by Laird Barron
Beth had hated it, said the artist, a local celebrity named Miranda Carson, used too much wax. The sculpture was indeed heavy, it required two burly movers to install it in the gallery. Wallace did not care, he took morbid pleasure in admiring the milky eyes, the tangled strands of real hair the artist collected from her combs. In low light, the wax figure animated, transformed into a young woman, knees drawn to chin, meditating upon the woods behind the house, the peacocks and the other things that lurked. Wallace once loaned the piece, entitled Remembrance, to the UW library; brought it home after an earthquake shattered an arm and damaged the torso. Carson had even driven over and performed a hasty repair job. The cracks were still evident, like scars. Macabre and beautiful.
The gallery was populated by a dozen other sculptures, a menagerie orphaned by Beth's departure and Wallace's general disinterest. Wallace wandered among them, cell phone glued to his ear, partially aware of Skip's buzzing baritone. Wallace thought the split in the dead girl's body seemed deeper. More jagged.
"—so Randy and I'll go today. Unless you want to come. Might be what you need."
"Say again?" Wallace allowed himself to be drawn into the cathode. It dawned on him that he had made a serious tactical error in confiding the Bruenig interview to Skip. They had discussed the Choate legend over drinks the prior evening and Wallace more than half-expected his friend to laugh, shake his snowy head and call him a damn fool for chasing his tail. Instead, Skip had kept mum and sat stroking his beard with a grim, thoughtful expression. Now, after a night's sleep, the story had gestated and hatched as a rather dubious scheme to nip Wallace's anxieties at their roots.
"Randy and I'll scope out that property this afternoon. He wants to see that nest you were going on about at the hospital. He said it sounds weird. I told him it's dried up. He refuses to listen, of course."
"Wait-wait." Wallace rubbed his temple. "You plan to go to the barn."
"Uh-hmm, right."
"To what—look at the nest?"
"That's what I've been saying. I'm thinking noon, one o'clock. We'll have dinner at the Oyster House. It's lobster night."
"Lobster night, yeah. Skip?"
"What?"
"Forget about the nest. You're right, it won't be there, they migrate, I think. And the barn's condemnable, man. It's dangerous. Scary people hang around—maybe druggies, I dunno. Bad types." Wallace's hand was slippery. He was afraid he might drop the phone.
"Oh yeah? Well it just so happens I called Lyle Ferguson—your old pal Lyle, remember him? He landed the bid and he says they're planning to commence tearing down the barn and all that sort of thing on Monday or Tuesday. So time is of the essence, as they say."
"Skip—"
"Hey, Wally. I'm driving here. You don't want to come with us?" Skip's voice crackled.
"No. Uh, say hi to Fergie, if you see him."
"Okay, buddy. I'm driving, I gotta go. Call you tomorrow." Click.
"Uh, huh." Wallace regarded a bust on a plinth. It was the half-finished head of a woman wearing thick lipstick. A crack had begun to divide the plaster face.
He had had Pride check into Bruenig's story about the BLM geologist and the monoliths. The geologist was named Chuck Doolittle and he abruptly quit his post six years ago, dropped everything and departed the state of Washington, although nobody at the department had a handle on where he might have emigrated. As for the so-called monoliths, the bureau disavowed knowledge of any such structures and while the former Choate property did overlap tribal grounds, it had long ago been legally ceded to the county. No mystery at all.
The only hitch, insomuch as Pride was concerned, was the fact certain records pertaining to the Choate farm were missing from the county clerk's office. According to a truncated file index, the Choate folder once contained numerous photos of unidentified geological formations, or possibly manmade constructs of unknown origin. The series began in 1927, the latter photographs being dated as late as 1971. Pride located eight black-and-white pictures taken in 1954 through 1959 that displayed some boulders and indistinct earth heaves akin to the Mima Mounds. Unfortunately, the remainder of the series, some ninety-eight photos, was missing and unaccounted for since an office fire at the old courthouse in '79.
Wallace went into Helen's suite, waited near the door while Cecil massaged Helen's cramped thigh muscles. Kate had arrived early. The burly nurse dabbed Helen's brow with a wash cloth and murmured encouragement. Helen's fish-black eyes rolled with blindness and fear. There was nothing of comprehension or sanity in them and the cleft in her forehead and cheek was livid as a gangrenous brand. She howled and howled without inflection, the flat repeating utterance of an institutionalized mind.
Wallace limped upstairs to his office, turned up the radio. His hip throbbed fiercely; sympathy pangs. His hand itched with fading scabs. What had happened to him that night in the alley behind the Marlin? What was happening now? He found some Quaaludes in a drawer, chased them with a healthy belt of JD and put his head down in his arms, a kindergartner again.
10.
Wallace was standing in Skip's dining room. Wallace's feet were nailed down with railroad spikes.
"Why'd you let them go?" Delaney asked. He slouched against a cabinet and smoked a cigarette.
Watery light washed out the details. Randy's prosthesis shined upon the table, plastic fingers blooming in a vase. A two-inch crack separated the fancy tiled ceiling. There was movement inside. Squirming.
Skip swaggered from the kitchen and plunged oversized hands into a bowl of limp, yellow noodles. He drew forth a clump, steaming and dripping, plopped it on his head as a wig. Grinned the wacky grin of a five-year-old stoned out of his gourd on cough syrup.
"Why are you doing that?" Wallace tried to modulate his voice; his voice was scratchy, was traitorously shrill.
Skip drooled and capered, shook fistfuls of noodles like pompoms.
Wallace said, "Where's Randy? Skip, is Randy here?"
"Nope."
"Where is he?"
"With the god of the barn-b-barn—b-barn barn barn barn!"
"Skip, where's Randy?"
"In the barn with Bay-el, Bay-el, Bay-el. Playing a game." Skip hummed a ditty to his noodles, cast Wallace a sidelong glance of infinite slyness. "Snufalupagus LOVES raw spaghetti. No sauce, no way! I pretend it's worms. Worms get big, Wallace. You wouldn't believe how big some worms get. Worms crawl inside your guts and make babies. They crawl up your nose, your ears, into your mouth. If somebody grinds you into itty-bitty pieces and a worm eats you, it'll know all the stuff you did." He lowered his voice. "They can crawl up your butt and make ya do the hula dance and jabber like Margie Thatcher on crank!"
"Where's Randy?"
"Playing sock puppets." Skip began ramming noodles down his throat. "He's Kermit de Frog!"
"Should've stopped them, Boss. Now they've stirred up the wasps' nest. You're fucked." Delaney stubbed his cigarette and walked through the wall.
Wallace awoke in darkness, fearful and disoriented. He had drunkenly migrated to his bedroom at some fuzzy period and burrowed into the covers. He remembered long, narrow corridors, bloody nebulas splattered against leaded glass and Kirlian figures scorched into the walls: skeletal fragments of clawing hands and gaping mouths.
Wallace, Helen said. She was there with him in the room, wedged high in the corner of the walls where they joined the ceiling. She gleamed white as bone and her eyes and mouth and the crack in her face were black as the pits between the stars. There's a hole you can't fill, she said.
Wallace screamed in his throat, a mangled, pathetic cry. The clouds moved across the moon and reshaped the shadows on the wall and Helen was not hanging there with her black black eyes, her covetous mouth, or the stygian worm that fed on her face. There were only moonbeams and the reflections of branches like skinned fingers against the plaster.
Wallace lay trembling. Eventually he drifted away and slept with the covers over his head. He flinched at the chorus of night sounds, each knock upon th
e door.
11.
"Skip. Are you eating? Where've you been?"
"Nothing, Wallace. I'm tired."
"Skip, it's three. I've been calling for hours. Why don't you come over."
"Ahh, no thanks. I'm gonna sleep a while. I'm tired."
"Skip."
"Yeah?"
"Where's Randy? He doesn't answer his phone."
"Dunno. Try him at the office. Little bastard's always working late."
"I tried his office, Skip."
"Okay. That's right. He's out of town. On business."
"Business. What kind of business?"
"Dunno. Business."
"Where did he go, exactly? Skip? Skip, you still there?"
"Dunno. He won't be around much, I guess. There's a lot of business."
"Skip—"
"Wallace, I gotta sleep, now. Talk to you later. I'm very tired."
12.
Wallace sat on the steps, new cane across his knees, Bruno and Thor poised at his flanks like statuary come alive. The sun bled red and gold. The trees would be getting green buds any day now. He listened to the birds mating in the branches. The graveyard-shift security guard, a gray, melancholy fellow named Tom, was going off-duty. He came over to smoke a cigarette and introduce himself to his new boss. He was a talker, this dour, gaunt Tom. He used to drive school buses until his back went south—lower lumbar was a killer, yessiree. He was an expert security technician. Twenty-four years on the job; he had seen everything. The other two guys, Charlie and Dante, were kids, according to Tom. He promised to keep an eye on them for Wallace, make certain they were up to standard. Wallace said thanks and asked Tom to bring him the nightly surveillance video. The guard asked if he meant all four of them and Wallace considered that a moment before deciding, no, only the video feed from the garden area. Tom fetched it from the guard shack and handed it over without comment. The look on his face sufficed—he was working for a lunatic.
Wallace plugged the CD into the player on his theater-sized plasma television in the den. He called Randy's house and talked to Janice while silent, grainy night images flickered on the screen. Janice said Randy had left a cryptic message on the answering machine and nothing since. He had rambled about taking a trip and signed off by yelling, Hallucigenia! Hallucigenia sparsa! It's a piece of something bigger—waaay bigger, honey! Janice was unhappy. Randy had pulled crazy stunts before. He dodged lengthy stays in Federal penitentiaries as a college student and she had been there for the entire, wild ride. She expected the phone to ring at any moment and him to be in prison, or a hospital. What if he tried to sneak into Cuba again? What if he blew off his other hand? Who was going to wipe his ass then? Wallace reassured her that nothing of the sort was going to happen and made her promise to call when she heard anything.
Lance Pride dropped in to report his progress. Pride was lanky, a one-time NBA benchwarmer back in the '70s. He dressed in stale tweeds and emanated a palpable sense of repressed viciousness. His eyes were hard and small. He glanced at the video on the television and did not comment.
Pride confessed Joshua Choate appeared to be a dead end. His last known residence was a trailer court on the West Side of Olympia and he had abandoned the premises about three years ago. The former Ph.D. farm boy had not applied for a driver's license, a credit card, a job application or anything else. Maybe he was living on the street somewhere, maybe he had skipped the country, maybe he was dead. Nobody had seen him lately, of that much Pride was certain.
Pride strewed a bundle of newspaper clippings on the coffee table, artifacts he had unearthed pertaining to Paul, Tyler and Josh: stories detailing the promotion of Tyler Choate and a file picture of the young deputy sheriff grinning as he loomed near a Thurston County police cruiser and another of him shackled and bracketed by guards after he had been exposed as a mastermind cultist; a shot of Joshua when he had been selected as an all-American tackle—his wide, flabby face was nearly identical to his brother's; articles from the mid-'60s following Paul Choate's hiring at the newly founded Evergreen State College and his brief and largely undocumented collaboration with NASA regarding cosmic microwave background radiation. There were school records for Tyler and Josh—four-point-oh students and standout football players. Major universities had courted them with every brand of scholarship. Tyler did his time at Washington State, majored in psychology, perfect grades, but no sports, and joined the sheriff's department. Meanwhile, Josh earned a degree in physics at Northwestern, advanced degrees in theoretical physics from Caltech and MIT and then dropped off the radar forever. Tyler eventually became implicated in a never fully explained scandal involving Satanism and rape and got dropped in a deep, dark hole. The only other curious detail regarding the younger brothers was the fact both of them had been banned from every casino within two hundred miles of Olympia. None of the joints ever caught them cheating, but they were unstoppable at the blackjack tables and the houses became convinced the boys counted cards.
None of it seemed too useful and Wallace barely skimmed the surface items before conceding defeat and shoving the pile aside. Pride just smiled dryly and said he'd make another pass at things. He had a lead on the company that had sold the Choates a ton of fabricated metals in the '60s and '70s. Unfortunately the company had gone under, but he was looking into former employees. He told Wallace to hang onto the newspaper clippings and left with a promise to check in soon.
Wallace moped around the house, mixing his vodka with lots of orange juice in a feeble genuflection toward sobriety. He picked up the newspaper photo of Josh Choate aged seventeen, in profile with his shoulder pads on. He wore a slight smile and his pixilated eye was inscrutable. I am a loyal son. I am here to usher in the dark.
The day was bright and hot like it often was in Western Washington during the spring. The garden filled the television with static gloom. Upstairs, Helen began to scream. Wallace was out of orange juice.
He called Lyle Ferguson. The contractor was cordial as ever. He was moving crews into the Otter Creek Housing Development, AKA the old Choate place as of that morning. Yeah, Skip Arden had called him, sure; asked whether he could nose around the property. No problem, Ferguson had said, just don't trip and break anything. Pylons? Oh, yeah they found some rocks on the site. Nothing a bulldozer couldn't handle . . . .
13.
The next day Wallace became impatient and had Delaney drive him to the branch office of Fish and Wildlife. Short visit. Randy Freeman's supervisor told Wallace that Randy had two months vacation saved. The lady thought perhaps he had gone to Canada. Next, he phoned the number Detective Adams gave him and got the answering machine. He hit the number for the front desk and was told Detective Adams was on sick leave—would he care to leave a message or talk to another officer?
Wallace sat in the rear of the Bentley, forehead pressed against the glass as they waited in traffic beside Sylvester Park. Two lean, sun-dried prostitutes washed each other's hair in the public drinking fountain. Nearby, beat cops with faces the shade of raw flank steak loomed over a shirtless man sprawled in the grass. The man laughed and flipped the cops off and a pug dog yapped raucously at the end of a rope tied to the man's belt.
Delaney chewed on a toothpick. He said, "Boss, where are we going with this?"
Wallace shrugged and wiped his face, his neck. His thoughts were shrill and inchoate.
"Well, I don't think it's a good idea," Delaney said.
"You should've kept feeding me my pills. Then we wouldn't be sitting here."
"You need to see a shrink. This is what they call the grieving process."
"Think I'm in the denial stage?"
"I don't know what stage to call it. You aren't doing so hot. You're running in circles." The car moved again. Delaney drove with the window rolled down, his arm on the frame. "Your wife isn't going to recover. It's a bitch and it hurts, I know. But she isn't going to come around, Mr. S. She won't ever be the woman you married. And you got to face that fact, look it dead in the e
ye. 'Cause, till you do, whatever screws are rattling loose in your head are going to keep on rattling." He glanced over at Wallace. "I'm sorry to say that. I'm real sorry."
"Don't be sorry." Wallace smiled, thin and sad. "Just stick with me if you can. I'll talk to that Swedish psychiatrist Green recommended. Ha, I've been ducking that guy since I got out of the hospital. I'll do that, but there's something else. I have to find out what the Choates were doing on that property."
"Pit bull, aren't you, Boss?" There was admiration mixed with the melancholy.
"Bruenig said the man moved out of state. He's wrong. Choate's in the neighborhood. Maybe he lives here, maybe he's visiting, hiding under a bridge. Whatever. I saw his tracks at the barn and I think he's been creeping around the garden. I told you." Saw him in the alley, too, didn't you, Wally? He shuddered at the recollection of that febrile mouth closing on him.
"Yup, you saw tracks. Almost a year ago," Delaney said. "If they were even his."
"Trust me, they were. Pride's running skips on him, although I'm getting the feeling this fellow isn't the type who's easy to find. That's why I've got Pride tracking down whoever sold the Choates the materials for their projects in the back forty. Maybe you can call in a favor with the Marconi boys, or Cortez, see if you can't turn up some names. I gotta know."
"Maybe you don't wanna know."
"Dee . . .something's wrong. People are dying."
Delaney looked at him in the rearview mirror.
"You better believe it," Wallace said. "Stop acting like my wet nurse, damn it."
Delaney stared straight ahead. "Okay," he said.
"Thank you," Wallace said, slightly ashamed. He lighted a cigarette as a distraction.
They went to Skip's home, idled at the gate. Delaney leaned out and pressed on the buzzer until, finally, a butler emerged with apologies from the master of the house. The servant, a rigid, ramrod of a bloke, doubtless imported directly from the finest Hampton school of butlery, requested that they vacate the premises at once. Wallace waited until the butler was inside. He climbed out of the car and hurled a brandy flask Skip gave him some birthday past, watched with sullen pleasure as it punched a hole through a parlor window. Delaney laughed in amazement, shoved Wallace into the car, left rubber smoking on the breeze.