The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (27 page)

Zina, ninety pounds of unwavering attentiveness, settled at the foot of his bed. His Mossberg rested against the nightstand. Kellerman’s hands were trembling fists as he fell asleep.

Blackboots half-dragging a teenage girl through the muddy filth in Buchenwald
.
She screams and pleads in Polish, as her terror-blasted eyes lock on the eyes of nine-year-old Samuel Kellerman
.
In her pupils the boy sees the abyss, not for the first time
.
He can feel as well as hear the sludge of hungry murmurs clinging to her
.
Her next scream pulls him back from the abyss
.

Two SS officers drag her through the door Samuel holds open
.

“You will take her in the other room and hose her off
.
When she is dry, put her in a gown and bring her to me
,
”
Dr. Ernst Karl Strück spit
.

“Samuel, clean that mud off my floor
.
”

Samuel Kellerman stood on the other side of the door for two hours
.
His tears no armor against what he hears on the other side
.

“Samuel
. Komm’ her.”

Samuel tried not to look at the thing—maggot-ready wreckage scent of gut and fluids, innards observed by the medic of rooting hands, eyes missing from their sockets (and the room), hands and feet severed tossed in a metal medical tray, hours ago a young girl—on the floor
.
Tried not to look at the doctor
.

Dr. Ernst Karl Strück walked to the boy, gripped his jaw with thumb and forefinger, raised his head
.
“Call the guards to remove this
.
And clean the blood from my floor
.
”

The doctor, naked and still erect, was wearing the girl’s skinned face
.

Samuel wet himself
.

“When your task is complete, bring the
Schwarze Fűhrers
to my study
.
And Samuel, you will remember, do not look inside the books
.
”

Bolt upright. The dream-images deteriorating but the savage horrors the terrified child forever-bound inside Kellerman thunder from memory’s tongue. Decades distant and still the frenzied riverbed of nightmares attack. Kellerman was quick to strip the sweat-soaked sheets. Lying there on dry sheets he did not sleep, but he cried, unconsciously scratching the inmate identification number tattooed on his left arm as he does every time he endures these night-terrors.

***

Sunrise and at times, quiet birds, outside the east window where his wife’s crematory urn rested. A window once far away from what people are capable of. In May-June rose-purple rhododendron blooms softened the view. Morning coffee brewing, Kellerman lovingly dusted the urn.

“What thrived outside all rules, Raechel… it lives here now.

“I hope you can forgive me, but I do not think I can distance myself from the beast again… I’m too old. And where would we move?”

Kellerman poured coffee in the mug; he stopped when it was one inch below the rim of the mug. He measured one level teaspoon of sugar and stirred it, three times, into the coffee, then he measured one level tablespoon of whole milk and added it to the mug, stirring it exactly five times with the tablespoon. He set the mug on his small desk in his study. Then walked to the door. “Come, Zina.” He looked at his wife’s urn as he closed and locked the door to his library.

Half of the books Chance and Ray had sold to him were piled in a corner. They were too slight or redundant, and as they contained no pieces of his golem they were of no use to him. Seven volumes sat on his desk awaiting deeper scrutiny. He opened the next box and began looking at what he had purchased.

When the chimes of the anniversary clock on his desk announced the noontide hour he went into the kitchen and made a simple lunch, one slice of wheat bread, a thin layer of lightly salted butter evenly spread, and two slices of venison salami from Lundin’s General Store. As he ate, he cut a four-inch hunk of the salami into eight pieces and slowly handfed them to his ninety-pound Rottie.

Thirty minutes later Kellerman was walking Zina on a curved, evergreen-hooded path that lead north; since Hambly’s passing this had become his favorite walking track, in no small part due to the pink-bloom rhododendrons that were generously sprinkled along it. The boughs of ancient pines ringing the small clearing Kellerman liked to stop and take in moved in the breeze. This was a quiet place, undergrowth—that did not march to the rigor of any compass—threatened its unfilled, and thick hides of emerald moss covered the ten boulders that were scattered in the center of the clearing he believed Hambly would have found theatrical. Even with the fierce nature of a July sun lengthening above, it could be a lonely place; today it was gloomier without its usual birdsong.

Odd this. Unnaturally quiet
. “Not a single bird.” He did not think long on them being hunkered down or flown—

Gunfire. Automatic weapons. Close. Loud voices toasting in gutterwords between the bursts.

Kellerman repositioned his Mossberg. Should confrontation with his new neighbors suddenly bruise it would be no real defense, but…

“The demons came. They shattered the night. They butchered by daylight… Now their children unleash that hatred and bloodlust here. All they know is dismantle and decimate. This hostility must die.”

Kellerman was not ready for the conflict he knew would come. He turned and walked home, the color of his step fueled by resolve.

***

Kellerman stepped away from the coal-dark window. There was no moon tonight and if and when the sun rose in the morning for him, any radiance it cared to extend would be stained by the blight of darkness that had applied its behavior and instruments on the quiet abundance his neighbor, and fellow refugee, Hambly had so loved.

Hambly was a good man. Kind and generous, a good neighbor. He was a poet, held in high regard and widely published. Soul-sore he fled the streets of illest-’cuz, nigga/drive-by L.A. to find roots, breathe stars and read the flux of seasons, and expand his craft.

Craig Hambly died, suddenly—unexpectedly—in his sleep, at fifty and his property was sold off.

Hambly and Kellerman had been out walking for the better part of an hour. Hambly stopped and sat on a fallen bole. He packed his pipe with a mild cherry-blend and after lighting it, said, “L.A. How long was a blues. Suddenly, a void. Same in Chicago. I couldn’t breathe in waves of fine-print—gaps, junctures, last things, the vertigo of the turns and back that spoiled and slashed… it had become a harpoon, speed I kept stumbling over. I became a manifesto of excessive thinness… So I came here to wash off the stinging salt. To gaze at bowels and escape.”

Hambly picked up a fallen leaf, twirled it between thumb and forefinger. “I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.” His small smile seems to say he found his musing funny, but it faded quickly. He pointed along the shadowed deer runway they’d been following. “Nature’s watchmen have told me this wood is a door, Sam. Behind this green curtain is another existence. One day I hope to find the truth there.”

Kellerman hoped his friend would never come upon what he sought.

He didn’t.

In Hambly’s absence a different black kernel, a vulgar storm, stained the horizon.

Kellerman spent the night looking through the new boxes of books. He had black kernels of his own to seed.

***

Clouded in a whorl of cigarette smoke, Dr. Ernst Karl Strück read aloud from the dark books. Every night—displaying profoundly and black-flares of notions not-mastered. All day—all work. Samuel (statue, standing where instructed, awaiting instruction to do this, or fetch that) listened, didn’t want to, but he did. Strück was a Nazi mystic, one of Hitler’s occult seekers. When he was not carving his pleasures in adolescent flesh (which he ordered, almost nightly, from the women’s camp) he was deep in the occult documents brought to him from every nook and crevasse in Europe.

His pencil, Strück could not abide pens, tapped steadily on the desk as he examined his copies of the
Black Guide
. Strück was in possession of three copies and aggressively in search of as many others as could be unearthed—“They assert there may be as many as fifty copies and all you can find is three? Your performance to date is wholly unacceptable. There are hells beneath the hells, Sturmbannführer, and if you do not find me other copies, you will find the ongoing agonies of the Jews in this facility are negligible in comparison to what you will endure.” Tonight, warped by a foulsome mood, as a forth copy (acquired in a tiny village to the south and west of Kiev) had been held up by railway delays, Strück was seeking the key to his future in the copy that had been found in Barcelona.

“‘There are wild places in nature where They reside, waiting for the door to be opened. They have always lived there. When the conditions are met the Thin People will come through.’

“‘They will come for blood.’

“For
blood
.”

Strück’s head came up from the book. His eyes locked on Samuel. “Do you have the ability to understand, my little monkey? You see what I do here… but do you
see
?

“No. No, how could you? You are both child and Jew… you are merely another ant.

“A few of the sycophants who have his ear think my intellectual excursions and concepts are the products of mental illness… Mad!” Strück backhanded the telephone off his desk.

“My insights…
are wild claims?
I am no dolt. Make no mistake, boy; I am aware of which of them disparage me. When
I
summon the Children of the Black Sun they will understand. They seek the tools of Odin and the weapons of the Christ-father—there is no
Spear of Destiny
.
Gungnir
is a barbarian’s myth. If there had been a Loki, he would have injured himself laughing at what they believe.

“If your people could have raised a golem, Samuel, would they be here now?

“Fools… man’s gods have no power; they never did for the gods mankind’s religions hold up never existed.” Strück held up the
Black Guide
. “In this is the power that has been hidden in the mystic.”

The doctor lighted an unfiltered cigarette and smoked it. “Their voices direct me. They will lead me to the broadsword that is hidden within these obscurities.”

Nights Samuel stood on the other side of the door he heard voices, the doctor’s, the pleas and screams of Strück’s victims, and he heard unhuman amusement and the merciless and abrasive comments—bonfires of hungrily—of unseen
Others
. Yet he knew only two had entered the room, the room with no window or vent and only this bolted door.

Repeatedly, Strück tapped on the book’s cover with his pencil. “One day soon. One day soon.”

***

Two members of the W.L.A. (shaped like an explosion of blunt) thrust their neo-Nazi extremism—their flame (nothing concealed, nothing slight) could have broken rocks—through the door of Lundin’s General Store, Isabella Gallo put the bottle of habañero pepper hot sauce and the cake mix back on the shelf and made a beeline for the door. Mary Caples scooped up her daughter, Nikki (and her red-horned/red-tailed unicorn plushy), and followed suit.

Had Lundin been at a party his scowl would have easily been awarded Best Eastwood Impression.
First we get the occasional asshole redneck coming in, now it’s these assbags
.

“All set, Mr. Kellerman. Comes to $62.47 with tax. I’ll have your girl’s dog-food Tuesday afternoon.”

“Kellerman?” Spit. “That a
Jew
name?” Roar.

“There are those of the Hebrew faith with the name, yes.”

“Look like a
Jew
to me.”

“I have heard it said everyone has an opinion.”

“Old man” (spit) “and a
Jew
,” (roar) “I’d be real fucking careful openin’ my mouth. This country is going to get cleaned up real soon and a lot of trash ain’t gonna do too well when Right and White reclaims its due.”

“Yeah. War comin’”

The topography of detestation displayed gave Pete Lundin no pause. He’d been a nineteen-year-old grunt in The Nam and after taking two in the chest as his baptism of fire, kowtowing to hate-garbage wasn’t in him. “It won’t be today. And it won’t be
in my store
.

“See that?” Lundin asked. “The guy I’m fishing with in that photo is my wife’s brother, Mike. Folks around here know Mike as the county sheriff—been sheriff here for fifteen years. Him and me like to fish together and play horseshoes, or pool, together and we like to sit and have a beer or two… and we like to go hunting together. Bow, shotgun, or rifle all work great on
coyotes
. If you take my meaning? Now’s a good time to git, Adolf.”