The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (19 page)

Once it finished eating, the slug emitted a shrill scream like the folding of metal and slithered its way back up the wall to escape the light in a hitched, coiling motion, evidencing a total disconnect with movement on land, or possibly three dimensions.

“What is that thing!” I cried, ducking down and shielding my head as the worm disappeared back into one of the holes in the ceiling, yowling in a rising, halting pitch that sounded like madhouse laughter as it buried itself deeper into the primeval granite behind the skeletal arabesque.

My mind swam, the pattern of bones all around me twisting and diving in a stuttering pattern that made me nauseous. I dropped to my knees and vomited. I wanted to expel everything I had seen and now knew. I was sure this was all the result of something Doyle had given me. This was all a hallucinatory dream. It
had
to be. Oh fucking yes, I needed this to be true, or else I’d bash my fucking brains out with a rock. With a dragon bone. “What is that thing?” I asked quietly, playing the role in my waking dream, this inverse déjà vu, bile dripping from my quivering lips.

“A Servitor,” Doyle said, gazing up with a smile of pride at the now populated tunnel in the ribcage of the world. “A Pure One sent here as a missionary to spread the ballad of Old Leech.” I stared up at Doyle, not understanding. “You know, the song that gave us speech, taught us math, physics, how to split the atom.”

“I don’t—This doesn’t…”

“Okay, call him the choir. Or maybe the A&R rep. Our tiny Punjabi friend here, or…” Doyle looked around, not finding the skin suit. He shrugged. “Wherever he is, climbed the antennae of our planet looking to hear something,
anything
, reaching WAY OUT from his mortal shell to hear the truth amid the dead silence of the universe, and OL found his frequency.” Doyle looked at the circular arrangement on the black stone slab and smiled. “He called, dialing the right number, and someone answered. The rest is history, or soon will be. He’s just one of many.”

“Then what are you?”

Doyle cocked his head to the side, as if he had never considered this question before. “A fundraiser, I guess. Bandleader, maybe.” He laughed. “With pedigree, of course.”

“I’ve never heard of this… leech. Is he your god?”

“No and yes. If he is a god, he’s yours, too. You just don’t know it yet. Not knowing the truth won’t stop it from existing, or doing what the truth does.”

“Which is?”

“Finding its way to the light. In this case, Old Leech isn’t too keen on all that illumination, so it’s going to do a little major redecorating around this corner of the multiverse, make it a little more cozy for when he stops by for a visit.”

I looked around the room with eyes opened just a little bit wider, finally taking in the gravity of the eons of animal and human bones stacked on top of each other, showing a devotion stretching back so far my brain couldn’t comprehend it all. The hidden god of the mountains, worshipped in secret under the mountain. Humanity didn’t know a goddamn thing, maybe didn’t want to. Ignorance is bliss, bliss in ignorance, my crown for just one more second of ignorance. “Your god is coming…? Here?”

“Oh yes,” Doyle said, his eyes gleaming in the dusky torchlight. “That’s always been the plan. My family, and a few others, have made it a point to roll out the red carpet when he arrives.”

I curled up into a ball, dislodging a femur of some early hominid in my hand and bringing it close to my chest like a little girl’s dolly. Fetal position, longing for the womb. Lord, birth me again, far away from here. Or shoot me out stillborn, slimy and blue. Anything but this.

“I want to die,” I moaned, fighting back another wave of nausea.

Doyle walked over and crouched down in front of my face. “Like hell you do,” he said, breathing into the side of my head. “We’re just getting to the good part.” He stood up suddenly. “The time of the Arrival is upon us, and you could help lead the charge, my brother! We need good people, good men.” Doyle fixed his gaze on the circular skeleton across the cavern. “Old Leech is patient, but he’s also an impulsive motherfucker.”

“I don’t underst—”

He dropped to his knees again and took my by the shoulders. “Of course you don’t, you fucking barnacle!” Doyle’s face looked feverish, sweating madness. “I don’t either, really. This is a birthright, and who can gauge the history of a family that stretches back to the time of the first mastodon? The first tribe? Back when the play of the universe and the earth were more closely connected. Back when the Dark walked, or slithered, on our planet each and every night? What I
do
know is that a brigade is being assembled. The foot soldiers are housed in the barracks all around us.” Doyle swept his hands to the tunnels dotting the ceiling. “And in a dozen other outposts scattered across the planet. I’ve dropped in on them all, and everyone—everything—is ready and waiting. Now we need the generals.” Doyle took my face in his hands, tossing that lasso again. This time, the rope was on fire. “I know that you know that I know what creeps deep inside of you. That thirst for
experience
, the taste of the edge. For the command of things that have no name. You and I are the same, Barnacles. We want to exterminate the status quo, and kick the doors in on a new era of enlightenment that will move our species from the apes we are to the earthly gods we are destined to become!”

He was squeezing my face now, and I ripped my head away from his grip, bringing fingers to my bruised cheek. “You’re… insane.”

His face fell, eyes becoming cold as a reptile as he stood up. Even their shape seemed to change. “Sink or swim. Song or meat. It’s your choice.” He held out his hand. I just looked at it. “It’s going to be everyone’s choice soon, so consider yourself getting in on the ground floor.”

After several moments, I sat up, looked him in the eye, grinned ruefully, and took Doyle’s hand. He gripped it and brought me to my feet, pulling me in for an embrace. I leaned in close to his ear, smelling that clean sweat of his and strange incense clinging to the nape of his neck. That intoxicating aroma of my former guru… In my mind, I saw myself running through the woods. I was followed, above and below, but I didn’t turn around, because I knew if I did I’d want them to catch me. To kill me, because what was following me was worse than what I had seen inside the mountain. There were worse monsters still that hadn’t yet been revealed, and I wanted to live in ignorance lest I die from the knowledge. The drums. The flutes. The song. In my mind, I ran…

“Meat,” I whispered into Doyle’s ear, before burying the bone into his neck like a dagger, driving it so hard it poked out the other side with a crimson blurt. He jerked away from me, pawing at the bone lodged just under his jaw, stumbled backwards and fell on his ass, blood spurting out from between his fingers, his teeth.

“You did it, Barnacles,” he gurgled, fixing a horrible smile outlined with dark red. “You… really did it…”

I staggered backward, horrified and proud of my action in equal measure, completely unaware of where my motivation to murder my friend, my teacher, my everything, had come from.

As Doyle fell to the floor, his life draining out of his grinning mouth, the black stone slab rippled like ink, or maybe flesh, and a sound—a voice—arose from inside all that endless black. It howled, it roared, it yammered in a language I couldn’t possibly understand that nearly split my eardrums and fried my brain like an egg.

And then it sang, and I stood there, listening. Song or meat. Both Doyle and I had our role now, and I dragged his body toward the pulsating slab of rippling black that lapped up and over the bones. Shrill barks and clicks came from the holes in the mountain. Things emerged from the openings, and watched the procession on the ossuary floor below. The song from the black slab grew louder, and I started to hum, as it started to make sense. Vibrations became words, stitched together into stanzas. New real estate in my brain began to map itself out. New synaptic connections were made. New notes discovered in a sonar range I never knew existed.

The first verse in this psalm I already knew. It was born inside me, in my lizard DNA, and I just needed to be swallowed and reborn to remember:

For one to transcend, one must kill their heroes. This is the way of Old Leech.

Thus concludes tonight’s service.

The Old Pageant

Richard Gavin

H
e didn’t want her to know how physically taxing he’d found the long drive to the woods, how tedious the prospect of unpacking seemed, or how repugnantly primitive he found their accommodations to be upon their arrival. The holiday had the potential to be far too special an occasion for him to sour it by sulking.

The cabin had been in her family for decades, though the moment he spied it—an oblong box slumped between leprous-looking birch trees—he wondered why she didn’t regard the cabin as a skeleton from her family’s closet instead of a prideful heirloom.

After an anxious struggle to fit the copper key inside the ancient lock, the door gave, allowing the pair of them to be assaulted by the stench of long-trapped air. The dark had evidently grown so accustomed to the cabin’s interior that it stubbornly refused to part for the sunbeams that the man and woman ushered in.

Shutters were peeled back, windows were pried ajar. She stripped the ancient white sheets from the beds and took them outside and hung them from the birch limbs so that the breezes might push out their mustiness.

They cleaned and unpacked and traded off-colour wisecracks. The supper they cooked together was hearty and its aroma managed to mask a bit of the cabin’s cloying staleness.

After eating he delighted her by finding the detached footboard that had once braced the lower bunk bed she’d slept on as a girl. It had been wound in a shower drape of translucent plastic and stored behind her grandmother’s dormant sewing desk.

Her grandfather had carved (with visible skill and obvious love) an inscription into the footboard:

Here lies Donna Hammill

Each and every summer

Dreaming…

She cried and ran her fingers along the grooved words as though they were Braille.

—I have another gift for you, he told her in a voice whose shakiness surprised him.

He was almost fearful of producing the ring case from his pocket.

Ultimately he opened the case and he asked her.

She accepted and they both began to shed fresh tears, but ones of happiness.

He uncorked the bottle of pinot noir. She stole a sip from the brimming glass he handed her.

She set it on the windowsill and told him not to move a muscle. Her purring tone thrilled him.

Leaning against the deep washbasin with its antiquated hand pump, he watched with increasing anticipation as she pushed together a pair of slender cots, draped a quilt across their bare mattresses, and stripped the dusty clothing from her body.

She giggled at his suggestion that they shut the door and windows, assuring him that they were all alone, no one within earshot. In fact, no one within walking distance.

He went to her.

The ferocity of her climax proved to him just how isolated they were, for she had always been painfully aware of the neighbours. Birds actually rustled free from a nearby tree, startled by her passionate cries.

Buoyed by his petit mal, he lay back in the humidity and hoped that the encroaching dusk would cool him.

—Well, we’ve officially christened this place, she beamed.

She held up her left hand to admire the glinting star that now ringed her finger.

He asked her if she was happy.

—Very, she told him.

—When was the last time you were up here?

—Not since I was eleven, the summer before my grandma died.

—How come your family never sold it? If the cabin wasn’t being used, I mean.

She shrugged.

—It had been in the family for so long, no one ever thought of getting rid of it. My great-grandfather built this cabin with my great-grandmother. They actually lived here for a few years. Eventually they moved to Olympia where my great-grandfather had landed a job doing… something, I can’t remember what it was. They used to spend their summers up here with their kids. Then my grandparents vacationed here with
their
kids, then on to my parents with my sister and me. And now us.

She pecked his cheek and he smiled and tipped back the bottle of pinot noir.

—Did you like coming up here when you were a girl?

—I loved it.

Her tone was richly sincere, if a shade melancholic.

He placed his head against her breast and asked her to tell him about what it was like. He was city-born, city-bred. Nature was to him as it should be to all: utterly bewildering, daunting in its autonomy.

—My grandmother used to take my sister and me on these marathon hikes where she’d point out all the different plant types. Or she’d try to teach us how to identify a bird by its call, things like that.

She began to chew her plump lower lip and he asked her what was wrong.

—Nothing.

His bladder had been throbbing for several minutes. He rose and muttered some euphemism for relieving himself which she did not find as funny as he’d hoped. He excused himself from the cabin.