The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (4 page)

“Um… all right, sure, okay. You do that.”

“I promise I’ll bring it back soon, after the bathouse goes up. Would that be acceptable?”

“…yes.”

That smile again, a little wider. “Then it’s a deal.”

Gone, moments later, as though she’d never been. Only the tarp, peeled back like a lid, gave any evidence of her passage. Lydie stood there looking at it for a few more breaths, thinking:
You need a break, food, a minute. Go inside. No more today.

But the sun was hot and bright, the cool, dark hole inviting. A minute more, therefore, and she was already halfway down—far enough inside to glance back up, just for a second, and almost think she saw the hole itself blink shut, grass-fringed rim knitting like eyelashes, to shutter away her from the harsh surface world forever.

So nice,
she thought, happily, going down on both knees to grub in the mud some more.
So very nice, always, to come home.

***

The bathouse went up both fast and easy, as advertised. A week on, Lydie watched its inhabitants fly up at twilight, scattering like thoughts into the night as they chased their food, the next echo, each other. By bedtime, undressing in front of the window that looked down onto the back yard, she felt as though could still hear them twittering, even though she knew they probably weren’t there. Beneath its tarp-lid, the hole gaped open, its presence always a slightly painful, slightly pleasurable ache; she lay there trying not to think about it, but enjoying when she failed.

“Today wasn’t your first class, was it?” Ethan asked, sleepily, from beside her.

“What?”

“Well, you said six weeks…” No reply. “You missed it, didn’t you? Oh, honey.”

“I can make it up.”

“Yeah, hope so.”

Annoyed, Lydie turned over, scoffing. “C’mon, Ethan, they want our money, don’t they—
your
money. Of course I can.”

The next day, however, she was back down in the hole (cellphone still charging on the bedside table, blissfully forgotten) when Paula’s long shadow fell over her, making her look up. And: “Hey!” Lydie called. “So you
did
come back, after all.”

“I said I would.”

“Uh huh. Your supervisor… he like the artifact?”

“Very much. I’ve got it, if you want it back.”

“Just give me a sec.”

More like thirty to finish up, thirty more to clamber free, wiping the sweat from her eyes. Paula stood there, toad-rock already extended, offered up; Lydie put out her hand as Paula dropped it, fisting the totem gratefully, as if reclaiming a lost piece of herself. She gave a cave-deep sigh.

“That feels good,” she’d said out loud, before she could think to stop herself.

Paula smiled. “I thought it would. Now—if you don’t mind me disturbing you just a
little
bit further, might I possibly be able to see what’s in the shed?”

***

No actual rack, just a long, low trio of shelves which had once held flowerpots, before Lydie relocated them. She’d cleaned the skulls off carefully, one by one—each so muddy they’d initially looked like they were sculpted from clay—by first letting them dry before going at them with a variety of unofficial fine-cleaning tools, paring away dirt and grime with brushes meant for paints or makeup, scaling the eye-sockets with wire loops to remove as much detritus as possible before breaking out the sand, the bleach soaks, the polyurethane sprays. Now they grinned in welcome, display-organized left to right, until Paula gingerly picked up the first on the uppermost row, raising it towards the light.

Each came with a hole just above where the bridge of the nose would be, if there was a nose, mirroring the totems, and on each the hole at first seemed differently shaped, though careful examination revealed another, more subtle pattern of variation. For in those holes, so seamlessly fitted they almost appeared to have been individually made
for
the space it now occupied, Lydie had laid each of the totems she’d dug up carefully to rest: insect, bird, snake, bat, toad, plus some sort of low, broad thing with long claws, squat legs and a blunt, blind head, like a mole or badger. A catalogue of every crawling and creeping thing which ever forced itself through some crack in the earth and hid itself inside, trading light for dark, at the urging of some hidden, hollow voice.

“Thought they were signs of trepanning, at first,” Lydie heard herself explain, her own tone thinning, flattening, words tumbling out in a breathy, secretive rush, as though she feared being stopped before she could finish. “Even though they were in the wrong place. I didn’t even think to match them up for… must’ve been weeks, a month. A happy accident.”

“Often the way,” Paula murmured. “And then what?”

“I started thinking about why. The point of the exercise.” Lydie paused, feeling her way, waiting for the words to suggest themselves. “What you could hope to—extract, that way. From the same place people used to think visions came from, or dreams… the seat of enlightenment.”

“The
ajna
, or brow chakra. Where things open up.”

“Yeah, but not if something’s blocking it—fear, maybe. Desire, Some kind of… lower instinct. Like an animal.”

“And you think that’s what they were removing.”

“Metaphorically, it makes a certain kind of sense—I mean, no
sense
at all, really. But still… that
is
what it looks like, to me: like they were trying to create a completely new way of seeing. A totem for every hole, a congealed bit of nightmare, a filter that needs to be removed, before you can see clearly. The plug that keeps us all from letting something out—”

“—or in.”

“Or in, yes. The light…”

(
the dark
)

Unable to keep from connecting the dots, now it’d finally been said—from seeing the hole, the place left empty for an answer, and being therefore driven to fill it. To keep from wondering whether that had perhaps been her mother’s problem all along, solution inherent in its own equation:
Could
she have been cured all along, and this easily? A single, fairly simple operation, just one; cut a hole, take out what you find there and throw it away, down into the dark. Just offer it up to whatever wants it, and find the courage to finally accept things
as they really goddamn are,
without having to be afraid. And then…

…and then.

Standing there wound down, sunk inside herself, no longer able to tell whether or not she was saying any of this out loud, or what. Then something at the corner of her gaze again, a black flicker; she looked up. Just in time to see Paula put down the skull (carefully, gently,
reverently
) and reach up, behind her head, to flick open some sort of knot or clip, slackening her headband until it was loose enough to unwind. Which she began to do, one long fold at a time, without haste or worry—slow and careful, the very same way she told Lydie, still smiling—

“I
knew
we were right about you, Mrs Massenet… Lydie. Though of course, I haven’t been as entirely honest, from the beginning, as I might have hoped to be; I knew you already, you see, that first day I came here.
Of
you, at any rate.”

Lydie swallowed, dryly. “Oh?” she managed, eventually.

“Yes… as Lydie Pell, to be exact. Through your mother.”

One twist, then another, then another—just one more, the final one. Leaving Paula’s forehead bare at last, high and broad and smooth, yet pitted centrally with a perfect shell of scar tissue, cracked just a hint at its core: the very same place where Lydie could feel that intermittent migraine-seed of hers re-forming, bone-planted but pushing upwards and out, threatening to bloom. Because here she was at last, arrived, like she’d always somehow known she one day would be: this place, this very moment, teetering on the brink and wondering just what might be lurking under there, waiting, in the dark. A naked pineal bud, eyelid-furled, waiting to breach the scar’s tissue-plated embrace, sip at the air, twitch and blink?

But:
Does it matter, Lydie?
her mother replied,
wearily, memory-locked.
The hole has its own reasons, always. Do you really want to know what they are?

Inside the bathouse, the sleeping bats cooed and scrabbled, shrilling sleepily.

“I fell in a hole once, a long time ago,” Paula went on, stroking down along the ridge that threatened to bisect her open, guileless gaze with one pinkie delicately lifted, as though she were about to serve tea. “Just like this one. And it was scary, at first: so dark, so deep. But after a while, once my eyes adjusted, I found that I didn’t want to get out again at all, let alone go home. Because there were
so
many wonderful things down there, to see, and do, and be. Wouldn’t you like to know what?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Always. You always have a choice.”

Which sounded plausible, and not, both at the same time—a truth, thinly disguised as a lie. Or vice versa.

Tongue leather, head swimming. Migraine between her eyes, turning in a tightening spiral, like a screw. Like the coin-shaped burr hole a trephine leaves behind, after the flesh has been cut away and the skull pierced, to show the sweet grey-pink beneath.

Thinking:
So the first harrowing was me breaking up the earth and sifting it for traces, exposing more and more of this buried ruin. But the second harrowing will be a descent into the underworld, a sort of anti-transfiguration… instead of rising into the sky, sinking into the earth and burrowing down, fertilizing it with yourself, a hole inside a hole. Become, at last, the mulch from which something new will grow.

Lydie looked down, then up again, meeting Paula’s gaze with her own. Felt herself nod.

“I thought so,” Paula said, happily. “Now—hold still.”

And Lydie did, drawing herself taut, rigid, eyes wide. Trying not to flinch as the wickedly curved black stone blade Paula pulled from behind her back made its necessarily painful mark, x-signing the spot where her Folly-stone hid, first one way, then the other.
’
Til it radish-rosed a great peel of skin, parting the bloody petals key-into-lock smooth, to lay the slick white bone bare at last and open her up in one swift punch, digging the hole to set her final nightmare free.

Then down, always down, curve after curve, counterclockwise—following the signs which marked her path
’
til she could go no more: markings, so luminous and many-layered, on stone which had seemed empty under light, lit up like stars now darkness led the way. Until the surface disappeared. Until Ethan and the rest fell away. Until there was nothing left but one step and the next, over and over: the signs, the path, its eventual end.

(
Lydie, don’t
)

The mouth of the cave, whispering in her blood. Her question, and its answer.

(
don’t trust it
)

Like you never did, Mother?
Lydie thought, unsympathetic. Remembering Paula, whose family had cast her out instead of welcoming her back; Paula, who took the gifts they spurned, and grew to fit them. Paula, her three eyes shining, beckoning to Lydie from the very, very bottom of the hole, the once-top of some inverted mountain huge enough to dwarf Chomolungma.

Here at the bottom, where she finally had worth, and truth, and purpose. Where in led out, and out back in. Where no one mattered more than she did, at least for task at hand.

I walk the harrow, downwards-tending,
Lydie Massenet Pell thought, wiping her own blood from her pitifully weak, light-dependent lower set of eyes, while concentrating hard enough to let the uppermost of all three show her the way.
Dragging my blades, ploughing
’
til there is no more left to plow, waiting below
’
til harvest comes, and we all ascend.
’
Til the pale sun shrinks so far it becomes nothing more than just another star in a half-forgotten sky.

Above her, the rock, like choirs. Below her, the dirt, like flesh, and blood, and food. The great, uprooted currents of the earth, pulling her towards its burning, pulsing, molten heart.

Home.

Pale Apostle

J. T. Glover & Jesse Bullington

W
ah Sung replaced the box on the shelf and made another mark on the tally sheet, shivering all the while. The February cold of Seattle had nothing on the blizzards that roared down from the Chiung-lai Mountains and blasted across the Red Basin, but something about the cold here chilled her in a way it never had back in Ch’eng-tu. Her father didn’t heat the stock room, claiming that it saved the potency of the various herbs, dried insects, and animal parts they imported for the local apothecaries… to say nothing of the tea!

Privately, Wah suspected this decision only preserved the potency of their coalscuttle, but considering the sorry state of their ledgers, fuel might soon become as rare as bear bile. Running a shaky hand over her loosely tied-back hair, she scowled at the obstinate numbers on the sheet, wishing so much were different.