The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (21 page)

to do: Travel expense report, make contact/set up interviews with co-workers, follow up with Royal Newfoundland Constabulary, local wilderness guide?,
explain to Scott that I’m not really going off into the wild by myself again
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june 30

Hello from Happy Valley-Goose Bay’s library! Subarctic climate, but it’s sunny and pushing into tee shirt weather. Town sits at the southwestern end of Lake Melville (a town/lake only a Calvinist would love) and at the mouth of Churchill River. It’s not much of a city with a population equivalent to Tommy’s hometown of Ryder. A WWII boomtown, founded by sticking an air force base out here. Runway is long enough to have once served as an alternate landing spot for NASA’s space shuttles. First non-military settlers were led by a Rev. Lawrence B. Klein, who was appointed as the first resident United Church of Canada, minister (1953
–
1954). Reverend Klein and his wife Johanna organized non-denominational community meetings that eventually led to Happy Valley being officially registered as a municipality in 1953. There were 106 charter families: 45 United Church, 24 Anglican, 21 Moravian, 12 Pentecostal, 4 Catholic. Metis and Inuit now make up close to 40% of the town’s population.

july 1

Jeffrey Stephens, Royal Newfoundland Constabulary: Tall, rail thin, ruddy complexion, strong man contest handshake. Dark blue dress shirt pressed to within an inch of its life with light blue Constabulary crest patch on left arm. Big window overlooks the bay behind him and his desk. Pleasant enough. Chitchatted. Stammered through saying he enjoyed my book on Everest, well, not that he enjoyed the parts where so many others in my party died: “Jeeze, must’ve been rough. When all hell broke loose and you trip over the dead climber in the snow on your way down to camp, man, that’s something that stuck with me.” I told him it was rough and thanked him for reading the book. To ease the mood, I point at the pic of his young wife and baby and tell him he has a beautiful family. He doesn’t ask about my family and he clearly doesn’t want to be talking to me about Tommy. Maybe reading too much into vibe and his clearly defensive posture (Scott
6
says it’s one of my less endearing features but I’m a journalist and can’t help that).

Tommy’s body was found by Antoine and Brandon LaForge (father and son snowmobilers) on March 24th. Stephens presented me a photo of the body. Tommy’s all curled up in a tight ball, lost inside his puffy anorak. Adjacent to him are the dead coals and black ash of a spent fire pit. Tommy likely died of starvation sometime during the previous fall. Five fingers on his right hand were missing. The coroner was unable to determine if fingers were removed by critters post-mortem because of the advanced state of decay of the body.

Were any other body parts missing?

“No.”

Isn’t it odd that animals didn’t take anything else?

“Who knows why animals do anything they do?”

Tommy’s hands look to be hidden tight into that ball of rigor mortis. Stephens agreed. There was evidence of frostbite in Tommy’s toes and Stephens suggested (admitted it wasn’t likely), that perhaps Tommy cut his fingers off himself after suffering from severe frostbite
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. Next an itemized list of the meager supplies found in Tommy’s possession, including a camera. They were only able to produce a handful of pictures from the film in his pack and in his camera, the rest were washouts: one photo of a woman in a small apartment kitchen, hiding her face behind a dish towel
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; three photos of woods, the hiking trails nearly indecipherable in the brush; an open field with the barn as a dot in the far background; the last picture is a self-portrait of Tommy sitting up against the barn, his hair wild, baby face tufted with facial hair, gaunt and emaciated, facial fat and muscles melting away, replaced by the hard angles of what lies beneath
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, but he doesn’t look like he’s suffering or in pain, but with the content, wild, ecstatic look of a zealot. He sits with his back up against the side of the barn but toward the front. Above his head, and in the upper right hand corner protruding out from the front of the barn, is an ornamental structure, like a deer’s head in profile, and I do think it’s some sort of animalistic avatar or totem, only the neck is elongated, but the head has no antlers, or ears, or much of a snout, it’s oval, tapers to a rounded point at the bottom, human?

What’s that supposed to be on the front of the barn?

“Not sure. The wood at the end has been all chewed up by woodpeckers.”

Early town records are a bit murky on who first built the Barn
and cleared the area to farm it
, but one of the town founders
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took it over and used it to host weekend retreats in the summer. The property was abandoned in the mid-’80s by the family trust, officially condemned, but has been left standing so lost hunters/hikers/snowmobilers can use it for shelter if they get in trouble, and frankly, it’s too deep in the woods, the road/trail out to it long overgrown, to bring out wrecking equipment.

“We get kids like Tommy up here all the time looking for freedom, adventure, something to fill the hole in their lives. Many walk into the woods. Some don’t walk out.” (subtext: don’t know what makes Tommy so special that a famous writer would be writing his story).

Do you think Tommy knew the barn was there?
11

“I doubt it.”

—Lunch at the Silvertop Diner
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. Tommy washed dishes here for a little over a month, alternated crashing with a co-worker and staying in a motel
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. I sit at the counter and ask locals about Tommy. Some remember him as a friendly, smiling kid with an infectious laugh. The owner, Garrett Langan (thick glasses and thicker forearms), didn’t have too much to say other than, “Nice kid. Wasn’t afraid of hard work. Knew he wouldn’t stick long. A little squirrelly.”

Meeting with cook Nadia Bulkin at 6 pm tonight. Another co-worker, Steve Strantzas (unclear if he’s a cook or washer or waiter), refuses to meet with me
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. “What’s there to say? Seemed like a nice enough guy, but had no idea what he was getting into and died because of it. Oldest story in the book.”
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Pressed him for more, told me he was tired and hung up. (subtext: go fuck yourself, Nick.)

Nadia: Beers with Nadia at the Tavern on the Green. She was the last to see Tommy alive. He left her apartment on the morning of June 14th and hiked into the woods by himself. She’s a 34-year-old outdoor sports enthusiast (cross country skiing, kayaking, and mountain climbing mainly). Sunburned face. Wary smile. She’s a weird combination of chin-up/chest-out confidence and nervous twitchiness. Says she’s thinking of moving to Vancouver next spring, which is the first thing she told me after shaking hands and telling me she’s been stuck here for four years. She met Tommy the first night he showed up in the diner. He looked “as scraggly as a wayward dog and twice as skittish.” He drank three cups of coffee and ate two steaks. Didn’t take her bait in attempts at chitchat but asked about the dishwashing job. He was much more pleasant the next morning when he showed up to work, and over the next month he wowed everyone with his tales from the road and his boasts about going to live in the woods by himself for one year, just to prove that he could do it. Such a genuinely kind, enthusiastic, earnest kid, though haunted. “There was something there, behind the curtain, you know?” Nadia knew he was low on cash and she let him crash at her apartment.

She stopped there and swirled the last sip of her porter around the bottom of her glass.

You and Tommy got close?

“Yeah. Yeah, you could say that.”

I tell her I’m sorry. I know it’s hard.

“It is. Did I tell you I’m going to Vancouver next spring? Goddamn it, I am. I am.”

Nadia’s apartment: One bedroom. Kitchen/living room combo. Clean, but run down. Skis, boots, weather gear, clips, piled by the front door.

“I wanted him to stay. I think he almost did. I’m not just lying to myself, you know. I could sense that he wanted to. That in some ways it would’ve been easy to, but there was something else there, making him not stay. Making him go to the woods.”

What was it?

“He wanted to be alone. He needed to be alone. When he first got to the Bay, you could see him filling up with all the people around him again, a battery recharging. He was manic during those first few weeks. But then you could see him dimming again, losing the juice. We all weren’t enough to sustain him, keep him going.”

Did he want you to go with him?

“He asked me to go, but he didn’t really mean it. And I didn’t want to. It didn’t feel right. I’m not much of a trust-your-gut kind of person, but this time, I could feel it.” I finessed through a question about her being surprised Tommy was found in some abandoned barn only a few days hike from civilization. “I knew where he was going.”

Where? To the barn? How?

“He had this book with him. This stupid book.”

Do you have it?
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“Yes.”

Can I see it?

“Only if you take it with you when you leave.”

Tommy told her he had purchased the obscure book in a used bookstore back in Burlington, VT. He never came out and said as much but his obsession with the book was the motivation behind his trip.
The Black Guide
(Morderor de Caliginis)
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is a guidebook. Thin paper, small newspaper kind of font. Table of Contents divided the entire east coast of North America into sections. There are occasional grainy black and white photographs, rough illustrations, hand-drawn maps, but the meat of the book is comprised of colorful/colloquial descriptions/histories of regional oddities, “hidden places of arcana” (sic), and areas of interest for the “discerning tourist.” Despite my many travels (including hiking the Appalachian Trail from start to finish) in the region, none of the places in the TOC are familiar to me. There’s an entry titled “Labrador: Klein’s Barn.”

You didn’t give this to the Constabulary?

“No.”

Why?

She shrugged, said that she “sort of” told them about it. Said that Tommy talked about how he’d read about the barn in a guidebook as an emergency shelter if you get stuck out there in weather. “They didn’t ask me if I still had the book, either.”
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I ask if I could borrow the book for a few days.
19

“Like I said, I want you to take it.”

“Tommy promised me the night before he left. He promised me
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that he was going to stay with me, that he wouldn’t go out there by himself. I wanted to believe him when he said it. He seemed relieved, like that weight was gone. We went to bed. He woke in the middle of the night, screaming from some nightmare. And I mean he was full-on screaming. It took me forever to wake him up. He wouldn’t tell me what the dream was about, only that it was awful but it wasn’t a big deal, that he’d had the same nightmare before and he’d be fine. He spent the next hour in the bathroom with the light on, sink water running on and off. I couldn’t sleep and just watched his shadow filling the crack of light under the bathroom door. He didn’t say anything when he came back to bed. I wanted to talk but he said he didn’t want to talk about it, just wanted to sleep. When we got up the next morning we silently ate breakfast and in the middle of his coffee he just said that he had to go. That’s what he said. ‘I have to go, Nadia. I’m sorry.’ He got up and packed his gear. I ran out of the apartment and jogged two miles in my bare feet. He shouted after me, ‘I’ll be back in the spring.’ He was gone when I got back. He left the book on the counter.”

After he left, did you consider going out to try and find him, find the barn?

“No. I was angry at him, that whole summer, tried to forget him. This was what he wanted and I’m not a survivalist type. What was I going to do out there with him? And he wasn’t going to come back here with me.”

(Back at the Hotel):

Cursory web search turns up only one copy of
The Black Guide
on eBay. No publisher information forthcoming. Waiting to hear back from Tracy with more deets. Most of the entries in
The Black Guide
hint at the occult.

The Black Guide
entry, “Labrador: Klein’s Barn”

Klein’s Barn was built in spring/summer 1955, two years after Reverend Lawrence B. Klein and his fellow United Church of Canada followers registered Happy Valley as an official municipality. They wanted to hold religious retreats in the heart of nature and away from the prying eyes of the military stationed in and around Goose Bay. During a brief but eye-opening trip to France in the winter of 1956, Klein became obsessed with the Grand Guignol Theater in Paris. The theatre’s popularity was beginning to wane, but its history intrigued Klein; particularly the work of André de Lorde, who collaborated with an experimental psychologist Alfred Binet to write almost 100 plays, a handful of which featured a formless, nameless, and rapacious ancient deity whose fervent followers devolved into grotesqueries remade in its likeness. Klein admitted to being absolutely terrified by the plays, but became intrigued with the idea of crossing the lurid aesthetics of Grand Guignol with the ecstasy of old-time religion, of good old hellfire and brimstone. Upon his return from France, Klein wrote morality plays that always ended with the gory tortures of hell and with Satan portrayed as an insatiable, wormlike creature. How many of these plays were performed is not known. Whatever run they enjoyed was short, and his plays morphed into bizarre ceremonies and rites devoted to the nameless deity. The odd, long-necked carving that hangs above the entrance to the barn was apparently carved in its likeness. Klein’s wife Johanna along with other players were seriously injured with a fire stunt and shortly thereafter relocated to Europe and promptly disappeared.