The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (18 page)

“I WILL,” a voice shouted from the crowd.

“Your father loves you,” the man said. No speakers were present on the stage or dangling from the arched ceiling, but his words boomed out into the room.

“AND WE LOVE OUR FATHER!” the congregation replied as one.

“Your father waits for you.”

“AND WE WAIT FOR OUR FATHER!”

“The father is a child to his father, and to his father before him. We are all the children.”

“WE ARE ALL THE CHILDREN!”

“Who will enter the holiest of holies?” the man barked through rubbery lips. Doyle was nowhere to be seen. “Who will be baptized and born new, ready the truth of paradise?”

“WE WILL! WE WILL!” The crowd was rising to their feet, reaching their hands to the stage.

“Who will feel the embrace, the hug of the servant?”

“WE WILL! WE WILL!”

“Who will be first? Who will be first to be last?”

The drumming and the piping and the ping of metal stopped. I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned, expecting to find Doyle, but it was the shaved man from the stage.

“My brothers will!”

It was Doyle’s voice, cutting through the sudden stillness of the room. He stood now on the ground with the rest of us in front of the stage. Escofet and Sugarboy were at his side, both stripped naked, both standing stiffly at attention. The acne on Sugarboy’s back seemed to wink like tiny, diseased eyes in the weird light of the room.

“They’ve come to learn the song,” Doyle said, gripping them tightly by the shoulder with each hand. “They’ve come to feel the embrace. They are the children waiting for their father’s arms.”

“Approach,” the man croaked, his one open eye fixed greedily on the two men.

Doyle led both to the stage and climbed the low stairs, walking them to the seated man, who slowly raised his arms, holding them out wide. “The father seeks to provide the attention and care we all should have received as children,” the old man said. “The father seeks to right the wrongs. Restore the balance.”

The crowd moaned again, a sound of longing, expectation. Sugarboy and Escofet got to their knees and nuzzled in close to the man’s torso, clinging to him like two kittens pawing at the teats of their mother’s belly. Sugarboy shook, sobs wracking his body, undulating under his jutting ribcage. Escofet just smiled, like he was finally home. The wrinkled man’s arms emerged from their cloaking and wrapped around both, enveloping them in his embrace. His wingspan seemed too wide for someone of his stature, his fingers too long and knuckled in too many places. He hugged Sugarboy and Escofet firmly, drawing them into the parted section of his garment, into the wrinkled skin of his chest and stomach.

His grip tightened, the sinews of his distended arms bulging taut, and the men slowly disappeared inside the man’s robes without a sound. First the faces and heads, then torsos, hips, and finally two sets of bare feet were drawn inside the seated man like pouring melted butter through a sieve.

The hidden bell tolled. The crowd gasped, clutched at each other.

“The children have gone home,” the tiny man said. His eye closed, and his head lowered once again to his chest.

Doyle walked to the front of the stage and bent to the microphone, his eyes shining like sparking embers. “Thus concludes tonight’s service.”

The crowd began chattering at once, breaking the silence with an explosion of confused noise and animating a thousand formerly sleeping corpses. Many of them rocked back and forth. Several more shot to their feet and thrashed in some violent dance, before falling to the ground, speaking in gibberish like an old revival tent meeting. Some joined the dance, others heading quickly for the doors, expressions ranging from dreamy wonder to masks of horror. Many of them cried and held each other. I wasn’t sure if this was out of disappointment or trauma. Possibly both.

I couldn’t wrap my mind around what had just happened, if I was just witness to a magician’s trick or something much deeper. My brain felt funny. I had a difficult time remembering yesterday, how we had arrived at this place. I just remembered locomotion, travel. A gray jumble of freeway concrete that led to this place high above the regular world. There seemed to be no going back, because forward was the only thing that made sense, and wasn’t shrouded in an anxious mystery.

“Nelson
.
”

Somehow I heard Doyle’s voice above the din, the slap of bodies and weird chanting. Doyle was standing on the stage, the microphone gone.
“Nelson
,
”
he said again, his lips not moving over a curious grin that lit up his face. Did I imagine it? He held out his hand. The full force of that glow enveloped me, and instead of heading toward the door, I walked towards him, the crowd parting in front of me. Pleading, envious faces looked up at me, and I couldn’t help but feel special. Blessed. He had called me by my first name. Not my name from the Hill, but my real name. He knew me.

That name climbed inside of me, just as we climbed the stairs to the stage, hand in hand, and followed the man on the cart through the opening in the curtain. I didn’t care what anyone else in the room believed. Doyle was my guru, and I’d follow him to the ends of the earth, and probably beyond.

***

The light slowly faded with the sound of the crowd behind us until we were in total darkness. All I could hear was the squeak of the cart wheels, and the pounding of my own heart. I couldn’t feel Doyle’s hand in mine anymore. I couldn’t feel my feet touching the spongy ground, and yet I had the sensation of moving downward in a tight corkscrew, although I never brushed up against a wall or ceiling. I was adrift inside the throat of some great beast perched on the lip of the outer void, moving toward the culmination of all of my wandering. I was about to travel.

The sound of the wheels ceased and I felt the air change, growing more damp and cold and constricting, pressing in on me as would the steam in an overheated room. There was a sensation of the material world reconstituting around me, and then I felt the ground under my shoes. It was uneven, ridged, and I had to readjust my weight to stay on my feet as my brain seemed to find my body underneath it again.

“Bring us some light,” I heard Doyle say. I couldn’t tell where he was. His voice sounded clear, but muffled, as if he spoke directly into acoustic tile.

“As you wish, Mr. Wolverton,” someone said.

Torches flared to life one by one and started to move, as more of the shaved men emerged from alcoves in what the flickering firelight in their hands showed to be an enormous cavern with craggy walls, twice the size of the room we had just left, roughly hollowed out by tectonic shifts or some other blind elemental force that found rock to be nothing but deluded clay.

As the torches grew in number and the light brighter, I realized that the walls weren’t jagged cave rock, but a tapestry of bones. Millions and millions of bones, in various shapes and sizes and species, from a dozen eras of planetary history, fused together from floor to ceiling with the mortar of time and glacial ooze of living rock. And although the bones were scattered and the body structures vague, it was clear that whatever living things they had once been, they were all individually facing—
paying eternal homage to
—one singular object: a wide sheet of raised, jet-black stone in the center of the cavern, which jutted at a 45 degree angle from the cave floor, like an insect display, and held in stasis a half-exposed fossilized spine of what looked to be a giant snake, but topped with a massive skull that more closely resembled a Tyrannosaur. Or a dragon. It had died in a loose, nearly perfect circle, open mouth and teeth facing its tail, but not quite reaching it… The broken circle pattern on Doyle’s robe, here calcified and memorialized by an innumerable pattern of dead pilgrims… Ouroboros before it could complete its mad autosarcophagy… Failure of the Eternal Return, frozen for all eternity in a half layer of volcanic rock that must have been a billion years old. This was the elephant graveyard for every vertebrate creature that slithered, walked, swam, and flew across this planet since the cooling of the primordial soup.

I stood, mouth agape and mind spiraling, still somehow rooted to the bones under my feet, while the shaved men busied themselves around me, paying me no mind as they sorted through the donation bins, grouping, counting and labeling each item down to the last sock and faded penny. Others packed up documents and took down draperies that had formed impromptu tents within this hollow in the earth—basically moving house, if one’s house was a traveling circus of the damned.

“I’m sure you have a few questions,” Doyle said, suddenly at my side. He shook out a stiff, leathery suit as one does after pulling a wet blanket from the wash. He began to fold it carefully, trying to smooth out what wrinkles he could in more of a nervous habit than anything actually effective. It then dawned on me what it was in his hands, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. But, just moments later, I was taking it for granted and speaking around it, as if it could have happened, and
does
happen. A man holding the flesh suit of another man, in a cave made of bones. The surreal had become reality. Nightmares more tangible than the outside world, which seemed so far distant from where I was standing at that moment.

“What happened to him? The Nightjar,” I said, my voice feeling as if it came from someone else and I was listening to it as one would a stranger. I gestured to the suit as Doyle fussed with a zipper, digging skin out of the teeth so it would glide properly and find purchase.

He glanced up at the ceiling, which was pocked with openings that could easily accommodate a person. Or something the size of a person. “Oh, he’s around here somewhere.”

“What
is
he?” The stranger with my voice spoke again.

“A servant. Just like me. And just like—” A tittering hiss filtered down from the warren of holes in the ceiling of the cavern, and Doyle just grinned, laying the haphazardly folded skin suit to the side, which was quickly and solemnly picked up by one of the hairless men and ferreted away to one of the quickly filling wooden storage boxes. “Well, okay, he’s a LOT different than any of us, but lets just say he plays for the same team.”

My jaw worked without sound. I needed water. I needed to drink every gallon of goddamn Lake Ogallala, where my family went camping every July 4th. The fireworks looked so beautiful reflected in the lake. Like cosmic spiders, revealing themselves in an explosion of terrifying light and sound for only a few seconds, before burrowing back into the dark. Nebraska was so far away now. Everything was. “What happened to Sugarboy and… that other guy?” I said, feeling my voice return to my throat. “Your friend.”

“Now
that
I can’t tell you. I mean, I would tell you if I knew, you dig? But I don’t, so I can’t.”

The inclusion of the
“you dig”
—something the old Doyle would have said, the Doyle who wasn’t some pseudo Eastern religious leader—set my already chattering teeth on edge, and seemed to focus me, ripping me away from the saw-blade edge of awe and possibly insanity at the existence of such a place, of such things, and dropping me closer to a more rational state of mind tethered to reality by the familiar nudge of irritation. It was blasphemous, the new mouth saying these old words. More so than anything that was said out on that stage, than what was buried here under this mountain.

“Why did you bring me up here?”

“I wanted you to see,” Doyle said, reclining against the hipbone of some great forgotten beast. “And then I wanted you to decide.”

“See what? A buried museum? Some space-case, bourgeois religion? A cheap magic trick?” Even though I said the words, I didn’t believe them, not in the dismissive way they came out. I was embroiled in something huge, and way beyond my comprehension. But I wanted to insult him for lying to me, thinking me a dupe. I probably wouldn’t make it out of this cave, but I wouldn’t go out like a chump.

Doyle couldn’t believe my words either, judging by the expression on his face. “Magic trick?
Magic
trick?” he snarled, air expelling from his lungs in shock. “Do you think what you saw up there was a fucking parlor game?”

“I don’t know,” I said quietly, crouching down, trying to get small. “I don’t know what I saw. I don’t know what any of this is.”

His face became deathly calm. “Let me clarify it for you.”

Doyle nodded his head, and one of the shaved men walked forward and stopped, still as stone. Doyle then snapped his fingers, and something large landed with a heavy thud behind the man. There was a ripping sound, followed by a gentle lapping. The man’s face held its concentrated expression as sweat beaded his forehead, then poured down his face. His body shook, then started to writhe, as his skin expanded outwards like a stretched, veined sausage, facial features and muscles popping, before every inch of him burst, showering a twenty-foot radius with a spray of blood and meat. What bone and chunks remained were choked down in segmented jerks by a massive, squirming worm the general shape and color of a garden grub but the size of a jersey heifer, cross-mated with a jungle-variety centipede.

“The fuck!” I screamed, wiping gore from my eyes and scrambling up the wall as far as my worthless feet would take me, which wasn’t very far.