The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (9 page)

When the light went out completely, there was a sound like a rising tide, as dozens of voices all spoke at once, whether to calm or panic, and dozens of bodies all started to move in different directions. The ringing in my ears seemed to have left my head and spread out into the room itself, and underneath it I would have sworn that I could hear the orchestra playing. Others would later say that they heard it too, some wild, discordant melody that none of us could identify but that we all thought sounded very familiar. Then the whole room tilted, or at least that’s how it felt, like the hotel was just a model sitting on a tabletop that somebody had stumbled into.

I felt bodies slamming against me, elbows jamming into my sides, my face. I felt my lip split against bone, I felt myself stumble over someone or something in the dark. Bright strobes of light were going off, and at the time I couldn’t account for them, thinking maybe they were going off inside my own head, though now I know that they were the flashbulb of Nicky’s camera as he desperately sought to catalogue something of the disaster.

In the flashes, I remember feeling like I had stumbled somehow into one of Henri’s paintings. The faces of the people around me seemed bloated and dead, seemed to float up from out of the darkness to assail me. Like I was drowning in a black river, with only corpses to keep me company. The “servants,” I told myself later, in their grotesque masks.

I have no clear recollection of making my way outside, but that’s where I found myself, my hands on my knees, Nicky trying to staunch the flow of blood from my face. The bright lights of the hotel were on, making our shadows long on the gravel in front of us, turning the night sky into a black dome above our heads. I turned around, and saw that the hotel was on fire. Flames licked out of the doors and windows of the first floor, sending embers spiraling up into the darkness, like lanterns carried aloft.

***

I talked about it later, with the other survivors, with Nicky, with the police. I told them what I had seen, what I could remember, though it didn’t seem like much. A few people had been killed in the blaze, many others suffered from burns, smoke inhalation, injuries acquired in the panicked rout. Once the fire was out, the authorities sifted the ruins for bodies, identified the charred remains, sent them back to their families to be buried. Henri wasn’t among them. He was never seen again.

When Nicky went to develop his photographs from that night, he told me that none of them came out, from any of the cameras. He said that not even the pictures he’d taken earlier, at the airport and on the train, had returned anything but black squares. He blamed a bad batch of film. He should have been devastated, but he didn’t seem to be. After that evening, it was like something turned over inside Nicky. He started photographing again, and turning out good work. The best he’d done in years, but I didn’t like them. They reminded me of things I’d seen that night. He’d go to the zoo and take pictures of the animals; kangaroos and donkeys and goats, yellow eyes staring out of darkened paddocks.

I believed him, about the photographs, though I wondered about the explanation. I had crazy thoughts, that maybe there was nothing wrong with his film, but instead something wrong with that night. Then I found two of the photographs that supposedly hadn’t come out. They were under the grate in our fireplace, scorched at the edges. One was a blurry shot taken up on the observation deck. It seemed to be one he’d snapped by accident, with the camera in motion so that most of the picture was a smudge, the stars falling like embers, the radome an enormous white blot consuming one entire side of the image. Right at the edge of the picture, though, was a woman, standing near the railing. Only part of her was visible, the edge of a fur coat, long, dark hair.

The other photograph was obviously one that he’d captured with the flash after the lights had all gone out. In the foreground were the fleshy shapes of panicked guests running in front of the camera, pushing and falling over each other in the darkness, but in the background was Henri, the focus on him perfect so that you could see the defeated expression on his unsmiling face. He stood in front of his “Chernobog” painting, looking out at the rioting crowd as though he could see them, his eyes vacant. Worse, though, than anything about his expression was something that I tried to tell myself was an optical illusion created by the effect of the flash and the angle. The hoof of the painting’s black goat, resting on Henri’s shoulder, beckoning him to turn and follow.

I kept the pictures, thumbed through them relentlessly, obsessively, wearing smeared fingerprints into the edges. I meant to confront Nicky with them, throw them down on the table, demand to know why he hadn’t shown them to me, why he’d lied to me, burned the evidence. But instead I watched him, his new confidence, his new photographs. He made friends that I didn’t know, went to parties and gallery openings that I declined to attend, staying home with a bottle in my hand. When he was gone I would take out the pictures, look at them again and again.

Finally, I waited for him to leave the apartment one night and I followed him. Watched him walk down the street, his head up, not slouching, not anymore, and saw him go to the corner and get into a cab with someone. A woman with long dark hair, wearing a fur coat.

Learn to Kill

Michael Cisco

I
glance up; there’s a pale young girl, a stranger, standing in the doorway, her dark eyes on me, her set lips motionless, sealed, telling me:

“Michael—learn to kill.”

…and gone, in a blink. There might have been some movement back there; a little girl, having somehow wandered into this silent house without being heard by me, might have been able to get out of sight again in the time it took my eyes to close and open.

I struggle to my feet and cross the bare boards, over to the doorway. I peer the length of the empty hall beyond it. I shuffle the length of the hall, looking around, not looking very closely, not caring, not really, going through the motions. What would I do if she were there?

No one is there. Not a sound. I can hear the trees on the slope outside, not making sounds. Somewhere, far off, I hear a familiar noise I can’t name. The sound of a motor, I guess. A groan, getting louder, going higher.

Now what shall I do?

I go back to my chair and sit down again, as before. Without intending to, I find that I have even reproduced the same posture, like the cast-off coat that keeps the wearer’s shape for a while. Perhaps this sameness will induce her to return; but I don’t think so. It doesn’t work that way, is that what I’m thinking, is that what I am foolishly presuming to know? It doesn’t fail that way, could that be what I mean?

I already know how to kill. I killed Dad. He would have killed me, if I hadn’t gotten him. No doubt. Little did he ever dream he’d be the first among equals—is that the right phrase? First among my actual, all-withstanding family, taking pride of place, I think, as well he should, and forever in his prime and vigorous as he was the day he died. In protest, I forget at what, I slipped out the front door in the night and pissed on the house. I sprayed everything in sight. It froze, and the next morning I recall the noises of the hinges—the whine of the door hinges with the gasp of the screen door just after—and the usual bang followed by another report I soon learned was the sound his neck made as it broke against the edge of the top step. The slipperiness of frozen urine. So much for him.

His sister had never liked me and didn’t want me; she disliked children. There was ice everywhere that morning. She didn’t know I’d killed him, no one did. Melted, all of it, before noon. Perhaps there was an odor of urine about the front steps, but a man with a broken neck is liable to let loose, I suppose they thought. No one said a word about it. Angela, Dad’s sister, resented my indifference to his death and, since there was nothing I could do about it, my indifference to my own fate. I felt as if my life were over, too. The end of my life there, with him, and nothing to begin. Nothing else. I had no future, only getting up and going to bed, neverending meals, neverending shittings, neverending conversations with Mom about the same things.

My mother—baffled. A baffled woman. Even after I killed my Dad she was always buried in who knows what fantasies. She and Dad’s sister made a feint of fighting over me, but without managing to be convincing. I wasn’t convinced, anyway. Mom had a way of forgetting all about me; every least fraction of her attention I ever received I wrung from her by trespassing on her dreams.

“What do you want now?” she would ask me, as if I’d been hectoring her, even when I hadn’t exchanged a word with her for two or three days.

Early one afternoon I woke up and found her gone. She’d taken nearly everything worth having, which wasn’t much, as there was never much in the house. I’d overslept so long that I had no mind to speak of, as I remember. She normally woke me up. I could get one thought to appear, but not to tumble over into another. Nearly a week, she was away, and when she came back, I was gone. Angela had tried to call and found the phone was out, then came by one evening and took me, plunked me down on the sofa between Brian and Stephanie.

I know how to kill, already, but I suppose something new is meant.—Kill Brian.—And kill Stephanie. Just the one or the other won’t be enough. Each is nothing without the other, they’re a team, hateful word, a team and the one I leave behind will kill me.

I’m old enough, why not let them kill me? It would make them happy, it would mean they could do more of what they always wanted to do. Death doesn’t scare me.

I am old because I have never wanted to die, have always been careful—careful, and determined not to give up my life for nothing, and not alone. That’s no premonition. It’s a desire, with some of the externalities of a premonition, that’s what it is. If I go, I go sledding on your corpse, there’s too much of me to go alone.

Is that the meaning of this little girl? At seventy-seven I have a lot left to learn, or does she mean at last, at last I am ready for the final lesson?

***

Nodded off! How long was that? Everything looks the same. My boots, bony knees, knuckly hands. My chair. The window. Bare boards.

Lessons from Dad. When I was about eight or nine, I decided, I forget why, to provoke my father. I was very contrary and then, I remember standing stock still shouting

“FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!”

at him. He smiled at me, queerly. Then he went and shut himself up in his room. That was his sanctum. He padlocked it when he wasn’t in it. I wracked my brains for a way to get in, and I never did. With all my ingenuity, my genius for trouble, my intuitive sense of escape routes and infiltrations, when there was no hillside full of dense foliage I couldn’t wriggle inside somehow, to think, I never managed it. I never saw the inside of it, even after I killed him.

That night, the night following the day on which I shouted fuck you, I dreamt about him. He was “going off to work in the morning.” In my dream, this entailed his putting on his jacket and tie and going over to a post beside the front door. The dream supplied the post, which was blackish, scarred, splintery. My father picked up a sledgehammer and began slamming it against the side of the post with a heavy crash that shook the whole house each time. This was his dream-work, hitting the same spot on the post with clockwork regularity. Tooth-rattling. In the dream. There was a dent he hit at, scarred white, where the post was more like metal than wood.

I woke up screaming, flying through the air, and there was another scream, louder and deeper than mine, and angry. Dad had crept into my room as I slept, snatched me out of bed, roaring, and flung me up into the air. He caught me and began swinging me by one arm and one foot around the room, throwing me up at the ceiling and catching me, spinning and twirling me, bellowing at the top of his lungs, and I was sobbing. Then he suddenly let me fall onto my bed and left the room, chuckling to himself. That was how he paid me back for “fuck you! fuck you!”

“You could kill him, you know,” my mother would say to him sometimes. He liked pouncing on me, whipping me off my feet and hurling me all around the room with sudden barks and cries that made him sound like he’d gone wild. Then he’d right me and put me down on my two feet and go on about his business. Whistling. He didn’t really whistle, but it was like that, nonchalant. When my mother complained, he would chuckle. But once I overheard him say, raising his voice and laughing through his words:

“I know, I know… we need him, I haven’t forgotten…”

I wasn’t supposed to hear that, or to know that my parents had some special reason to keep me alive—a reason that I sensed at once had nothing to do with nurturing feelings. I knew, too, that there were unusual practices in my family, and things taken for granted that were anything but in the families of the other children I knew. It did not take me a great while to learn that I could not speak freely about what went on at home. My parents never told me to keep any secrets, although more than once, come to think of it, my mother did ask me if the other kids were curious about us. We lived far enough away, though, on the other side and beneath the hills, so that it was taken for granted we would be different. Hicky hillbillies.

Dad was not a squeamish man. He took to hunting, in particular, with gusto, and he loved cleaning fish or the carcass of a bigger animal, liked flicking blood on us for a laugh. He was always up to his elbows in some carcass and the house stank like a butcher shop. He taunted me and frightened me out of my wits when he could, but he never struck me. A man like that and he never struck me once. Something restrained him, and it wasn’t love.