The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (16 page)

Doyle started humming, or gurgling, deep in his throat. It was a terrible sound.
“The songbiiiird waits, at’er top o’ Deeeevil’s Moun-tain
,
openin’ them brown arms wiiide
,
”
he sang in an off-kilter voice, then hit the bottle again.

Sugarboy knitted his brow and cut his eyes to me. I just shrugged. We didn’t know each other well, as he ran with the Night to Day crew in the house while my hours were more in line with a college professor. But on this trip, it seemed like the dividing line between camps was separated by pale blue vinyl seats. Escofet and Cincinnati just grinned knowingly. “We are about to be enlightened,” Doyle pronounced before throwing on some grandma shades and leaning back in his seat.

My copilot twitched a few times, casting lassos through his orbiting brain, then turned back around and popped a Tootsie Roll into his mouth.

I swallowed a few times. The whiskey was wearing off and left something hungry and hollow in its place. “But what does that mean?”

There were a few moments of silence. I couldn’t see Doyle’s eyes behind his dark lenses, but I could feel Escofet’s latching onto mine, as if he was watching for the man next to him. “How’s that, Barnacles?”

I cleared my throat, wishing the bottle would make its way back up front, but Escofet was holding it with two hands, blowing into it like a jug player. Licking the opening. “Enlightenment, I mean. What are you getting at?”

Doyle lowered his sunglasses and looked at me with an expression I’d never seen before. Finally, he broke into a smile, then a laugh. His backseat chorus joined in, cackling like they were watching Jack Benny.

“Do I need to break it down for you? Our brothers are dying in the streets, bodies chewed raw from the filth of Korean rice paddies. Our sisters are locked in cages by husbands turned bosses….
slavers
, while the rest of us stare at our glowing squares, worshipping Cronkite and Lucy. Laughing inside the flames.” Doyle grabbed the back of my seat, wrenching it back toward him, his eyes flaring. He was strong. “What we think we know is BULLSHIT, and what we don’t know is our salvation. The West ain’t the best. The West is a gerbil wheel. Knowledge from the older places is what we need right now. I’ll be good goddamned if we scorch ourselves off this marble and leave only a black smudge with nothing underneath. I want to go deeper, find out how to rise above.”

“Right on, big daddy!” Cincinnati hooted and lit up a cigarette, pushing her limp blonde hair behind her ears. She was such a brown noser, made worse when her underwear was warm.

“We’re going to see the man with the plan.” Before I could ask, Doyle sat back in his seat, as if exhausted. “Take the first exit.”

I drove for five more miles, and was about to turn around, when I saw the small green sign on the side of the highway. Mount Diablo State Park.

The Buick veered onto the 680 South. That was the path to Devil’s Mountain, where an angel awaited.

***

After sliding through the foothills, we began to carve up the mountain on a fib of a road that degenerated into the truth of a barely paved switchback. I had to sit up straight and man the wheel like a Clipper captain amid a furious gale, lest we split open on the rocks below that waited at the bottom of a thousand-foot gorge, grasping at the tires just inches from the edge of the spotty asphalt marking the trail like flattened, black popcorn balls.

Within minutes, we were totally disconnected from civilization, as the sequoias closed in like colossal spires around us, eating the sun with arms a thousand feet high. The radio had faded to static, and Doyle started to hum again. That hideous, tuneless sound, as if intentionally missing notes. I wondered if we’d ever be able to turn around and head back down. Forward or die.

The road finally straightened and leveled off, ruts smoothed by wear and some level of primitive upkeep. I rolled down the window, and in between gusts of Cincinnati’s cigarettes, I could smell a dedicated wall of pine and ancient soil, worn down from the mountains to birth a million wooden titans. This was a different sort of smell than Nebraska loam, which had a damp odor of retreated ice, shallow streams, and clumsy agriculture. Up here lay the bite of primal dust, clinging to the backs of slumbering giants, full of wisdom born way down deep.

I looked into the rearview, hoping to catch Doyle’s gaze but expecting to find another’s, but I saw nothing. I pivoted in my seat, and found Doyle whispering into Escofet’s ear. He was leaning into the side of the car, eyes closed. Cincinnati pouted and picked at her nails, flushed ears poking through straw.

“Watch the road, man!” Sugarboy screamed, grabbing the wheel and wrenched it to the left as the right tire nearly slipped off the edge of the trail. The car found the road again. “You almost
killed
us!”

My face drained and my ears pounded. I was terrified of heights, and here I was, piloting a crew of hopped-up ragtags to the rim of the world on a broken spider web. Doyle just laughed behind me.

***

Further up the mountain, the asphalt degenerated to a dirt path. A pair of figures stood on the edge of the tree line, holding hands. It would have been hard to tell if they were male or female, as they wore matching plastic Wanda the Witch masks. But they were both naked, both male, and totally erect. Their heads turned as we passed, hollowed out eyeholes pouring darkness into the car.

Sugarboy jammed his hands to the side of his head, wagged his fingers and made a face at them through the window. They slowly imitated his hand movements in unison.

I looked at Doyle, who frowned at the naked pair like a disapproving parent. I had never taken him for a prude. Maybe he objected to their cheap costuming. “Is this some sort of orgy?” I asked jokingly, mildly disturbed by what I had just seen.

Doyle just shrugged. “It’ll be what you want it to be. But it’ll be something, that’s for sure.”

“I’m ready for anything!” Cincinnati squealed, hugging Doyle, who had craned his neck to watch the two men run back into the forest as if being chased.

Mismatched automobiles and campers were parked on either side of the road, stretching as far as the eye could see into the shadowed depths of the forest ahead of us.

“Pull in behind the last car,” Doyle said.

“So many people,” Sugarboy said through clenched teeth, scratching his neck raw as the car squeaked to a halt.

“Grab the tent,” Doyle said to Sugarboy, who was about to protest when Doyle tossed him a baggie full of pills. His mouth cracked into a jack-o’-lantern grin, and he threw open the door and hustled to the back of the car.

The rest of us piled out into the unnatural dusk, accept for Escofet, who was sleeping in the back seat. “What about him?” I asked, half hoping he had overdosed on a noxious stowaway Doyle secreted back from the jungle.

“Leave him. He’ll catch up later.”

“What’s he on?”

“I don’t know, but I wish I had some.” Doyle put his ropey arm around my neck and grinned, projecting that glow out of his mouth and eyes like a blanket. “We’ll have to ask him later.”

***

We walked nearly a mile on a gentle upward incline, joining a procession of travelers from all stations of life and what looked like a hundred countries across the globe. Many of them spotted Doyle and offered greetings of various sorts. He responded in turn, like some sort of pilgrimage ambassador. This was Doyle’s Christmas card list come to life and congregating on one California mountain. An advert for international brotherhood right out of central casting. His mystery deepened, if that was possible. Between multilingual salutations, we all trudged toward the locus of light dead ahead that would lead us out of the forest and back into the sun.

We finally breached the womb of trees and emerged into a vast clearing, and I could have sworn we stepped into a medieval carnival. Thousands of people clad in outlandish garb or some far-flung native dress danced, spun, and congregated in tight groups on the tamped-down grass. A tent city was set up at the far end of the glade, while gaily festooned vendor booths fronted the trees to the right. Lording over it all was a massive central structure built out of a mountain cliff that rose up into the mist-shrouded peaks. It was a hundred feet high and a football field wide, erected from mortared stone and thick wooden planks, topped with an onion dome that could have been ripped from eldest Siam or reddest Moscow. Narrow windows dotted the sides, giving the impression of a church, or perhaps a fort. By the weathering and veins of creepers crawling up the sides, whatever this place was, it must have been here for a while.

“Crazy, man…” I breathed, soon realizing that Doyle was waiting for my reaction. “What is this place?”

“This is the Listening Place,” Doyle said, taking all of it in with the appraising eye of a construction foreman. He glanced at me and winked. “One of them, anyway.”

A smiling woman with striking yellow eyes and skin tanned from a faraway sun skipped over and hugged Doyle before handing Cincinnati a flower. It looked lush and tropical, shining as if made of wax. Just like the woman who gave it. “Power to the children,” she said in a dreamy voice.

Cincinnati brought the flower to her nose and gasped. “Wow… It smells like… like… My grandmother’s farm.” She giggled and cooed, and I saw a glimpse of the little freckle-faced girl from Ohio, before she traded everything certain and safe for a chance to chase kicks and wild boys in the weird hothouse of San Francisco.

Sugarboy was eying vendors’ row, which was insulated by a coterie of patiently waiting customers. “Y’all sell candy around here?” he asked the woman without facing her. She handed him an identical flower before padding away, liming the magic hour sky with the serpentine curls of her black hair. Sugarboy glanced around sheepishly, then inhaled the glistening petals. A wince escaped his lips and he staggered. Swallowing a wave of emotion, he threw the flower to the ground and stomped it flat, before skulking away with that hitched, agitated gate of his.

“What did it smell like?” Cincinnati called after him.

“Aftershave,” Sugarboy murmured, as his mind tumbled backwards to those places he had tried to leave buried in the west Texas sand of east Lubbock.
My stepfather’s aftershave
, he thought, hoping his mouth didn’t move as he worked the words across his swollen tongue.

I watched Sugarboy melt into the crowd. “We’re gonna lose him.”

“Probably,” Doyle said. “He’ll get what he needs here, or he’ll go home.”

I stood back and marveled at the scene, again noting the smiles and bows shot Doyle’s way. This wasn’t like Telegraph Hill. This was an international procession of young and old. Mostly old. Yet all of them respectful, and often near reverent. “Why does it seem like everyone knows you up here?”

“Not everyone,” Doyle replied cagily, eying a pretty girl with red hair twirling like a Dervish on an open patch of ground nearby, her bare feet tamping down a perfect circle in the grass and her beatific face aimed up at the sky.

“How’d you find this place? It doesn’t seem real. It’s like… like a play, or something.”

Doyle took me by the arm and we walked like country gentlemen, Cincinnati falling in behind us, still holding the flower to her nose, grazing her thin lips as she inhaled deeply, eyes lidded heavy. A little girl again, almost beautiful. Almost.

“Have you ever traveled, Barnacles?”

“Me? Yeah, of course. I ended up out here, didn’t I? I mean, in the city.”

“I don’t mean
moving
, I’m talking about
traveling
. From this plane, to the next, and the next, and to the billion billion beyond.”

I felt silly, small-minded, as I often did around Doyle. Like a child trying to hang out with the older, cool kid. “No, I guess I haven’t.”

“You should give it a shot sometime. You’ll be surprised by what you find.”

“But what is this place?”

“It’s…
here
. It’s now. But it isn’t, you know?”

My silence told him that I didn’t.

Doyle took in the scene, eyes coming to rest on the snow-capped mountaintops. “The Indian tribes shunned this place like the plague. Called it The Place of Too Many Secrets. The Armenians who arrived here after the genocide named it
Hetch Hetchi
. Nothing of Nothing. The white-bread mapmakers, hearing a few of the watered down legends, labeled it Devil’s Mountain, which is a fucking joke on so many levels. But I guess they didn’t know how else to describe what goes on up here, and other places like this.”

“What goes on?” I asked with a bit of trepidation, remembering the two naked men standing in the forest. Masked and pale.

Doyle gestured with his chin to a bearded man wearing only a loincloth, blowing soap bubbles at a group of children who jumped and laughed, snatching the bubbles from the sky. Catching rounded rainbows. “You see that guy? That’s Randy, an ex-Marine from your government’s army. He killed three men and two women outside Pusan, then raped the ten-year-old daughter of the mother he brained with the butt of his rifle two minutes before.”

I reacted with horror, feeling my stomach tighten with nausea. “What a monster.”