The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (2 page)

Ross experienced it first. He’d be out walking his dog in sunny California, or out at his local bookstore when he would see
him
. Only it wasn’t actually him? Ross would catch a glimpse, just enough for him to realize he’d seen Laird. When he looked back he would see Laird standing there, at the mouth of an alley, or the end of a row of bookshelves. And it was definitely Laird, his mug isn’t the kind you mistake for someone else. Ross was perplexed, he told me later, because he was sure he was seeing Laird. He looked long enough for the imposter’s face to split into a black grin, and then with a wink the not-Laird would duck into the alley or step away from the aisle of books. Ross thought Laird must have been playing some kind of elaborate prank on him, until I pointed him to one of Laird’s blog posts. Apparently some of Laird’s friends have seen this doppelgänger before, but never more than once. I know this spooked Ross, and he hasn’t been the same since. I often ask him if it’s happened again, but whenever I bring it up he goes pale, changes the subject. If I push, he firmly denies anymore sightings, but I have my doubts.

I figured it out. Ross thinks we are just putting together a good group of stories, tries to justify his weird sightings with lack of sleep and too much reading for the project. But I know better, the dots are all there, easy to connect. Several of our authors have confided in me that during the writing process they were fraught with night terrors, and even a few cases of sleepwalking. One author turned in his story in a daze, and swore to me that he doesn’t have a single memory of writing it. One could chalk all this up to writer’s stress, working in overdrive to meet the deadline, but that doesn’t explain what happened with our foreword. A certain big-shot author sent us a foreword, before disappearing. Nobody has heard from him since. Ross and I debated on using the foreword regardless, only to find that it had somehow been erased from both of our computers. Strange coincidence considering we both reside on opposite sides of the country.

And then there’s me. Being woken up in the middle of the night by whispers from friends long departed. Easy enough to pass off as echoes from dreams, but that doesn’t explain why I would find the dog cowering under the bed whimpering. Or the black, sticky footprints left across my kitchen floor, cellar door ajar although I always check the latch before heading to bed.

If you’re still reading this you must now know that it’s too late for you, too. You’ve started to twist the handle, and the opening of the door is soon to follow. You’re going to meet the dwellers on the other side. The Children of Old Leech will soon be whispering in your ear, and they will whisper the same thing they whispered to me:
“There are frightful things. We who crawl in the dark love you.”

The Harrow

Gemma Files

T
he earth is old and full of holes,
Lydie Massenet’s mother used to say, at least once a day, back when she was still Lydie Pell.
Its crust is thin, and underneath there’s nothing but darkness. A rind, that’s all we live on; just thin ice, waiting for it to thaw and crack. No need to dig, really—if they want to find you, they will. Never trust anything that comes out of a hole.

And:
Okay, Mom,
Lydie would say, the way her father had taught her to.
That’s good. That’s fine.
Then just smile and nod, all the time staring off at nothing much, something invisible—contemplating Mars, he called it—until her mother finally stopped talking.

You have to know this, Lydie, if nothing else,
her mother told her.
Darkness shifts, darkness conceals; it’s impossible to know what’s hiding inside it, no matter how hard you try. But if history teaches anything, it’s that what we don’t understand, we fear… and what we fear, eventually, we come to worship, if only to keep it in its rightful place. To make sure it doesn’t come after
us
.

Yes, Mom. Okay. Sure.

’Til, one day:
Stop
saying that, goddamnit!
her mother yelled, and slapped Lydie across the face, so hard her glasses cracked in half. That was the day her father brought Doctor Russ home, the day before her mother went somewhere else—first for a rest, and then, after everything they did to her while she was there had utterly failed to make her well enough to come home again, to stay.

What’s wrong with her, Daddy?
Lydie asked her father, at last, to which he only shook his head and sniffed, trying to pretend he hadn’t been crying.

Honey, I wish to God I knew,
was all he said, in return. And hugged her a little too long, a little too tight.

***

By April, Lydie couldn’t stand it anymore. “I have to learn how to drive,” she said to her husband, Ethan.

“Told you,” he replied.

Thing was, in Toronto proper, you just didn’t need to have a car, let alone a license—
she
certainly hadn’t, her first twenty-one years of life. Lydie had vague memories of having passed the Young Drivers of Canada exam’s written portion, once upon a time, but more as a personal challenge; to go further required money she was loath to spare, at the time, and after that there was always the subway, or streetcars, buses, even taxis. Living in the downtown core, where she and Ethan first met, meant you could speed-walk almost anywhere you needed to in an hour or less.

Five anniversaries in, however, the powers that be decided Toronto proper was too expensive a place to rent offices, relocating wholesale to Mississauga. No big deal for Ethan, who’d grown up there. But to Lydie, it was the ends of the earth—“suburbs” squared, with no sidewalks, no easy-access stores. For a few seconds, the day they’d arrived, she’d fantasized about dragging her shopping cart the equivalent of five blocks to the local GO Train station, then investing in a four-hour/twelve-dollar return trip just to pick up enough food for the week from her previous neighbourhood’s supermarket.

“Oh, no need,” her mother-in-law had offered, helpfully, when she voiced this idea. “There’s a mall, just twenty minutes northeast.”

“Can I walk it?”

An odd look. “I… really wouldn’t, dear.”

In the morning, she saw for herself just why: the sole connecting road was a highway turned freeway, overpass after overpass looping sharply up, around and down, like J. G. Ballard porn brought to life. Standing there in shock, she couldn’t keep from asking Ethan: “People
live
like this?”

“Well, yeah, Lyd, apparently so. And most of them manage just fine.”

“How?”

He shot her a pitying look. “They have
cars.
”

That morning, she woke with a headache-seed lodged right between her brows, hard and sharp as Bosch’s Stone of Folly. Google gave her a list of numbers to call, trying to line up an appointment with an Adult Drivers instructor. By noon she was still on her cellphone, out in the back yard—another unfamiliar Mississauga oddity, weird combination of luxurious and annoying—when she came across what she’d eventually call the artifact: felt something uneven shift under her foot as she stepped back, almost tripping her, then squatted to squint at the ground, regardless of how high her skirt might hike. There, just protruding out of the earth with its uppermost portion wreathed in grass (a tiny crown, promise-green and fertile), a rough-carved, triangular little face peeped up at her, framed by a pair of short horns or antennae—one broken off jaggedly, almost at the root.

Black rock, lighter than it looked, and warm to the touch once she’d scratched it free, ruining Monday’s manicure. Her fingers curled ’round it instinctively, an almost sensual grip, to find it fit the hollow shaped between thumb, forefinger and palm, as if made for it.

Some sort of insect on top, yes, carapaced and six-limbed. But in the centre, where its thorax should be, something else sat instead: the sketch of a human skull, empty-socketed and noseless, grinning wide. With a neat little hole placed just where its brow-ridge should be, for no apparently obvious reason.

“What’s that?” Ethan asked when he came home to find her sitting at the kitchen table, dinner not even slightly started, still staring at it. And: “I don’t know,” Lydie answered, barely looking up; just kept on studying the bug-skull-thing in her hand, ’til at last he sighed, and called out for pizza.

Later, she took pictures with her phone and googled the resulting images. A trail of links (
insect totems,
catal huyuk, gobekli tepe, lbk culture, tallheim death-pit, herxheim
) led her to something recognizable: prehistoric trepanning, the procedure of cutting a hole in the skull to relieve cranial pressure, as of a subdural haematoma. Sometimes done for ritual purposes, or so various archaeologists claimed… but in Mesoamerica, at least, those waters had been muddied by the fact that prisoners’ and sacrificial victims’ skulls were often routinely pierced to facilitate the creation of skull-racks: rows on rows of severed heads, hung up on pegs, or hooks.

The hole goes at the back, usually,
she thought, tapping a finger against her teeth.
Or on top. Never in front.

Between the brows, though, or slightly higher—there was a symbolism there, right? The pineal gland. The third eye.

Around two, she lay down next to Ethan with her eyes open, contemplating the ceiling while he snored. Thinking:
I wonder if there’s more.

***

When she and Lydie’s father were kids, there’d been a girl, Lydie’s mother used to tell her. And one day, when they were all out in the woods playing, this girl had somehow stepped… wrong, laid her foot on the one place she shouldn’t have, and broke through, opening up a hole. Had tumbled down into what later proved to be a cave that went straight down, too deep to see the bottom, and with no earthly way of ever getting back out, once you were in.

A story grew up amongst the group of children Lydie’s mother ran with, afterwards, that if you were to go to that hole, that cave, and hang your head out over the edge—if you did that, and whispered your greatest fear or wish or dream down into the black pit below, while clinging on for dear life with both hands—then if you only waited long enough, a voice would answer. And that voice would tell you if your dream, or wish, or fear would… if it
should
… come true.

Whose voice, Mom?

No one knows.

Didn’t anyone ever ask?

Oh, no. No. That would be…

Here Lydie’s mother had trailed away into silence, one so long Lydie had thought at the time it might signify the conversation was over, before finally adding, minutes later—

…never, no, never. No one would dare.

Lydie studied her hands for another few beats of her pulse, letting the moment stretch on. Then asked:
Did
you
ever do that?

Lydie’s mother swallowed.

Once, yes,
she said, reluctantly.
Only once. And that was a mistake.

Why?
No reply.
But… did it answer you, Mom?

And:
No,
her mother replied, with a sad, angry sort of hunger.
But that’s just as well, isn’t it? Because you can’t trust such things, I’ve told you that already… those sorts of places, the earth’s open holes. The dark, and the ones who live there.

Why not?

Because… they
lie.

***

“What is it you’re digging, dear, exactly?” her mother-in-law asked, on Friday, when she turned up to take Lydie shopping. Lydie smiled and drew her gardening gloves off, pausing to thwack them clean against the stake she’d sunk to mark her initial excavation; dirt fell in clumps, dusting her boots. “Flowerbed,” she replied, without blinking.

“Ah. Eh—isn’t that one already, over there?”

“Sure. I just… wanted more.”

“A little project, to keep you busy
’
til driving school?”

“You got it.”

Ethan never even bothered to ask what she was doing out there, all day, every day—not after that first night. Not so long as she got her cooking done in the morning, and made sure there was something for him to eat when he came home.

“Boss might want to come for dinner,” he told her, skimming headlines on his iPad, as she catalogued her latest finds: more insects, some mammals, even a figure or two. Through the window, the tarp she’d thrown over the hole caught her eye, dun and dull, flat as a cataract. Without prompting, her mind went to those other things she’d uncovered, the ones she’d never bring inside: some locked in the shed, others still underground, concealed by the dig’s lip. Down in the dark with the worms, where no one would see, unless—one day soon, perhaps—she decided she wanted them to.

“Better to take her out, don’t you think?” she suggested, smoothly. “That place with the steak, maybe—the Korean banquet-house. You remember.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right. Where we took Mom and Dad, for their fiftieth.”

“That’s the one.”

“Mmm, good call, hon. She’d like that.”