The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (33 page)

“Really?”

“Anyway,” Delaney said, “the job’s there if you want to look into it.”

The sun had lifted over the horizon, lighting the landscape to gold-tinted colors. Marissa said, “If I were interested in this position, how much are we talking? Fifty? Sixty? I heard some of the guys who ferried around the Stillwater execs drew down as much as eighty.”

“You’d have to do your own negotiating,” Delaney said, “but I can guarantee you’d be making three times that, at least.”

“Jesus,” Marissa said. “Are you serious?”

He nodded. “Understand, you’d have to be available twenty-four/seven.”

“For that kind of money, I’ll sleep at the foot of his fucking bed.”

“You want me to put you in touch with him?”

“Might as well. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“Don’t say that,” Delaney said.

V

Inside, the Quonset hut was a poured concrete floor and metal ribs arching overhead. It had to be warmer than outside, but not by enough to matter. By what light the cloudy windows admitted, Marissa saw that, with the exception of a large, metal cage at its center, the structure was empty. Without hesitation, Barry strode to the cage, which appeared to contain another cage—an elevator, Marissa realized, it was an elevator. Barry swung open the cage door, and stepped into the car, which creaked with his bulk. A black box with a row of rectangular switches had been mounted to his right; he snapped all up at once. Within the elevator, a pair of halogen lights hung in opposite corners flared to life, while the air filled with the nasal hum of electricity. After making certain the door to the place was shut, Marissa crossed to the elevator. It shifted slightly with her weight. A narrow black box with two buttons set one below the other attached to the wire to her left. Barry nodded his ski-masked head at it. “If you would…”

She stabbed the lower button with a mittened finger. The car clattered, shook, and commenced a shuddering descent. Although her face was covered, she supposed her skepticism was evident. She said, “I was under the impression this place was more of a going concern. How long has it been since it was active?”

“As a diamond mine, thirty years, give or take. From the start, it was never as productive as its backers predicted. What diamonds were here were dug out almost immediately. The operation chugged on for a few more years, after which, it was leased to a pair of scientists.”

“Scientists?”

“I met one of them; though I didn’t know it at the time. At one of Manny and Liz Steiner’s parties, a Dr. Ryoko. He and his colleague used the lower reaches of the mine for some type of subatomic research. Had to do with exploiting the layers of rock to slow down the speed of some exotic particles enough for them to be measured. After they left, the mine lay dormant for a decade and half, until a man named Tyler Choate paid a ridiculous sum of money to have the use of the location for three months.”

The elevator lowered past an unlit tunnel. Marissa said, “What for?”

“That is a very interesting question. No one I talked to—and I spoke with a number of people—could answer it. I had to turn to a woman who’s good with computers to find out exactly how much his rental cost Mr. Choate. I’m used to large amounts of money. This was enough to impress me.

“To make matters more perplexing,” Barry said, “Tyler Choate undertook this course of action while an inmate at a maximum-security prison, where he was serving twenty-years-to-life for some especially nasty sex-crimes. Where, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, he continues to pay his debt to society.”

Marissa was about to ask him if he was sure, stopped herself. Of course he was. When Barry became interested in something—truly interested—he researched the subject as thoroughly as any scholar. Instead, she said, “I’m guessing that Tyler Choate led you to this place, and not the other way around.”

“That’s right, Barry said. “You’re wondering why.”

“Yeah.”

“When Delaney informed you I was looking to hire someone, he told you that he knew me through his employer, Wallace Smith. Did he tell you what happened to Wally?”

Another dark tunnel rose in front of the elevator door. “Just that he was dead. And,” she added, “that Delaney had nothing to do with it. To be honest, he seemed kind of spooked by the whole thing.”

“As well he should have been. No one has been able to say with any certainty what became of the man—of him and Helen, his wife. She had suffered a grievous injury and was being cared for at their house. One morning, she, Wally, and her nurse disappeared. Most of them did, anyway. There were… pieces of them left behind. Strictly speaking, there’s no definite proof that Wally is dead—that any of them is. But it doesn’t look good. The police were treating it as a probable multiple homicide.”

“So Tyler Choate’s some kind of crime boss, and your friend crossed him.”

“That sounds as if it should be what occurred,” Barry said. “I’m pretty sure it’s the theory the cops are working from. From a distance—from what I’ve told you—it’s the reasonable explanation. Wally’s wife was injured in a barn that was connected to the Choates. This set him off in search of information about them. He hired a private detective, a man named Lance Pride; he was the one who located Tyler Choate.”

“Wait,” Marissa said, “the guy’s wife was hurt in a barn? What happened?”

Barry considered the latest tunnel that had opened before them. “A horse kicked her in the head. Split her skull open. A freak accident, but it left her with massive brain damage.”

“Ouch. I guess that explains why he was so keen to get hold of whoever owned the barn.”

“The horse kicked Wally, too—ruined his hip, left him unable to walk without a cane. That didn’t matter as much as the wound to Helen, though.”

“What became of the horse?”

“Delaney shot it.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway—what I started to say was, when I began to poke around into Wally and Helen’s disappearance, into the weeks leading up to it, what appeared to be the reasonable explanation fell apart right away. For one thing, the Choates weren’t your typical crime family. Almost the opposite, in fact. Pig farmers and super-scientists. I know, it sounds bizarre, but several of the men in the family had careers of some note. In physics, mostly. They also raised pigs on their property, to no great profit, from what I could determine. Members of the family came and went from view. Sometimes this was because they were visiting universities, research labs, think tanks, consulting on theoretical problems and their practical applications. I’ll be honest: I couldn’t tell you what the hell they were studying, and I flatter myself I’m intelligent. Some of the projects had to do with fairly exotic subatomic particles, which may explain Tyler’s interest in this mine.”

“You said he was in prison,” Marissa said, “Tyler.”

The air had warmed sufficiently for them to remove their ski masks, which Barry did, leaving tufts of his fine hair half-raised. “He is. I gather he was as gifted as the rest of the family, but chose a career in law enforcement, instead. Presumably, to allow him a safe vantage point from which to pursue his less-wholesome activities.”

“He was the bad apple,” Marissa said. “The rest of the family was okay—weird, but okay—and he was into bad shit. Your friend messed with him, and Tyler had him taken care of. If he’s important enough, then him being in prison doesn’t matter. He wants to reach out and touch someone, he can do it.”

“All very rational,” Barry said, “except, there’s no evidence linking him to any larger criminal network, not even in rumor. He appears to be a model inmate; at least, his warden thinks so.”

Marissa pulled off her ski mask, stuffed it in her coat pocket. “Okay,” she said. “I want to say maybe the Choates are a dead-end, but we’re here, so I assume they’re not.”

They passed the entrance to a larger tunnel. “He called me,” Barry said. “Tyler Choate. Last week. I’ve spent a lot of time and treasure on this matter. I’ve investigated the Choates as extensively as did Wally. Hell, I succeeded in laying hands on the transcript of a cassette tape Lance Pride sent to Wally about a supposed visit he paid to Tyler Choate in his prison cell. It’s nonsense, but I read it half a dozen times. I’ve had Wally and Helen’s histories put under the microscope, too. I’ve stood in the room where the pieces of them were found. It’s been scrubbed clean, of course, but I swear, there is a feel to that space… It’s as if, when you notice the walls and ceiling out of the corners of your eyes, they aren’t meeting the way they should. But what other effect would you expect the site of such violence to have?

“The problem is, none of what I’ve found fits together. Despite my best efforts, I’ve been unable to arrange the information I’ve gathered into a coherent whole that will explain my friend’s fate. From what I understand, the police have encountered the same difficulty. I’ve kept on searching—it was what led me here, to Eckhard. I did my homework; I knew that the mine was tapped out decades ago. I suspect the consortium who’ve purchased it intend to set it up as some type of tax dodge. I don’t judge them; I’ve done the same thing, myself. What caused me to reach out to them was the fact that Tyler Choate had made use of the mine. In turn, this drew his attention to me.”

“What did he say?”

“He asked me if I was a student of mythology.”

The entrance to the next tunnel was smaller. “Mythology?”

“I said I’d read Bulfinch when I was younger, Edith Hamilton. Good, he said, I was familiar with the story of Ymir.”

“Ymir.”

“It’s part of the Norse creation myth. Ymir is a giant, inconceivably huge. The god, Odin, together with his brothers Vili and Vé, kills Ymir, then uses the pieces of his corpse to build the world. His skull becomes the sky, his blood the sea—you get the idea.”

“Lovely.”

“These are the Vikings we’re talking about. They weren’t famed for their refined sensibilities.”

“Okay—what does this have to do with anything?”

“Picture, Choate said, a being that size, vast enough that the inside of its skull could form the entire sky. How long did I suppose it would take for a creature that enormous to die? Eons as we measure time, even as our gods do. All the time Odin and his kin were carving up Ymir, tossing his brains up into the air to make the clouds, they were surrounded by his dying thoughts. When Ragnarok—their apocalypse—came, and everything went down in fire and ruin, it was only the last of those thoughts, coming to its end.”

“That’s pretty trippy,” Marissa said, “but I don’t—”

“Suppose,” Barry went on, “you could drill into that giant skull, through to whatever remained of its brain. A sublime trepanation, he called it. Wouldn’t you need a plane for that, I said, if we were inside the giant’s head? That was taking the myth too literally, Choate said. What it described was the fall of a being—the catastrophic fall, the Big Bang as the original murder—in whose remains all of us were resident. We—everything was living inside this dying titan. Our solar system was a bacterium subsisting on its cooling flesh. Quite a hopeless situation, he said, no less for him and his family. The Choates had scaled the evolutionary ladder, climbed so high above their fellow apes they could no longer see them below, but for all that, they were little better than tapeworms gorging themselves in the loops of the giant’s rotting intestines.”

How many tunnels had they passed? All full of darkness that had a curiously flat quality, as if it had been painted on the rock face. Barry said, “There are points, however, where the tractability of the quantum foam might permit you to pierce the giant’s forehead, to expose the surface of that great brain. You might stand at one end of an unbelievably long tunnel and watch thoughts light Ymir’s cerebrum like chains of bursting suns. If you could decode those lights, who could say what you might learn?”

“All right,” Marissa said, with sufficient force to interrupt Barry’s reverie. “We’ve moved from trippy to batshit insane.”

“I know, I know.” Barry shook his head. “The man’s voice… it was as refined, as precise, as an Oxford don’s. It seemed to surround me. I wanted to ask him about Wally, say, How are you connected to my friend’s death? But as long as he was speaking, I couldn’t force the words out. They were trapped by Choate’s voice. I had the sense that he knew exactly what my question was, but he never answered it. Instead, he invited me to meet him here, today. I agreed. I knew he was still in prison—and I double-checked, after the call ended—but I also knew I would keep our appointment. And,” Barry opened his hands to take in the elevator, the surrounding rock, “here we are.”

Half a dozen comments competed for Marissa to voice them, ranging from piteous (“Oh, Barry.”) to scornful (“Seriously? This is why we drove to the ass-end of nowhere?”). All were choked off when movement to her left drew her eyes to that corner of the elevator, where she saw the same child who had stood in front of her on the ice road. Its eyes were wide, its mouth open.

VI

After her breathing had returned to normal, Marissa rose from the bed, pulled off the baseball cap and sunglasses Delaney had asked her to wear, and tugged on a t-shirt. Rather than returning to the king-sized bed, she settled in one of the chairs beside the small table that served as her personal bar. Most of the bottles ranged on it were down to a film tinting their glass bottoms, but the Baileys sloshed when she hefted it by the neck, and that was fine. She wasn’t certain Delaney was awake; she didn’t bother checking before she started to speak.