The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (8 page)

Inside, however, the hotel proved to be as luxurious as it had appeared Spartan from without. Red carpets, crystal chandeliers, gilt everything else. We were shown into an enormous ballroom where a projector and screen were set up in pride of place, with couches and divans arrayed for our viewing pleasure. The artwork that normally hung along the walls had been removed, and in its place were easels draped in black cloth. All part of the night’s festivities, I assumed.

I knew that Henri himself had dabbled in painting once, when he was younger. I’d never seen the results, but I’d heard that at his best he’d mostly just knocked off Goya. At Henri’s one and only gallery opening a critic was apparently overheard to remark, “If you’ve seen everything Goya ever did, and you still want more, then Henri’s the man to talk to,” though whether that was intended as condemnation or praise, I couldn’t say. By the time Nicky and I met him, he’d already given it up, but his passion for the arts remained a constant throughout his life, so I wasn’t exactly surprised to see the easels there.

The man himself was there too, playing the good host and glad-handing his guests as they entered. He looked much as he had the last time I’d seen him, which was also much as he had the
first
time I’d seen him, though now his hair and beard were grayer, and the tiredness that was supposedly driving his retirement could be seen in the corners of his eyes, even as they sparkled as ever with his smile. The years had made him seem distinguished, rather than old, as they were kind enough to do for some people, and he wore his age well.

He kissed Nicky’s hand, shook mine, and then he and Nicky were flirting again—Nicky always was flirtatious, Henri always shameless—and then Henri had drifted away to talk to one of the other guests. “It’ll be some time before the festivities start,” he said over his shoulder as he departed. “The witching hour, and all that. One of the servants can show you to your room, if you’d like to freshen up.”

The “servants” were men in coats-and-tails, wearing shapeless
papier mâché
masks that made them look a bit like disfigured corpses. I knew from previous revels that under the masks I would find invariably young, attractive men, paid well for their forbearance and their discretion.

One of these broke off to escort Nicky and me to our rooms, which were next to each other and connected by an adjoining door. Henri, gracious and accommodating to the last. The rooms were as sumptuously appointed as one might expect, except for the narrow, slit-like windows that were the lasting testament of the building’s former function. “There’s an observation deck on the roof,” the faceless “servant” told me when he saw that I was eyeing the window with some distaste. “It provides a much better view.”

I sat down on the bed and kicked off my shoes. The clock on the desk said that I still had almost two hours until midnight, and I was suddenly very tired. The headache from the train was back, and I just wanted to lay down in the dark.

Nicky came from the adjoining room. “I’m going up to the observation deck before the party starts,” he said, patting his camera bag. “You want to come?”

I shook my head and laid backward into the softness of the bed. “I think I’m going to take a nap,” I said. “Wake me before you go downstairs.”

***

He left then, and I slept, or I must have, because I dreamed. In my dream, I had gone with Nicky to the roof. He was standing near the railing, trying to see a Brocken Spectre in the mist that had grown up around the hotel. There was a blindingly white light coming from behind us, maybe from the radome, throwing our shadows out like expressionistic paintings on the rooftop, and across the clouds. I wanted to turn around, to look for the source of the light, but I couldn’t. I was staring across the clouds, watching keenly as Nicky tried to position himself to create the halo effect that he was looking for, his camera held up to his face. For some reason, the camera made me uncomfortable. I wanted him to take it down. I had the irrational feeling that he couldn’t, that it was welded there. I saw him as some kind of cybernetic Cyclops, staring out through the camera’s lens at his own shadow.

I couldn’t speak, and there was a distant roaring in my ears, so that I didn’t hear Nicky, even as I saw his lips moving. We were not alone on the observation deck. There was a third shadow leaping out across the roof of the clouds, one that didn’t seem to shift and move, to jump around as ours did. I tried to turn my head, to see who was standing beside us, but I could only catch a glimpse. It was a woman, straight dark hair, wearing a fur coat, and I knew that it was Alexandria, Henri’s older sister, though in the dream she couldn’t have been much older than Nicky.

I tried to turn my head, to catch her eye. She was standing behind Nicky, her eyes were dark, holes in a mask that was her face, and her finger was coming up to her lips, shushing me, as though we were sharing a secret. Her shadow and Nicky’s shadow were the same, stretching long and dark across the clouds, and he was smiling, the halo appearing around the shadow’s head, and the camera snapping and whirring again and again.

***

I sat up in bed. Though the clock said that only a few minutes had passed, a strong wind had come up outside. I could hear it howling against the walls of the building. I turned to look out the window, but the black slit was a mirror against the lights in the room. Still, something was hurtling past through the darkness, something like sparks or embers from a great bonfire, whirled up into the sky in a cyclone.

I got out of bed and walked over to the window, pressing my face against the cold glass and peering out through cupped hands. The night outside was a black maelstrom. The lights of the hotel were gone, and the red warning lights of the opposite tower were lost in the darkness. The only illumination came from the burning shapes that I had originally taken to be sparks but that I saw now were lanterns, lanterns made from human skulls and hollowed gourds. They were carried aloft by figures, some nude, others shrouded in tattered garments whipped by the wind. Some were young, their flesh milky and smooth, while others were impossibly old, their skin puckered, their breasts withered and pendulous. All rode through that swirling darkness, some astride goats and pigs and cats the size of ponies, some on brooms and benches, some carried by owls and vultures and ravens tied on strings.

A woman’s voice spoke in my ear, husky and somehow familiar, “
Now to the Brocken the witches ride
,” and then I woke on the bed, still dressed, my face and hands beaded in cold sweat. Again the clock averred that only a few minutes had passed, and I had a moment of lurching terror, the feeling of being trapped in a hallway that you know you have just walked down before. Outside the window the night was merely dark, the wind only a whisper that played along the eaves, the red lights of the
Sender Brocken
blinking their warning.

***

I splashed water on my face, had a drink from the mini bar, and then another. In spite of my earlier instructions to Nicky, I couldn’t stay in the room, and I didn’t feel like navigating the blind, empty hallways that would take me up to the observation deck, a prospect which left me sick with indefinable horror. Instead I left him a note and went in search of the elevator, which didn’t seem like it could possibly be too difficult to locate since I remembered riding it up. Still, I took two wrong turns in the red-and-gold halls trying to find it, and at the second turn I thought I saw someone from the party up ahead, just going around a corner. A flash of silver and fur, a glimpse of a leg, and then she was gone. My first thought was of the girl that had ridden up with us in the car, and I opened my mouth to shout, but then I remembered the woman from my dream, and my voice died in my throat.

By the time I found the elevator and got down to the main floor, it was only twenty minutes to midnight. Buffet tables had been set up in the entryway, covered in brie and strawberries and other delicacies. I passed them by without a second look, because even though I hadn’t had a bite since the airport, the very thought of food made my stomach turn.

Inside the ballroom, the black drapes had been removed from the easels. The paintings they revealed must have been Henri’s own. They could have passed for Goya in bad light, or at a distance, but their colors were more garish, their subjects more universally grotesque or occult in character. Goya’s entire oeuvre, rendered into nothing but Black Paintings. In the largest painting, sitting in a dominant spot along the far wall, warped figures crouched around the form of a massive black goat, an obvious and blatant copy of Goya’s
Witches’ Sabbath
. More the 1798 one than the 1820s. I walked over to it, and found that there was a title hand-written on a piece of paper and affixed to the easel: “Chernobog.”

“Chernobog was a Slavic god, represented by a black he-goat,” Henri’s voice suddenly said from over my shoulder. “Of course, when the Christians came, he got turned into the devil, like so many others.”

“Subtle,” I said with a forced smile, turning around and reaching for his hand, not wanting to let him see that he’d startled me.

He smiled himself—his more genuine than mine—and shrugged. “Subtlety, like painting, never really was my strongest suit.”

We were momentarily isolated from the noise and bustle of the room, caught in a bubble of quiet and stillness near the big painting, under the golden eyes of the black goat, and I was still shaken from my dreams, which seemed to lurch about in my head like wheeled carts on the deck of a ship. That’s probably why I didn’t banter with Henri as I normally might have, and just asked him straight, “Are you really giving it up? Retiring?”

He nodded, and though his smile didn’t falter, his eyes looked sad. More than just tired, as they had before. Exhausted, spent. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “My time has come. One last revel, and then it’s out, out brief candle.”

As he spoke, I saw Nicky come into the gallery out of the corner of my eye, and at the same time Henri looked down at his wrist, though he didn’t wear a watch that I could see. “Speaking of which, the time is almost upon us. You’ll excuse me?”

I nodded and he was gone, lost to the crowd. I started to walk toward Nicky, but then Henri reappeared, standing near the projector in the center of the room, and everyone was muttering into silence and Nicky was raising his camera to his eye, and so I froze where I was.

I can’t remember what Henri said, standing there next to the projector. There was a ringing in my ears, and my headache had come back full force. I thought I could see someone over his shoulder, a familiar shape in fur and silver and long, dark hair. No matter how I moved, though, I couldn’t get a clear look.

Henri thanked everyone for coming, and started to talk about why we were there, about Muybridge and his films. First the stuff that you could find in the history books—studies of animals in motion, his murder of his wife’s lover and subsequent acquittal—but no one in the crowd was there for so mundane a scandal, so then Henri talked about Muybridge’s
other
films. Short topics of occult interest, all of them lost to rumor and speculation and myth. Some said he’d even caught the Devil Himself on celluloid.

My head was splitting, and I needed to get out of the gallery, find a drink, hair of the dog. I was pushing past the other revelers, who all had their gazes fixed forward, on Henri, while my eyes were only for the door. Maybe that’s why I saw her there, standing just inside the entrance. Long, dark hair, dark eyes, fur coat. Her hand on the light switch.

The lights went down, and the gallery filled with the whirring sound of the projector. In the flickering silver glow that came from the screen, I could see the faces of the people around me, all of them transformed into pallid, disfigured masks by the play of light and shadow, the “servants” now indistinguishable from the guests. All their eyes were black pits, all staring up at the screen. Reluctantly, I turned to see what they were seeing.

Twenty feet tall, on the wall of the ballroom, three figures wearing conical hats danced in a circle. Their arms were interlocked, their heads down, the points of their hats nearly meeting in the middle as they turned, slowly, rhythmically, like figures on a German clock. Intercut with them were other frames, more animal studies, but wrong this time, donkeys up on their hind legs, turning in a circle. It was just a few frames, figures and donkeys, repeated again and again. Turning and turning, in a dance that would never end.

There was a flicker, then, and the scene changed. A grove, somewhere, in a black forest, dark and thick as the Doré-inspired jungles of Skull Island, but a real place. Fires burned in the background, out of focus, and cloaked figures watched as a young girl, not more than sixteen, coupled with a black goat the size of a bison. Her eyes and mouth were black holes burned in the film. The images moved with the stuttering, shuddering jerkiness of a zoetrope. Just a few frames, turning on an endless loop. A dance that would never end.

The blemish began at the place where the girl met the goat. A rip in the film, a hole that gaped wider and wider as the film burned through, with that familiar sound of bubbling and tearing. For a moment the screen was white, and then there was a crack as glass shattered under extreme heat, and the room was plunged into complete darkness.

It’s hard to remember what happened next. The mind almost certainly played tricks at the time, the memory just as surely has played them since. I know that there was a moment of stillness, as the white light burned on the wall of the gallery. I turned in that moment, my eyes searching for the woman I’d seen inside the doorway, but all I saw were our shadows transformed into giants on the walls behind us.