait of a man bearing holy artifacts. It was a ritual he clung to as the universe quaked around him. With so much shaking and quaking he wondered how the birds balanced on the wire, how leaves stayed green upon their branches.
Delaney met him at the car, took the clothes and held the door. He handed Wallace his walking stick, waited for him to settle in the passenger seat. Delaney had bought Wallace an Irish blackthorn as a welcome home present. An elegant cane, it made Wallace appear more distinguished than he deserved, Delaney said. Wallace had to agree—his flesh sagged like a cheap gorilla suit, minus the hair, and his bones were too prominent. His eyes were the color of bad liver, and his broad face was a garden of broken veins.
There were reasons. Two hip operations, a brutal physical therapy regimen. Pain was a faithful companion. Except, what was with the angry weals on his neck and shoulders? Keloid stripes, reminiscent of burns or lashes. Helen was similarly afflicted; one had festered on her scalp and taken a swath of hair. Their origin was on the tip of Wallace's tongue, but his mind was in neutral, gears stripped, belts whirring, and nothing stuck. He knocked back a quart of vodka a day, no problem, and had started smoking again. A pack here or there—who was counting? He only ate when Delaney forced the issue. Hells-bells, if he drank enough martinis he could live on the olives.
Delaney drove him home. They did not talk. Their relationship had evolved far beyond the necessity of conversation. Wallace stared at the trees, the buildings. These familiar things seemed brand new each time he revisited them. The details were exquisitely rendered, but did not con him into accepting the fishbowl. Artificial: the trees, the houses, the windup people on the shaded streets. Wallace examined his hands; artificial too. The sinews, the soft tissues and skeletal framework were right there in the X-ray sunlight. He was Death waiting to dance as the guest of honor at Día de los Muertos.
Wallace was no longer in the car. The car melted. It did not perturb him. He was accustomed to jump-cuts, seamless transitions, waking dreams. Doctor Green said he required more sleep or the hallucinatory episodes would intensify, destroy his ability to function. Wallace wondered if he ever slept at all. There was no way to be certain. The gaps in his short-term memory were chasms.
He was at home in the big house his fortune built, seated stiffly on the sofa Beth, ex-wife number two, procured from Malaysia along with numerous throw rugs, vases and some disturbing artwork depicting fertility goddesses and hapless mortals. He did not like the décor, had never gotten around to selling it at auction. Funny that Beth took half of everything and abandoned these items so punctiliously selected and obtained at prohibitive expense. Wallace's closest friend, Skip Arden, suggested that Beth always hoped things would change for the better, that she might regain favor. Skip offered to burn the collection for him.
Wallace's house was a distorted reflection of the home he had grown up in, a kind of anti-mirror. This modern house was designed by a famous German architect that Beth read of in a foreign art directory. Multi-tiered in the fashion of an antique citadel, and as a proper citadel, it occupied a hill. There was an ivy-covered wall, a garden and maple trees. M
t. Rainier fumed patiently in its quarter of the horizon. At night, lights twinkled in the town and inched along the highway. Wallace's personal possessions countered the overwhelming Baroque overtones—his hunting trophies, which included a den crammed with the mounted heads of wild boars, jaguars and gazelles; and his gun collection, a formidable floor-to-ceiling chestnut-paneled cabinet that contained a brace of armament ranging from an assortment of knives and daggers native to three dozen nationalities, to an even greater array of guns—from WWII American issue Browning .45 automatics up to show-stopping big-game rifles, the Model 76 African .416 and his pride and joy, a Holland & Holland .500, which had come to him from the private collection of a certain Indian prince, and was capable of sitting a bull elephant on its ass. Littered throughout the rambling mansion was the photographic evidence of his rough and wild youth; mostly black and white and shot by compatriots long dead or succumbed to stultified existences similar to his own. The weapons and the photographs grounded his little hot air balloon of sanity, but they also led to thinking and he had never been one to dwell on the past, to suffer introspection. They were damning, these fly-buzz whispers that built and built with each stroke of the minute hand, each wallowing undulation of the ice in his drink. You always wanted to be Hemingway. Run with the bulls; fire big guns and drink the cantinas dry. Maybe you'll end up like the old man, after all. Let's look at those pistols again, hmm? And when such thoughts grew too noisy, he took another snort of bourbon and quieted the crowd in his skull.
Outside his skull, all was peaceful. Just Wallace, Helen, Helen's aides, Cecil and Kate, Delaney, and Bruno and Thor, a pair of mastiffs that had been trained by Earl Hutchison out in Yelm. The dogs were quietly ubiquitous as they patrolled the house and the grounds. The gardener called on Friday; the housecleaner and her team every other weekend. They had keys; no one else bothered Wallace except Wallace's friends.
These friends came and went unexpectedly. Ghosts flapping in skins. Who? Skip and Randy Freeman made frequent guest appearances. Barret and Macy Langan; Manfred and Elizabeth Steiner. Wallace thought he had seen his own father, though that was unlikely. Dad divided his time between the VFW, the Masonic Temple and the Elks Lodge, and according to reports, his participation at social gatherings was relegated to playing canasta, drinking gin and rambling about "The Big One" as if he had jubilantly kissed a nurse in Time Square to celebrate V-J Day only last week.