The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (10 page)

His only friend was his cousin, Tyler. Tyler’s son Amos was a little ahead of me in age, and we played together whenever Tyler came over. I got the feeling that Amos did not always want to come with Tyler, that he was brought along to keep me distracted, and perhaps to keep him out of something too. Tyler had a locked room, too, but Amos was handier than I was.

During these visits, Tyler would vanish with Dad behind the door to the room and I would hear the snap an instant after it was drawn to, which meant they were locked in together. An ear to the door—nothing. Silence. No window to peek through. I asked Amos if Tyler ever hit him. He said no, never.

“Not ever?”

“No,” he said. Wonderingly.

“Dad never hits me either.”

“Huh.”

“He grabs me and throws me around the room, up in the air.”

“You mean he swings you around?”

I nod.

“Mine does that to me,” Amos told me.

At the time I supposed it was family taboo. Tyler had never said anything in Amos’ hearing about needing him for anything.

After I killed Dad, then, away we—

That sound again. The motor. Up and then down. Only the one road. They back already? How long has it been?

“Michael,” the voice says behind me. “Learn to kill.”

I turn. Nothing. Violent pain in my back. There is nothing behind me but the outer wall of the house. A window, though. Coming on to dusk outside. Wind. Just now starting. It rustles up and dies away.

All quiet again. No sound but me, the creaks of the chair as I return to my position, facing the door. Stephanie and Brian aren’t back yet, but they will be back soon. When they come back, it will be them or me. I don’t know how I know, but I know. Today.

A brief flurry of nausea. Must have been the turning. A rib scraping something, squeezing. And there’s a pain in my back, too. Incipient cramp.

No sound at all. Only the breath in my nostrils, and tinnitus. Big nostrils. Dad’s were huge and stiff in his coffin. They take the brain out through the nostrils, and shellac them. No motor. Nothing.

He hated me enough. Why didn’t he beat me? Why didn’t Tyler beat Amos? He struck his wife. Amos told me. Dad hit Mom. They weren’t peaceful men.

After I killed Dad, away we went, Mom and I, then Angela, and so on. They did not quite fight over me like two people who wanted nothing more to do with each other. They fought over me like two people who were going to have to go on with each other. I noticed that. They obviously despised each other, but something bigger made them set hate aside.

It was all very mysterious, but not interesting. Amos and I attended the same miserable high school, and wasted our time with the same pack of beer-mad wretches, beer conspirators, brigands of the cheapest, the very worst liquor imaginable. The day came when, drunk, Amos was challenged, on pain of ritual thrashing, to shoot a can out of another boy’s hand with a rifle. We had always been forbidden even to touch a gun. Dad kept his guns locked up like art treasures, and so did Tyler. I couldn’t have picked my father’s rifle out of a group of three, I saw so little of it.

Amos was given three chances and missed each time, somehow managing not to hit the boy who gingerly held out the can. As punishment, he would have to hold the can for someone else to shoot at. An older boy, a good shot and a bit less drunk, took the shots, but Amos couldn’t help himself. He flinched and winced, kept drawing the can back in again with a look of abject defeat on his face.

The boy who would administer the whipping was a wet-lipped pale fellow named Curtis. He always wore a heavy belt, and now he slipped it loose and began assailing Amos with it, chasing him around, smacking at him. Amos ran off and hid. Curtis went after him. When I next saw them, Amos had Curtis up against a wall in the shadows and was ramming his fists into Curtis’ stomach as regular as pistons and with such force that Curtis bounced against the wall. The bigger boys tried to pull Amos away—couldn’t budge him. His face was dead calm, it was a corpse’s face. Those punches struck, one, and again, and again, regular. Regular. Punching. Curtis rebounding from the wall. Sagging over the fist.

Amos stopped of his own accord. Curtis collapsed. The blows had been all that held him up. Blood poured from his nose and mouth in a steady stream. We all watched. Curtis was dead. Amos looked down at him, grey and calm. Then he turned away.

Amos told me what had happened, years later. He was out—how? Parole?

Curtis had found him in the cabin and started drubbing him with the belt. Amos, smarting and confused, could only ball himself up and wait for it to be over. He said it was awful, not because it hurt, but because he had no idea what to do.

I saw a flame, he said.

I went numb, he said.

I felt nothing. I knew he was still hitting because I swayed, but I couldn’t feel it any more. There was a flame right in front of me, but nothing was on fire—I couldn’t see what was burning it, it was just one light like a candle, straight up and down in space ahead of me, well back. Well back in the room. And there was no flickering or anything, it was so still. Even in the air from the belt—nothing. Straight. I didn’t look away, but I was sort of taking it all in, and when I looked again, then there was a ring of them around the first one. I could see the first one up through the ring. They were just standing there in space. Then they came toward me, all in the same formation. The moment before that happened, though, I saw a face beneath the first one. I couldn’t see it quick enough. It was too faint, I wasn’t sure, but there was something there. Then they all came at me, in the same formation, not too fast. They swooped over to me and I saw the fires around me, around my head. Not like a crown. They were out around chin level. Maybe chin level.

The next thing I knew, Curtis was on the floor. And I was… looking down.

His father never beat him because he knew what would happen if he did. That’s why. What did that mean about me? That was why Amos told me. Neither of us told all he knew, or suspected. But we knew and suspected the same things. That we were reserved for some purpose known to our parents and not to us. But Amos killed Curtis and was taken away, away from Tyler, and I killed Dad.

Tyler never asked about me, so apparently a cousin wasn’t the same thing as a son. I guess he just left. I don’t where he went.

Sometimes, I would be home, thinking I was alone, and I would hear Dad, his voice raised to a weak falsetto, calling “Archy… Archy…” in a drawn-out voice. I think he did it to frighten me. He never burst the bubble, though, to laugh at me. I would see him later, poker faced. I never met any “Archy.” It might have only sounded like “Archy,” through the locked door.

Brian and Stephanie are Amos’ kids and some family outlier got to them. They killed Amos. I couldn’t prove it. If I could, I’d be next. I am next, anyway, unless I kill Brian and Stephanie. Just the one or the other won’t do it. Both.

We were not guest-hosting people, but people, neighbors I think, used to come around anyway, once in a while. To ask if we still had power, or water, or if we could spare any gas for a generator. Things of that nature. Mom handled the talk. I remember the knowing look my Dad exchanged with Tyler when one of our visitors said—

“Pray Jesus the rain’ll stop!”

The faint curl of the lip, relaxed again at once. A smug little transport of contempt. Witches. I never saw any plain proof of it, but I knew it was there. And that it was being kept from me for some reason. And that reason could not have had less to do with love, or pity. I was confused to discover that it didn’t have much to do with caution, either. What did they ever do that was illegal? It seemed to me that my family were exemplary citizens. My father drove the speed limit religiously and never failed to come to a complete stop at a crosswalk. With a snicker.

They were saving me—us—for something. And they didn’t dare strike us nor hurt us. Amos had not just gotten mad; that wasn’t anger that punched Curtis in the stomach to death. So, no killing in store for us, after all. No Isaac-to-completion-this-time. But if Amos or I were killed at a stroke?

The Harvester, damn it I remember now, thinking Dad and Tyler had been talking about a harvester, although neither of them had anything to harvest, and it was
the
harvester they were talking about, not
a
harvester. I had left them together and come back a moment later to get something I’d forgotten—a knife, or something, I forget—and I overheard them talking about “the harvester,” and they hushed up about it the moment they knew I was there, and they did know, even though I’d made no sound, all at once their voices stopped. Dad called to me, then. I was observed closely in the little chat that followed. What had I heard? they were wondering.

“What harvester? You goin’ to plant something? You goin’ to plant crops, Daddy?”

I didn’t tell them everything.

I hadn’t heard anything about any harvester, because, after some careful remembering, I decided the word they’d used wasn’t harvester but a word I didn’t know, which was “evester,” a word I stored away, in case I ever heard it again. I knew better than to ask them what it meant.

Then, years later, the garage, me trying to get open a jammed drawer in the workbench and noticed the corner of the book peeping out from behind the work table, where it had fallen unheeded some time ago—a spiral notebook, Dad’s of course. I peeled it open and saw—

“The Evester is a thing like a shadow on the wall.”

The top of the page had PARACELSUS: THREE BOOKS OF PHILOSOPHY WRITTEN TO THE ATHENIANS.

“The Evester is a thing like a shadow on the wall,” the page said.

“The shadow riseth and waxeth greater as the body doth, and continueth with it even unto its last matter…” the page said.

“So when one is ready to die, death seizeth not on him till the Evester hath first past sentence, either by blow, bruise, or fall, or some such other kind of example; by which if a man perceive the Evester, he may see a signe of his approaching death,” it said, and also, “…a mans Evester remaineth in the earth after his death…”

And it said, “the dead mans Evester… departeth not hence till the last minute when all things shall come together. This Evester worketh strange things. Holy men wrought miracles by their Evester onely.”

Amos died alone, in his car. Instantaneous. Hence, no driving for me. No car. No where else to go. No money.

The passage is vague about something important—can someone do strange things with someone else’s Evester, once that person is dead? Did they wait, Tyler and my Dad, for the Evesters to grow with our bodies? My body stopped waxing and started waning again a long time ago. Perhaps the Evester grows younger again, as the body withers?

The stillness is thickening out there. In here, there is the noise of my breathing, the chair’s complaints. Out there it is getting stiller and stiller and stiller. The trees, the waning day, are turning to church pews. I don’t know what I mean. There’s an expectancy around the house. It will come fully to life when Brian and Stephanie get back, try to kill me. If they can. I think they think I’m passed due. But no one ever told me anything. Amos did say to me, once, that he thought his Dad was watching for something bad, and sudden. It struck me because it seemed like my parents were fugitives from something worse than the law. They never talked about the past. They had set pieces about the past, but they were all lies, they never talked about—

The motor—

Nothing. Did I—?

There!

Coming. Do I know it will be today?

I’m afraid. I’m sweating. My hands are shaking. Shaking more. Why did I stay?

I get up. Can barely breathe, I’m breathing so hard. My back is killing me.

To the back door, back porch. Then out. Away, anywhere. Throw myself into the woods, crawl if I have to. I can’t get my breath. Sick to my stomach. I reach to steady myself and I tear something in my arm. I can’t stand up straight. My knees keep folding.

The motor sounds clear, coming around the bend. A blast of wind drives me back toward the door. The wind… thrashing… shoving at me… My arm… Splintering pain in my knees as I drop onto the back porch. Screaming in my arm—the muscle torn in half—impaling in my back, gouging its way up into my neck—
—I didn’t tear anything in my arm it’s a heart attack.

I hear a chuckle, like Dad’s.

Coming from my open mouth.

Stop laughing!

I can’t help it…

Car door.

You’re a bit late! My dears!

Agony—nausea, and pain, my neck ripping.

“He-ey!”

Brian’s voice.

What is that? A silence? Something went silent? I look up.

—I see it! I see it! A flame! There! It’s there! Standing in space, the wind lashing the trees behind it and it burning straight up and down! Not a flicker! Not a waver! Not a glimmer! I see it, Amos! I see them! The ring of lights! Tears—what a time for them, choking on them—The face is there too, Amos—oh God it’s me! It’s me. Young! The flame burns from the crown! I still feel it ripping—

Why don’t I go numb?

“To me!” I groan. “To me!”

There! I see what it is now! It’s a
reflection!