The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (28 page)

Big hands (that wouldn’t be slaying today), bodies (propped-up on rage), and hardened blackboots stomped out of Lundin’s General Store, tails (and derogatory) not quite between their legs.

“This is America; good man’s a good man no matter what god he thinks is best. Vermin and free-ranging predators… well, that’s why we got guns. How you set for shells, Mr. Kellerman?”

“Very well, thank you.”

“Lot of mouth, no backbone, Mr. Kellerman. I’ll mention them and their mouths to Mike.”

***

The fourth copy of the
Black Guide
had finally arrived. Strück’s bursts and cascades were enormous, his eyes raced across the handwritten pages. His tongue and teeth and lips flared with every word he released into the room.

“‘
They have existed long before humanity, and will continue to exist long after the human swarm has vanished
.
’

“Listen, Samuel. It is written in this copy as well. ‘
The Children of the Black Sun, called by various adepts and seekers of arcane wisdom, the Thin People—“beings of fell potency that dwell between,” live in dark forests, in places where the moon breathes. Inhabitants of the Dry Realms beneath the Black Sun they are called to blood
.
’

“When the moon colors the gate… their dance will break every wing. It will be my baton that conducts the currents they will ride.

“Night will come, Samuel. Even you must know it to be true. I am the hawk who has flown in shadows. I have been in the long, cold night, in the wounds that hold spooks to the Place of Skulls. My spade is the lightning that will learn their speech, the sounds and joy of it—how to hold it. I will open the way.”

A year later, on the sunless day American soldiers from the 6th Armored Division (Third Army) took shoeless, in rags, Samuel from the camp (two days after a horrified, young American captain emptied his .45 in Strück’s chest, an event Samuel was present for), the boy had all four copies in a cloth sack. From Buchenwald to a hospital (for nearly three weeks) to an autumn with shadows no music could climb, across Europe to the stamina of the American coast, no one thought to try to take the books from the boy.

***

Shots ring out.

The east window that brings sunrise into the room shattered. Cut, color, clarity, in the sunlight the pieces of the window cut mind and memory like diamonds.

Raechel Kellerman’s urn in pieces on the table and hardwood floor. Her ashes scattered.

Outside, dead on the porch (where minutes before she dozed quietly), Zina. The first of the three rounds that cut her down struck below her left ear…

“You’re next, JEW! Might come one night
and burn you out
—or alive!”

Tires on gravel, shitty-muffler noise.

No barking—old bones up off the kitchen floor, shotgun divining trouble, its able-bodied ready to address the visitation. Out the door.

Kellerman stood over Zina’s body, his hands were quaking fists. “Yes to heat. The heat will come… very soon.”

Kellerman was shattered but did not break. If there were a God he would have begged to be taken to some place of peace, but his task required him to bear the horror. He had. Had carried the moments. Took what was hard, what soaked and discolored every sky, what would not go away. Did when he was a boy. Did and did and did. This was harder, but he would do what was required, what he’d promised.

Kellerman took Zina’s head in his hands and kissed her brow, another to have, now have not, and then he dragged her into the toolshed. Tied a rope around her back legs and hung her, head down, from a hook. He slit her throat with a hunting knife. Her blood, and Kellerman’s tears, flowed into a washtub.

They will come for blood
.

While Zina’s blood dripped into the tub he went inside and swept up his wife’s ashes.

For an hour he dug in a small flower bed that the morning sun kissed. Then he placed his wife’s ashes on a comforter and wrapped Zina in it. Eyes stinging from an hour’s worth of tears, he buried them together.

Over them no prayer, but his promise.

Back in the shed he stirred some of his wife’s ashes into the blood before ladling the mixture into large pasta sauce jars. He took the jars inside the house and placed them in the refrigerator.

“If I need more… I have what flows in my veins.”

***

Kellerman took down two ancient newspaper-boy canvas delivery bags from the hook in the bedroom closet and brought them into the kitchen. He slid the pages he’d removed from thirty-two of his rarest books into the first sack. He put a few hundred upholstery tacks and a tack-hammer in the second.

Ten days, night and day, napping when he had to, preparing the pages. Drop of Zina’s blood and Rae’s ashes smeared over a certain word on a certain page. Now all he had to do was post his handbills and wait.

Didn’t lock his door on the way out. Might not get back.

If it was his time, it was.

Two hours of walking and selecting which trees on the east and north side of the compound to tack his handbills on. And another two as he repeated the process on the west and south sides.

After heating and consuming a small can of baked beans and a slice of wheat bread for his late dinner, Kellerman took his mug of coffee and his shotgun out to the porch and sat in his rocker.

He smoked and waited for the moon to rise.

A whisper after 10pm, moon on the day-maybe-two-till-werewolf-full side and riding high. The fog had unspooled, stayed low, swelled and covered bushes and clumps of ferns, curled and moiled around the base of hardwood trunks and low pine branches, clung to the pages he’d tacked to the trees. Clung. The ministrations of the moon roosted on certain words smeared with Zina’s blood and Raechel Kellerman’s ashes. Fog and moon… blood and ashes…

His mug was empty. A breeze was in the pine branches. He stood. Looked east. It was quiet. Looked in his window at the coffeemaker on the kitchen counter. Walked inside.

Kellerman came back out and sat on his porch. Had his coffee in a mug and his shotgun resting across his thighs. He rocked slowly.

To…

and

back to the toil of waiting. Ears ready to read. Mind packed, attached to the landscape not weighted in occurring. Smoking a cigarette with hurts.

Slowly.

Measured, not sluggish. Predator readying true for ignorant prey.

Smoked his cigarette.

Sipped his coffee.

Rocked.

Smoked another cigarette.

Old man with the shape and size and weight of the memories of his heart. Looked east. Didn’t smile. Didn’t make a fist.

“War Day.”

Heat, the dryness of an oven rising within the circular frame staked out by the pages. Leaves and needles and moss, brown, begin to wither.

“Blood.” One judge—Death clings to The Enemy of His Kind. No jury. Stipulation: “Blood.” Sentence pronounced.

The air is furnished with an unhurried, glimmering procession. They come, softly, like gargoyles not nailed to stone, smelling of tomb and the discolored bottom of roadside ditches. Float, glide, cloaked in misty nightclothes…

The human vessels that contain the blood are surrounded by the cold sound of fluttering.

What had yet to pale and brown in the branches and threaded undergrowth was visited by dry and shriveled in the strange heat the spectral consequences radiated.

Consequences visit human…

Blood… splatter and crackle. The roux thickens.

Soft white flesh… desperately alone, ripped open. Torn. Meat soft and gleaming, teeth in its flanks, at its throat. The clout of brutal teeth withholding nothing.

Cross-channels and torrents of pain. Panting. Sobs. Fractured arms. Pain, bewildering balloons of pain, and drop by drop. Eyes enlarged by suffering burst. No yes or no and few shocked outcries born in panic.

Heads are pulled off.

Meatfat dripping in the heat. Muscle stripped away, and bone, shattered, swallowed—no belching… mastered by beasts.

The strong cold moon shouting in the fog clutches. Blood.

The Thin People were called to it. Took laffs and its you again… Took dutifully… Took slower and praise and that’s too much… Took breath and all that was wet inside—

Soft flanks. Pain yes. Outcry and very little gunfire in response. Torn sinew. Stripped, unrecognizable. Swallowed in torrents. Bone gleaming.

No rowing away…

Spilled.

Cause of death: sentence pronounced.

{
The Brandos “Gettysburg”; Steve Reich
Different Trains for String Quartet and Tape—Europe—During the War (movement 2);
Lena Griffin “The Ghosts of Pretty Cello Girls”; David Sylvian “Waterfront”}

The Woman in the Wood

Daniel Mills

From the diary of James Addison Thorndike II (1828–1843?)

14th July. Thursday.

E
vening. I spent to-day with my Aunt while Uncle Timothy was at work in the fields. His farm is the largest for miles around with hundreds of acres of hilly pasture. There are few trees save for a solitary stand of pine at the edge of his property & the wind is strong & constant. It comes down from the bare mountains & crosses the open fields.

Aunt Sarah is not at all what I expected. She is only a little older than myself though Uncle Timothy is older even than Father. She is his second wife, the sister of a traveling preacher. She speaks plainly & with an accent & is fond of quoting Scripture, as is my Uncle, though she is superstitious as well & shivers to hear the whippoorwills passing overhead.

The baby Mary is not yet two. Aunt Sarah dotes on her. She carries the child with her all about the house, though she is only a small woman & expecting another besides.

I arrived in the village last night.

It was well past suppertime when the coach reached town & my Uncle was surprised to learn that my parents had permitted me to make the journey alone.

Later I heard them talking about me. My bedroom is next to theirs at the back of the house & I could hear them quite clearly.

A boy of his age? my Uncle asked. It isn’t right.

Surely there’s no harm in it, Aunt Sarah said. Traveling on his own.

He isn’t yet fifteen.

Aunt Sarah laughed. She said: I weren’t much older than that when you met me.

Yes, he said, a little sadly. I remember.

Then came a long pause before my Aunt spoke again. She asked: Is the boy truly ill? His father’s letter says he does not sleep or eat—

Of course he isn’t ill, my Uncle said. It’s country air he needs, that’s all.

***

[The following passage is the first of several written in a rushed and nearly illegible script as denoted here by the use of italics. It was subsequently crossed out by the diarist. —
ed
.]

& she’s standing by the bed in her nightgown which she slides over her head, smiling as she reveals herself to me. She is white as milk & stinks of sin. Her belly bulges outward where the baby turns & kicks within her & below that the blackened mouth with its lips spread & dripping

***

15th July. Friday.

I found it in the fields near the pine-wood.

The beast was lying on its side & I thought perhaps it was sick. But I smelled the rot as I drew near & saw its blood splashed through the grass—

This morning it rained, though the skies were clear by noon. The day was hot so I wore my linen shirt & trousers. I ate sparingly of the dinner my Aunt had prepared (mutton roasted & charred) and afterward announced my intention to walk outside on my own as Father would never have permitted in Boston.

I walked the fields for the best part of an hour without seeing man or beast. Then I came over a rise & saw the great herd of them before me. They were grazing at the end of the stony pasture: dumb & grunting & caked in their own filth.

I went eastwards & climbed over a wall to the adjoining field where the land slopes down to the neighbors’ property & the pine-wood, which lies in a depression between so that none know for certain who owns it (or so my Uncle says).

The grass is higher there & that is where I found the ewe.

Uncle Timothy was at work in the pastures to the south. I ran toward him, waving & shouting & he came to meet me at a sprint. I told him what I had found & he sent me back to the house. Then he called to Auguste, one of the hired men.

Come, he said. And bring your gun.

I went back to the house & told Aunt Sarah that I had found a dead sheep. She said it was probably dogs or a wolf, but Uncle Timothy returned to the house at dusk & said it was likely a wildcat, though he hadn’t heard of them coming so far south, especially in the summer.