The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (3 page)

“There you go.”

***

Some people say God turned the world upside down, once,
Lydie’s mother whispered, into the close, hot air of her small, dim hospital room.
Just for fun. And many strange things came up out of the earth, then, things trapped down there for a hundred thousand years, ever since the world was made… just like the Flood, but different. And many bad people joined with these things, and flourished, and many good people died screaming. Until finally, when he didn’t find it quite as funny anymore, God flipped it all back over again, and made everything the way it was. Like when you lift up a rock to see the bugs crawling underneath, and when you’re bored, you just drop it again, and squash them; you don’t have to care what happens, because they’re just bugs, after all. And better yet, it’s not like you have to
see
it.

But some people say he never did flip it back again at all, God,
Lydie’s mother whispered, later.
That’s why things are so bad up here, even though God made us, and everything around us. Because this world, all we see, was never meant to be on top at all. It was meant to be hidden, kept down, trapped. Because where we live, right now… we live in hell. What was
meant
to be hell.

Shush, Irma. For Christ’s sake, shush.

(But:
Where did the people who were meant to be in hell live, then? Lydie used to wonder.
And the things down there in the dark, the people who weren’t people, the ones her mother kept on warning her about… who were they? Was that meant to be
heaven
, down there?)

What happened to that girl, anyways?
Lydie was finally unable to keep from asking her father, one night, as he stroked her mother’s hair back from her rigid, sweating face.
The one from the story. The one who fell into the hole.

Oh, well… they never did find her, honey, though they looked a good long time, all the time your mom and me were at school together. And that’s why you should stay away from places like that—in the woods, under the ground. To stay safe.

But:
Karl, why would you lie to her that way, our own daughter?
her mother broke in, suddenly.
You know as well as I do that she
did
come back, eventually… all cold and wet and naked, knocking on her family’s door and crying, in the middle of the night. But they knew they shouldn’t let her in, because they were old now, and she—she was the same, just a kid. Just like the last time they saw her.

Irma, please, be quiet. My God, why won’t you ever keep quiet? You’ll frighten her to death.

At this, Lydie’s mother’s lips drew back; you couldn’t call it a smile, not quite, for all it involved was lips turning upwards. Not after you’d spent some time alone with it.

Oh no,
she said.
No, she’s not frightened—are you, darling? Don’t listen to him, Lydie; go where you want, do what you want. Go dig. Go whisper in every hole you see, for all anybody cares.

See what you get, then.

***

In agriculture, a harrow (often called a set of harrows, in a
plurale tantum
sense) is an implement for breaking up and smoothing out the surface of the soil, distinct from the plough, which is used for deeper tillage. Harrowing is often carried out on fields to follow the rougher finish left by ploughing
operations. The purpose of harrowing is to break up clods of soil and provide a finer finish, a good tilth or soil structure, suitable for seedbed use.

In Christian mythology we speak of “the harrowing of hell,” Jesus’s descent into the underworld during his three days of death. In this case, the word “harrow” derives from the Old English
hergian
, meaning to harry or despoil—the idea that Christ invaded and triumphed over hell, releasing all those kept captive there, including redeeming Adam and Eve, the fount of all original sin.

“Excuse me,” a voice said, from behind the back fence.

Lydie bookmarked her page and set the iPad aside. Someone was looking in at her through the narrow mesh of the gate next to the shed, so dense it barely suggested their eyes, like the facial grille of an Afghan
chadri
—female by the voice, Lydie could only assume, which was husky, flute-y. Though the level of the shadow “she” threw did suggest a fairly unusual height.

“I’m sorry,” Lydie said, automatically. “Can I help you?”

“I hope so, yes,” the voice said. “Could I come in and talk to you, just for a minute?” Quickly adding, a moment later, as Lydie hesitated: “Boy, that
does
sound sinister, doesn’t it? Better to come back later, maybe, when you’re not all alone. I’ll bring pamphlets.”

“Oh, no, no, no,” Lydie found herself protesting, hand already on the latch. “I’m—it’s fine, really. I just… wasn’t expecting anybody.”

As she opened the gate, the woman—it
was
a woman, now Lydie saw her up close; she was almost sure—smiled, lips canting sidelong like a slow-typed emoticon (back-slash, then semi-colon plus an apostrophe, to mark where that dimple formed closed-quotes punctuation), and stepped inside. Her skin was aggressively tanned, hair bleached at the top and brown at the tips as though she’d been out in the sun for weeks somewhere far hotter than here, let alone today, and held back with a tight-wound bandana so low it brushed the tops of her equally pale eyebrows.

“Paula Neath,” she announced. “From the Society for Ecological Rebalance.”

While:
1. in or to a lower position;
Lydie’s brain filled in, automatically.
Below. 2. underneath, prep. 3. under. 4. farther down than. 5. lower…

She shook her head, scattering words, and held out her hand, smiling too. “Lydie Massenet. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of you.”

“Well, we’re a fairly recently formed project. Most of us were doing other things before we got the call… I was in Turkey, for example, tracking genetic variation in honeybees, locust migration patterns, that sort of thing. But actually, what I’m here to talk about is bats.”

“That’s an interesting subject-shift.”

“Not really. All part of the same ecosystem.” Paula jogged her head towards the yard’s back left corner. “Now, the reason I wanted a word is that as it so happens, your
property corners onto this block’s drainage ditch—do you know where that is?”

Lydie nodded. “Runs under the mouths of all the driveways on the south side, then dips down under the street. Tell you the truth, I hate that thing: when it rains, it’s a stream; the rest of the time, it’s a sump, stagnant. It stinks.”

“Exactly—perfect for breeding mosquitos, which spread West Nile disease. Previously, the city’s plan to deal with that involved spraying, but we’re seeing some very alarming fallout from that… denuded bee population, for one, which affects pollination, which cuts down on new growth generally. So we’d like to put up a grouping of bat-houses in various areas, including right here.”

“Like a birdhouse, but for bats.”

“Exactly.” That smile again. “I’ll be honest, Mrs Massenet—”

“Lydie.”

“—a lot of people seem to think the idea of opening their arms to flying mice is a bit of a deal-breaker. One lady was convinced they spread rabies, for example; that sort of stereotype. Old wives’ tales, to put it frankly.”

“Didn’t want guano in their hair?”

“Didn’t want
bats
in their hair.” They both chuckled. “Foolish, I know. Bats are nocturnal, far more interested in insects and nectar than anybody’s follicles. You’d barely see them, except at dusk.”

“Sounds sort of nice, to me. Do they make noise?”

“Not within the hearing-range of most humans.”

Lydie shrugged. “Okay, then. I’m sold.”

“Wonderful! You won’t regret it—we’ll be in and out, no muss, no fuss. And the public health benefits will be striking, once the bats have had a bit of time to do their work.”

“I don’t doubt it. So… you must be from the university, right? Did they bus you in?”

“Most of us, yes; some of us live here, in the area.”

“Nice to work where you live.”

“Yes.” Paula’s sharp eyes—an odd non-colour, neither grey nor blue, almost clear when glimpsed straight-on—shifted from Lydie’s, focusing instead on the tarp, as well as the earth piled neatly next to it. “You’ve been doing some work of your own, by the look of it.”

“Oh, uh… not officially. I mean—”

“May I see?”

“Well…”

…why not?

Surprising, in its way, the idea that she would
want
to show Paula, a complete stranger, what she’d so carefully managed to keep from everyone else—her loved ones, supposedly. The people who loved her. And yet, that did seem to be what that usually silent voice deep inside her was suggesting… that midnight whisper, sexless and dark, ambiguous as Paula’s own throaty purr.

(
Don’t listen, Lydie. They
lie.)

So—

“Yes,” Lydie replied, and moved the tarp aside, allowing Paula to see: the hole, and what it concealed. A gaping, sod-lipped mouth which never quite promised answers, for everything else it delivered; oddities, rarities, the strange, the unique. Something you could hold in your hand and study, but never fully understand, except perhaps in dreams.

The dig went ten feet in, these days, much of it almost straight down—a ladder she’d found in the shed providing access, tall enough to reach the roof when unfurled—and with an odd little trailing twist at the bottom, brief sloping sketch of further possibilities. Ethan would be horrified; Lydie couldn’t even venture a guess at what her mother-in-law would think. They were such sweet people, really, it seemed only
right
to hide the truth where it couldn’t hurt them… kinder, in its way, than the alternative.

If Mom’d only done that,
she found herself thinking, sometimes, as she hadn’t let herself for years,
then things would’ve—might’ve been—very different.

Paula took in everything Lydie’d spent the last two months doing, then hiding—the open wound of her craziness, at long last laid bare—with one swift, shrewd, searching glance. Then turned her back, stepping down into darkness, sinking
’
til all Lydie could see of her was the top of her head; her voice seeped back up, dirt-magnified, made hollow at the bone. “Fascinating,” she said. “This is… Neolithic, would you say?”

“Older, maybe. I think it got folded under when the glaciers shifted.”

“Yes, very likely. You’re extremely perceptive, Mrs Massenet.”

Lydie shrugged, embarrassed. “Hardly. I mean—it’s weird to think about, something like
this
under our feet, just hidden away… still so perfect after so many years, with all this suburban crap slapped on top. But there you go.”

“It is odd,” Paula agreed, words deepening further as she bent to rummage through the slick bottom of the shaft, picking and choosing. “But no more so than anything, really. The earth is older than any of us care to acknowledge, and
everywhere
was somewhere else, once. Most people simply don’t bother to look any closer than they have to at what they already think they know, unless…”

“…unless something
makes
them.”

“Exactly.”

(
Old, and full of holes. But do not put your hand down to see, because
…)

Lydie took a small, shallow breath. There was something—she wasn’t sure what. A kind of wobble, at the corner of her eyes; black spots hovering, blinking. Was she going to pass out?

A few moments later, however, Paula had made her way back up the ladder in two massive steps, and was standing once more on the lip’s moustache-like rut of trodden grass. Extending one huge, muck-filled hand, she scoured free an entirely new type of totem between her thumb and forefinger, with swift, almost brutal strokes: a squat, oval thing, bulgy at both ends like a toad, and small enough even Lydie might’ve mistaken it for a mere clot of mud-wrapped rock… except for the fact that she knew where to look, and what for.

“Beautiful,” Paula named it, reverently. “How many have you found, so far?”

“Oh, more and more, usually five, eight a day… sometimes ten, if I can dig uninterrupted
’
til my husband comes home. They don’t ever seem to stop. I’m thinking votive objects, a whole cache of them, brought here on pilgrimage and buried, as some sort of—prayer, or sacrifice. Some sort of payment.”

“You’ve done your research.” As Lydie shook her head: “No? Then your instincts are
very
good, considering. Nice work, either way.”

“I took archaeology in university,” Lydie offered. “Just one course a year, but I kept it up all the way through my degree; I’d’ve liked to go back, to specialize, but…”

“Things happen, yes—sadly, almost always. We move away from our dreams, or they move away from us; seem to, at any rate. But sometimes, the universe provides a second chance.” Here Paula closed her hand, tucking the totem away, and watching as Lydie couldn’t stop herself from flinching. “May I keep this? Not forever, believe me… just for a few days. I’d like to show it to my supervisor.”