“Ask her,” Azazel replies, winking fetchingly at the frum lady, who has apparently been following us and has just arrived.
The Rosh Yeshiva’s face wears a terrible expression. “She is a lady. She has no place in a men’s Yeshiva.”
Azazel tap-dances from hoof to hoof. “Do you hear him?” he asks me. Then he turns to the frum lady. “Liberation, right? Tell him how liberated you are. Free to follow your dreams. Free to jump off a cliff and fly, right?”
The babies are still crying, the toddler is crowing and pointing, straining against his mother’s grasp. “Please, Moishy,” she begs her son, ignoring the goat and clutching the child. “Be good.”
“Oh, but he is good, better than all of you,” Azazel says, cavorting on the sidewalk.
“We have to go home, Moishy,” she says, beseeching more than telling. But Moishy has his own ideas. He breaks free, shakes off his mother’s pleading hand, and leaps onto Azazel’s back. “Play, play,” he crows.
“And the child shall lead them!” Azazel shouts. “Follow your leader, Rabbi!”
“I won’t go!” the Rosh Yeshiva shouts back. “This is a travesty. This is”—he waves his hands wildly—“this is an outrage, an abomination.”
By now, rabbinical students are pouring out of the building, gaping at the scene unfolding on the steps of the Yeshiva. A few eye me cautiously, and I can almost hear them thinking, That Schmuel, he always was a strange one, wasn’t he?
“You will come with me.” Azazel’s voice has taken on a distinctly menacing tone.
“Please climb down, Moishy,” the frum lady implores her child. He chortles and claps his hands, then throws his arms around Azazel’s neck. “Play,” he says again.
“A fitting leader,” Azazel says in a voice suddenly casual, nonchalant. “So follow your leader, Rabbis.”
The Rosh Yeshiva is about to protest when Azazel butts him—gently but firmly—with his horn. “Schmuel, you know what you must do if he refuses to go.”
But Schmuel has become irrelevant, overshadowed by the more powerful goat—no doubt the brother, who has come to take revenge not only on the priests and assembled masses but also on his sibling who could not save him from slaughter. Irrelevant, I am struck silent. Inert.
“You know what to do,” Azazel repeats. He gazes at me and in that moment we are suckling together, grazing side by side, we are stumbling toward Jerusalem, and the High Priest—another rabbi—is tearing us asunder. Across the sword, our eyes meet and the words begin to fall quick and full from my mouth. My fingers are moving rapidly, forming Hebrew letters in the air.
The Rosh Yeshiva’s beard lengthens and whitens, his hands fall to the sidewalk, his feet become hooves, a tail sprouts from his hindquarters. He opens his mouth to speak but all that comes out is a bleat. I look around and my fellow students are also on all fours, the bleating thunderous against the now silent New York streets. White goats with black yarmulkes or black hats perched at odd angles atop their tufty heads, black jackets and pants hanging awkwardly over their furry forms. A great multitude of rabbinic goats.
And they stampede in their numbers along Pinehurst to Fort Washington Avenue, then onto the George Washington Bridge. Cars screech to a halt, horns blare, police sirens scream, but the goats continue their stampede, and suddenly, there are more, thousands of goats, some with black hats and sidelocks, some with colorful crocheted yarmulkes, all following the procession of Azazel, with little Moishy riding akimbo, shouting lustily. Then me, the humble servant-creator, the terrified servant-creator. Then the frum lady, huffing and puffing to catch up with her precious little boy, her shopping bags long gone, her infants still crying. And behind us, the streaming, bleating multitudes.
Across the bridge, into New Jersey, up the Palisades Interstate Parkway to the State Lookout.
To the cliff. The rocky cliff.
I feel even sicker than I did before. Azazel may be long-winded, he may be irreverent, he may be nasty, but just how nasty? How far will he carry the quest for revenge? I start to expostulate, to reason, to plead, but he silences me by butting me with his horns. He turns to face the multitude, who have stopped just short of the cliff, swaying uneasily as they look down.
“Hear O Israel,” he proclaims, and miraculously he is heard throughout the crowd, to the very last, most junior rabbinic student. “For centuries you have prayed for the rebuilding of the Temple and the restoration of the rituals, you have devoted your lives to studying the book that spawned the torture. You have served oppression, you have worshipped evil. You have sinned. You have transgressed. You have committed iniquity. You will bear your sins.”
He butts the Rosh Yeshiva, pushing him forward to the edge of the cliff. In and out of the crowd he weaves, his horns working deftly, as he prods and pokes and drives the herd to the edge. “Now, then!”
The Rosh Yeshiva falls first, followed by throngs of goats, a blizzard of fur and hooves and beards and tails and black jackets and sidelocks, the air rent with terror and entreaty.
“Now, Schmuel, now!” And he looks at me without so much as a twinkle of humor, Azazel and I in the communion of brothers. And in that moment, as our souls unite, I see my fingers once again forming letters in the air, my mouth moving frenetically, the incantations frantically tumbling as fast as the goats themselves.
And before the goats reach the rocky bottom they rise, a great white cloud of jubilation, a burst of hallelujah. Blessed be the Kingdom of Truth forever and ever. Higher and higher they go, until they are indistinguishable from the white clouds billowing across the sky, until they are the tail of a comet streaking into the night.
“Come on, Schmuel!” And I grab the hand of the frum lady, hoist the double stroller, and leap, the babies now silently sleeping. Azazel leaps with Moishy still gleefully clinging to his neck. As we are airborne we rise together. We fly amid the clouds, we soar, we swoop, we ascend in a whirlwind beyond the clouds, beyond the firmament, to the truest liberation, to the lightning bolts and radiance of the heavenly host.
The Lagerstätte
Laird Barron
Laird Barron was born in Alaska, where he raised and trained huskies for many years. He migrated to the Pacific Northwest in the mid-1990s and began to concentrate on writing poetry and fiction. He currently resides in Olympia, Washington, where he is working on a number of projects.
His award-nominated work has appeared in SCI FICTION and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and has been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Year’s Best Fantasy 6, and Horror: The Best of the Year, 2006.
Barron has, in a relatively short time, achieved a well-deserved reputation for writing powerful horror stories and novellas. “The Lagerstätte” is a bit different from his usual—but still quite dark.
October 2004
Virgil acquired the cute little blue-and-white-pin-striped Cessna at an auction; this over Danni’s strenuous objections. There were financial issues; Virgil’s salary as department head at his software development company wasn’t scheduled to increase for another eighteen months and they’d recently enrolled their son Keith in an exclusive grammar school. Thirty grand a year was a serious hit on their rainy-day fund. Also, Danni didn’t like planes, especially small ones, which she asserted were scarcely more than tin, plastic, and balsa wood. She even avoided traveling by commercial airliner if it was possible to drive or take a train. But she couldn’t compete with love at first sight. Virgil took one look at the four-seater and practically swooned, and Danni knew she’d had it before the argument even started. Keith begged to fly and Virgil promised to teach him, teased that he might be the only kid to get his pilot’s license before he learned to drive.
Because Danni detested flying so much, when their assiduously planned weeklong vacation rolled around, she decided to boycott the flight and meet her husband and son at the in-laws’ place on Cape Cod a day late, after wrapping up business in the city. The drive was only a couple of hours—she’d be at the hou
se in time for Friday supper. She saw them off from a small airport in the suburbs, and returned home to pack and go over last-minute adjustments to her evening lecture at the museum.
How many times did the plane crash between waking and sleeping? There was no way to measure that; during the first weeks the accident cycled through a continuous playback loop, cheap and grainy and soundless like a closed-circuit security feed. They’d recovered pieces of fuselage from the water, bobbing like cork—she caught a few moments of news footage before someone, probably Dad, killed the television.
They threw the most beautiful double funeral courtesy of Virgil’s parents, followed by a reception in his family’s summer home. She recalled wavering shadowbox lights and the muted hum of voices, men in black hats clasping cocktails to the breasts of their black suits, and severe women gathered near the sharper, astral glow of the kitchen, faces gaunt and cold as porcelain, their dresses black, their children underfoot and dressed as adults in miniature; and afterward, a smooth descent into darkness like a bullet reversing its trajectory and dropping into the barrel of a gun.
Later, in the hospital, she chuckled when she read the police report. It claimed she’d eaten a bottle of pills she’d found in her mother-in-law’s dresser and curled up to die in her husband’s closet among his Little League uniforms and boxes of trophies. That was simply hilarious because anyone who knew her would know the notion was just too goddamned melodramatic for words.
March 2005
About four months after she lost her husband and son, Danni transplanted to the West Coast, taken in by a childhood friend named Merrill Thurman, and cut all ties with extended family, peers, and associates from before the accident. She eventually lost interest in grieving just as she lost interest in her former career as an entomologist; both were exercises of excruciating tediousness and ultimately pointless in the face of her brand-new, freewheeling course. All those years of college and marriage were abruptly and irrevocably reduced to the fond memories of another life, a chapter in a closed book.
Danni was satisfied with the status quo of patchwork memory and aching numbness. At her best, there were no highs, no lows, just a seamless thrum as one day rolled into the next. She took to perusing self-help pamphlets, treatises on Eastern philosophy, and trendy art magazines; she piled them in her room until they wedged the door open. She studied Tai Chi during an eight-week course in the decrepit gym of the crosstown YMCA. She toyed with an easel and paints, attended a class at the community college. She’d taken some drafting in college. This was helpful for the technical aspects, the geometry of line and space; the actual artistic part proved more difficult. Maybe she needed to steep herself in the bohemian culture—a cold-water flat in Paris, or an artist commune, or a sea shanty on the coast of Barbados.
Oh, but she’d never live alone, would she?
Amid this reevaluation and reordering came the fugue, a lunatic element that found genesis in the void between melancholy and nightmare. The fugue made familiar places strange; it wiped away friendly faces and replaced them with beekeeper masks and reduced English to the low growl of the swarm. It was a disorder of trauma and shock, a hybrid of temporary dementia and selective amnesia. It battened to her with the mindless tenacity of a leech.
She tried not to think about its origins, because when she did she was carried back to the twilight land of her subconscious; to Keith’s fifth birthday party; her wedding day with the thousand-dollar cake, and the honeymoon in Niagara Falls; the Cessna spinning against the sun, streaking downward to slam into the Atlantic; and the lush corruption of a green-black jungle and its hidden cairns—the bones of giants slowly sinking into the always hungry earth.
The palace of cries where the doors are opened with blood and sorrow. The secret graveyard of the elephants. The bones of elephants made a forest of rib cages and tusks, dry riverbeds of skulls. Red ants crawled in trains along the petrified spines of behemoths and trailed into the black caverns of empty sockets. Oh, what the lost expeditions might’ve told the world!
She’d dreamed of the Elephants’ Graveyard off and on since the funeral and wasn’t certain why she had grown so morbidly preoccupied with the legend. Bleak mythology had interested her when she was young and vital and untouched by the twin melanomas of wisdom and grief. Now such morose contemplation invoked a primordial dread and answered nothing. The central mystery of her was impenetrable to casual methods. Delving beneath the surface smacked of finality, of doom.
Danni chose to endure the fugue, to welcome it as a reliable adversary. The state seldom lasted more than a few minutes, and admittedly it was frightening, certainly dangerous; nonetheless, she was never one to live in a cage. In many ways the dementia and its umbra of pure terror, its visceral chaos, provided the masochistic rush she craved these days—a badge of courage, the martyr’s brand. The fugue hid her in its shadow, like a sheltering wing.
May 6, 2006
(D. L. Session 33)
Danni stared at the table while Dr. Green pressed a button and the wheels of the recorder began to turn. His chair creaked as he leaned back. He stated his name, Danni’s name, the date and location.
—How are things this week? he said.
Danni set a slim metal tin on the table and flicked it open with her left hand. She removed a cigarette and lighted it. She used matches because she’d lost the fancy lighter Merrill got her as a birthday gift. She exhaled, shook the match dead.
—For a while, I thought I was getting better, she said in a raw voice.
—You don’t think you’re improving? Dr. Green said.
—Sometimes I wake up and nothing seems real; it’s all a movie set, a humdrum version of This Is Your Life! I stare at the ceiling and can’t shake this sense I’m an imposter.
—Everybody feels that way, Dr. Green said. His dark hands rested on a clipboard. His hands were creased and notched with the onset of middle age; the cuffs of his starched lab coat had gone yellow at the seams. He was married; he wore a simple ring and he never stared at her breasts. Happily married, or a consummate professional, or she was nothing special. A frosted window rose high and narrow over his shoulder like the painted window of a monastery. Pallid light shone at the corners of his angular glasses, the shiny edges of the clipboard, a piece of the bare plastic table, the sunken tiles of the floor. The tiles were dented and scratched and bumpy. Fine cracks spread like tendrils. Against the far walls were cabinets and shelves and several rickety beds with thin rails and large, black wheels.
The hospital was an ancient place and smelled of mold and sickness beneath the buckets of bleach she knew the custodians poured forth every evening. This had been a sanatorium. People with tuberculosis had gathered here to die in the long, shabby wards. Workers loaded the bodies into furnaces and burned them. There were chutes for the corpses on all of the upper floors. The doors of the chutes were made of dull, gray metal with big handles that reminded her of the handles on the flour and sugar bins in her mother’s pantry.
Danni smoked and stared at the ceramic ashtray centered exactly between them, inches from a box of tissues. The ashtray was black. Cinders smoldered in its belly. The hospital was “no smoking,” but that never came up during their weekly conversations. After the first session of him watching her drop the ashes into her coat pocket, the ashtray had appeared. Occasionally she tapped her cigarette against the rim of the ashtray and watched the smoke coil tighter and tighter until it imploded the way a demolished building collapses into itself after the charges go off.
Dr. Green said,—Did you take the bus or did you walk?
—Today? I walked.
Dr. Green wrote something on the clipboard with a heavy golden pen.—Good. You stopped to visit your friend at the market, I see.
Danni glanced at her cigarette where it fumed between her second and third fingers.
—Did I mention that? My Friday rounds?
—Yes. When we first met. He tapped a thick, manila folder bound in a heavy-duty rubber band.
The folder contained Danni’s records and transfer papers from the original admitting institute on the East Coast. Additionally, there was a collection of nearly unrecognizable photos of her in hospital gowns and bathrobes. In several shots an anonymous attendant pushed her in a wheelchair against a blurry backdrop of trees and concrete walls.
—Oh.
—You mentioned going back to work. Any progress?
—No. Merrill wants me to. She thinks I need to reintegrate professionally, that it might fix my problem, Danni said, smiling slightly as she pictured her friend’s well-meaning harangues. Merrill spoke quickly, in the cadence of a native Bostonian who would always be a Bostonian no matter where she might find herself. A lit major, she’d also gone through an art-junkie phase during grad school, which had wrecked her first marriage and introduced her to many a disreputable character as could be found haunting the finer galleries and museums. One of said characters became ex-husband the second and engendered a profound and abiding disillusionment with the fine-arts scene entirely. Currently, she made an exemplary copy editor at a rather important monthly journal.
—What do you think?
—I liked being a scientist. I liked to study insects, liked tracking their brief, frenetic little lives. I know how important they are, how integral, essential to the ecosystem. Hell, they outnumber humans trillions to one. But, oh my, it’s so damned easy to feel like a god when you’ve got an ant twitching in your forceps. You think that’s how God feels when He’s got one of us under His thumb?
—I couldn’t say.
—Me neither. Danni dragged heavily and squinted.—Maybe I’ll sell Bibles door-to-door. My uncle sold encyclopedias when I was a little girl.
Dr. Green picked up the clipboard.—Well. Any episodes—fainting, dizziness, disorientation? Anything of that nature?
She smoked in silence for nearly half a minute.—I got confused about where I was the other day. She closed her eyes. The recollection of those bad moments threatened her equilibrium.—I was walking to Yang’s grocery—it’s about three blocks from the apartments. I got lost for a few minutes.
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 25