The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (17 page)

“Yes, he was. A monster not born, but made by the territorial army of the United States of America. Transformed from lamb to lion in the space of one tour.”

“What the fuck is he doing up here?” I said, my voice rising. “Around all this? Around
them
?” I pointed at the children.

“He’s transforming back,” Doyle said. “On that day in Korea, in that burning slaughterhouse, he stared into the void, and found himself alone. He didn’t see what was really there, waiting for him, watching him, encouraging him. Randy was blinded by programming, which only exists to take away the true eye, and make us blind to the Father.” I never took Doyle for a religious man, but what he was laying down sounded like the Sunday sermons I’d heard as a kid. “He came up here, traveled counterclockwise down the spiral of what we call the mind and what hides there underneath, and found what he was looking for. His eyes were opened to the truth, within and without. He’s become a child again.”

Once again, I didn’t understand what Doyle was talking about, and this time, I didn’t try to hide it. Instead, I shook my head and collapsed onto the grass, burying my head in my hands. “I don’t know what’s going on,” I said, embarrassed, figuring that this was the end. Maybe it was that weird stuff Doyle smoked, giving me a contact high that I couldn’t shake. Whatever it was, I knew I didn’t have the ingredients to stand with Doyle, so I figured I’d end the charade on my ass.

He sat down across from me, crossing his legs and sticking a blade of grass into his mouth. After almost a minute of him not saying anything, I looked up, and found him gazing up at the huge structure across the meadow, that grew out of the mountain like a distended belly. “When I was rolling through the Hindu Kush, looking for prospects,” Doyle began, taking on a practiced tone, as if he had told this story before, although I’d never hard it. “I caught whispers from the local Sufis of this bizarre medicine man who sat on the summit of the highest mountain in Kashmir, in search of this empty state of mind called ‘nirvana’ that waited for us all behind the illusion of this meat suit we call The Self. Didn’t eat for thirty years. Thirty fucking years, can you believe that, Barnacles?”

“No,” I answered.

Doyle’s grin dropped. “Well, it’s the fucking truth. The body can be told lots of crazy things if the mind knows how to say it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I get that.”

Doyle looked closely at me, probing behind my eyes, waiting for a spark of something akin to understanding. Finally, he went on. “So anyway, while this cat was up there, communing and listening and not eating or thinking about anything other than what could lay beyond the roof of the world, a strand of Knowledge happened across the mountaintop, pouring into him like a lightning bolt finding a key on the kite. Flesh made antennae. ZIIIPPP!” Doyle snapped his fingers and laughed, but there was no music it in. “Old man didn’t find nirvana, he found something DIFFERENT. Something older than Allah or Shiva or Yahweh or any of those bullshit cartoons. Waiting out there in the dark, with so many secrets to share. And shared they were… Now, our Punjabi friend is passing on what he learned, one person at a time. He’s a cosmic guru, this one. Fully legit, and I’ve checked out a few. He’s got the sight.”

“Guru?”

“Holy man. Shaman. Professor of the Divine. Whatever you want to call it, it’s the goddamn same. Always
has
been. We just put new labels on it that we recognize, like a can of fucking soup. Same soup, same can. Different packaging. So we eat it like good hungry Christians, you dig?” Doyle lit up one of those strange cigarettes of his. “This guru—The Nightjar, they call him, after some Indian bird that nests on the ground but flies in the air—climbed down from his high-altitude perch like Jesus fucking Christ himself—who spent time in India, by the way. The perverts in power won’t tell you that, Barnacles. No fucking way. Too
Eeeastern
…” He drew out the last word in the flat accent of a disgusted Middle American, took another drag and exhaled, the smoke twisting into ghostly seraphim around us. “So anyway, cat starts to wander, talking about the REAL deal. News spreads across the north, and in a matter of weeks he’s tearing the country sideways, pissing on religious hierarchy and giving the finger to madrassas and false holy places, gathering his followers around new ones, carving away at the status quo from the inside, like a life-giving cancer. The Hindus hated him, and the peace-loving Buddhists weren’t much kinder. The police in Uttar Pradesh put a bounty on his head. But the villagers
dug
him, all the way through Nepal and into China. They remembered the stories of the elders, the ones told around cave fires after the dinosaurs died.

This guy was telling them again. Everything old is new again…”

Doyle handed me the smoke, but I waved him off. He took another drag and went on: “Finally, the heat got so bad, with the police roundups at gatherings and death threats, his disciples had to sneak him into Pakistan, wrapped him in a shroud and hid him among the Muslims, hoping to get him to the sea at the port of Karachi. Instead, he disappeared and visited eight villages in four nights. Local Imams burned down each one after he left, once they heard what had happened.” Doyle’s eyes burned, and not with that normal protective glow. This was something more intense, much more private. “When the Nightjar opens his mouth, opens his
arms
, what flows out of him is righteousness from the way,
way
back. This is wisdom from the Beyond, the House of the Old Father, and what he’s teaching is cutting the nuts from everyone who bleeds humanity dry with threats of eternal damnation in fairytale land. He’s read the poetry of the universe, listened to the music of dead stars, and took in everything that was out there waiting, his body serving as a vessel. Writing a song. A love song from dear old dad. Once he came down from the mountain, hollowed out and filled up again, he gifted us all by sharing this solitary thing with everyone he met.”

“What’s that?” I asked quietly, realizing I hadn’t swallowed since he began his story. Maybe I believed more than my mind would allow.

“The embrace.” His dilated pupils danced above his white, perfectly straight teeth like two black dimes ringed in blue.

“I don’t get it.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of saying that?”

“Yes,” I said, and meant it.

“Then stick around, and you won’t ever say that again.”

The low register peel of a great bell rang through the valley, issuing from somewhere deep inside the onion dome. It repeated, shaking through me like the vibration of a bass string as big around as my arm.

Doyle sat up straight and cocked an ear to the repeating sound, seeming to find new things in each chime. He grinned over at me. “Time for the service.”

***

Thousands of people stood patiently in a queue that spiraled around the structure, looking inside the doorway, hoping to get a glimpse of what lay beyond. As they waited to reach the door, men and women, nearly indistinguishable from each other due to the lack of facial and cranial hair, walked up and down the line holding bins labeled “DONATIONS TO THE FATHER” in pink, bouncy letters. As each pilgrim walked past, they dropped in wallets, watches, jewelry. Some even tossed in their clothes, returning to the line in various stages of undress as the shadows of trees and peaks cut slowly across the clearing.

I walked past the line with Doyle, heading toward the entrance. Just like with every joint on the Hill, Doyle never stood in line. VIP all the way, regardless of the geography. “Why are they doing that?” I asked, motioning to the rapidly filling bins, trying to avoid the sporadic nakedness, as my blush would surely out me as a prude.

“You can’t enter the temple burdened by the outside world,” Doyle said. “Cuts down on the transmission, like lead between an X-ray. But aside from all that,” he added, shooting me a mischievous grin, “everything’s better when you’re naked.”

I looked around at the variety of mostly unclothed flesh, noting the variety in shape and size and skin tone and hair density. “I don’t know about that.”

Doyle laughed and threw his arm around my shoulders, kissing me on the side of the head. “You’re a real peach, you know that, Barnacles? If I didn’t like pussy so much I’d marry you tomorrow.”

We walked to the front of the line and passed through the wide doorway. The side of my head where Doyle’s lips touched it throbbed with a liquid warmth. Neither of us had removed any clothing, but I felt more naked than I’d ever felt in my life.

Inside, people were seated on a dirt floor in evenly spaced lines, just inches apart from each other, like a mosaic of humanity. The air was heavy with burning incense that billowed from giant copper braziers hanging from thick chains bolted to the vaulted ceiling of the dome, that wasn’t as naturally sloping as one would expect from the outside, but possessed a hyperboloid geometry that made me dizzy. Or maybe it was the smoke, which smelled just like Doyle’s strange little cigarettes.

The hushed congregation was facing a low stage built at the front of the cavernous space, backed by heavy curtains of a thick and lustrous fabric. Doyle led me to the far end of the room, just in front of the rise, and squeezed my shoulder. “Wait here,” he said into my ear, “and don’t get on stage, no matter what I say.”

The bell chimed again, startling me, mostly because it seemed to be coming from directly underneath the room, somewhere deep under the mountain, and not from a hidden steeple.
This is the church, this is the steeple, open the door, and see all the people
… I realized after a few fuzzy moments that I was staring down at my waggling, intertwined fingers. Perhaps I was becoming a child again, as well. I looked up to show Doyle, but he was gone. The recessed lights hidden in a gutter circling the high walls dimmed at that moment, and the tolling of the bell abruptly stopped. I could hear the beating of my heart in my ears. It was a slow, syrupy rhythm. The sound of an organ in mid-dream.

In the heavy silence emerged the creak of rusted wheels. All heads turned in unison to the right, as another of the hairless men pulled a rope attached to a rough wooden cart, atop which was seated a small, gnarled figure dressed in thick, simple robes the color of clotted cream, a hood covering its head. That cart was led in a narrowing spiral around the stage, then brought to a rest in the center, facing the crowd. The hairless man walked to the backing curtain and pulled it aside, revealing Doyle, now changed into a ceremonial robe of rich burgundy brocade. The crowd moaned softly, a thousand strong mouthing the sound “
oooooo
” which grew in subdued strength, compressed volume amplified by the identical pitch of so many vibrating throats.

Doyle strode forward, raising his arms, as he did just before story time on Telegraph Hill, but this time without a Mason jar of Jungle Juice in his hand. A circle stitched in shiny black silk adorned his chest. No, not a complete circle. It was broken, lacking a finishing piece on one rounded side. The corrupted symmetry somehow unnerved me, and I suddenly grew nostalgic for the small crescent of Regular Family that gathered around in a complete circle on the dirty cement of the old Victorian. That seemed like a simpler, quainter time of a long gone nostalgic past, even though it only happened twenty-four hours prior.

The crowd gathered here gave off a different vibe than the one living on the Hill. This group, although similar on the outside, was infused with a frantic yearning buried shallow, just under their whimpers and supplications. Doyle strode to the cart and unceremoniously pulled back the cowl covering the crouching figure’s head, revealing folds of leathery bronze skin heaped over the skull and face of a tiny man. He resembled a rotten potato, or a deflated balloon wrapped over a doll.

The man raised his chin from his chest and regarded the crowd through eyes pressed shut by deep wrinkles. One of his sockets pulsated, then opened like sliced flesh, as a sticky orb the size and consistency of a martini onion bulged from his face. Hazy, pus yellow and grown over with cataracts, it seemed totally sightless, but it moved across the crowd hungrily, his wasted body turning with great effort.

Doyle placed a microphone stand in front of the seated man and turned it on hot. Feedback squealed through the room, fading to a low drone.

The shriveled man began to hum along with it. The audience took up the vibration, and the whole vaulted structure filled up as the strength of the thrumming increased in texture, creating an invisible mass in the air that pressed against everyone. The acoustics of the building were perfect, absorbing the sound and amplifying it back without echo. The ground beneath my feet felt as if it was coming unmoored from the foundation and rising from the hardened skin of the mountain. And still the braziers smoked…

The sound of tablas began in some hidden place, pounding sharp and fast, interspersed with a metallic keening. The shrill piping of disjointed flutes joined the backbeat, bringing a frantic, zigzagging melody to the rhythm. A song was building, coalescing into something tangible, but no less chaotic, hitting the inner ear at an odd angle, unbalancing the brain. All that remained were the lyrics.

“Who among you will sing?” the shriveled man rasped into the microphone, his lips barely moving. The voice sounded like the shifting of sand, the scrape of great boulders. The accent was strange, undercut with a clipped hesitancy. Not exactly central Asian. Not exactly from anywhere.