The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (35 page)

“This is the Broadsword,” Tyler Choate said. He was standing to the right of the marble column. How, Marissa thought, could she possibly have missed him? The man was a giant, easily eight feet tall, five hundred pounds at minimum. A sleeveless white robe draped him to the tops of his thighs; the garment looked to be a sheet in whose center a hole had been cut for Choate’s outsized head. An assortment of astronomical symbols—stylized suns, moons, stars, planets, comets—had been written on the material in what appeared to be black magic marker. The body under the robe was exaggerated, swollen with muscles traversed by rigid veins. Nor was the face any better, the almost-delicate features situated in an expanse of flesh bordered by glossy black hair that draped Choate’s shoulders. What Marissa took to be a white dunce cap rose from his head—a wizard’s hat, she realized, to match the robe. A single symbol was inscribed on its front, a circle, its circumference broken at about the three o’clock mark.

There was no way for Marissa to have missed him, and yet, she had. It was as if he’d stepped out from behind the creamy light. His voice something with too many legs skittering over her, he said, “To be precise, this is Olympia’s famous hotel as it was mid-afternoon on March 5, 1927.”

“It’s an excellent reproduction,” Barry said. “I could almost believe I’m standing in the Broadsword at that exact moment.”

“You are,” Choate said, “although, the moment has been sliced from its context and slotted here.”

Wonderful
, Marissa thought,
guy thinks he’s a supervillain. Must be all the steroids he took to get this big
.

“Why?” Barry said.

“My father was very fond of the Broadsword,” Choate said. “His father took him to dine at it when he was a boy, and he retained a lifelong affection for the establishment. Call this an act of filial piety.”

“All right,” Barry said. “Why are we meeting you here? What does this location have to do with what happened to Wallace and Helen Smith?”

“Truthfully, not much,” Choate said, “although, given its association with my father, it is not completely inappropriate.”

“Wallace ran afoul of your father?” Barry said.

“Father developed an unusually…
intimate
relationship with Helen Smith,” Choate said. “In the end it tore her—and her husband—apart.” He grinned at the obvious pun.

“I was hoping for a more detailed explanation,” Barry said.

“He split her head open,” Choate said. “He crushed her husband between his teeth. Is that detailed enough for you?”

“Where is he, now?”

Choate waved his enormous hands to take in the surrounding luxury. “Father was much further along in his development than either me or my brother, Joshua. While he could still appreciate the immediate pleasures of your friend and his wife, his form had become more subtle in nature. It was an ideal substance for the process I described to you in our chat. You remember: the sublime trepanation.”

“Drilling a hole in the skull of a dead god,” Barry said.

“It’s a metaphor, of course; except, it’s also true. You can imagine, an enterprise of this magnitude requires unprecedented tools. Together, my brother and I were able to fashion such a device from our sire’s form.”

Great
, Marissa thought.
We’re in the underground lair of a crazy, giant sex-offender who, from the sound of it, is also a patricide. And who knows? He’s probably a cannibal, too
.

As if reading her mind, Barry said, “You killed him? Your father?”

A look of almost comic frustration twisted Choate’s features. “Come in,” he said, beckoning them toward him. “Come in, and have a look out the windows.”

Marissa glanced back at Barry. He nodded. She advanced three steps across the floor, and half-turned to view the wall in which the door opened. There were seven to eight windows to either side of the entrance. Tall, wide, arched at the top, they shone as if their very glass had been ground from light. It was a good trick, but not nearly as good as what she saw through the shining panes. A cratered plane of black sand stretched away to blackness. The sky was black, too, with the exception of a scattering of stars, several of them much larger and brighter than any she knew from the night sky. While she watched, one of the stars swelled, two, three times its diameter, more, before contracting to half its original size, then bursting in a phosphorous-flare that jerked her hand in front of her eyes. “Jesus!” she shouted. Behind and to her left, she heard Barry murmur, “Fuck!” Vision bleached, lids fluttering, she pivoted towards Choate. If he wanted to make a move, now was the time. She raised the .38 in his general direction.

Someone was standing next to him, equally tall, wearing a plain robe whose hood had been raised.
This must be the brother
, she thought,
Joshua
. When he lifted his hands and drew back the hood, she saw that she was right; although this sibling seemed much thinner, the skin shrunken around the contours of his enlarged skull. “Can you see anything?” Barry said. She could. She could see Joshua Choate reach his right hand into the left sleeve of his robe and withdraw a knife that was more a machete, a sinister bit of slight-of-hand. He exchanged a nod with his brother, and started towards her and Barry.

Marissa shot him five times, centering on his chest and tracking up to his head. The first two shots cracked the air and puckered the tops of Joshua’s robe. The third shot rung in Marissa’s ears like a hammer striking an actual bell; she didn’t hear the fourth and fifth shots, only felt the revolver buck in her hand. Holes opened in Joshua’s throat, his right cheek, his forehead. His knife bounced on the marble floor where he dropped it; he collapsed next to it and did not move. Marissa swung the gun at Tyler Choate, who had not strayed from his position. His lips were moving, but whatever words were leaving them were kept from her by the ringing in her ears. She shook her head. “I can’t hear you.”

Tyler nodded, held up one paw with all five fingers extended.

“That leaves me one,” she said, “and I’m betting I can put it someplace that will hurt.”

A hand pressed her shoulder: Barry, his cell phone out in his other hand. She did not need to hear what he was saying to know the threat in it.

Choate, however, grinned and gestured at the windows with their special-effects scene. Marissa looked at Barry, who was frowning at his phone. Were they too deep underground? Speaking in the too-loud voice of someone whose hearing was still stunned, Barry uttered a retort that was on the verge of being audible. Marissa thought he was accusing Choate and his brother of luring him here to murder him, to put an end to his investigation into Wallace and Helen Smith’s deaths.

That she could see, Choate did nothing. But the roof, the walls, the furniture of the room in which they were standing flew off in different directions, as if yanked away on enormous strings. Now nothing separated them from the desolate plane she had viewed through the windows. In the blackness overhead, a trio of stars flashed one-two-three, strobing the black sand with silent light. Joshua Choate lay where he had fallen; though his knife had been swept away in the disassembling of the room. Tyler Choate also remained in place. Marissa had the impression of something vast looming in the dark landscape behind him, a great, tumorous mass to which he was tethered by a fine thread that floated up from the back of his head and corkscrewed over what she judged a considerable distance.

This time, when Choate spoke, it was as if he was whispering in her ear. “You?” he said. “Barry, my friend, you’re incidental. Your companion is the reason you’re here.”

It was perhaps more shocking than anything Marissa had witnessed. “Me?”

“I required someone to kill my brother.” He tilted his head at Joshua’s remains.

His words still half-shouted, Barry said, “What?”

“This was a hit?” Marissa said. The notion was laughable, completely out-of-keeping with the madness surrounding them.

“A sacrifice,” Choate said, “of himself to himself. Like Odin on Yggdrasil’s branch. The only way out of this festering cosmos, this heaving meatwheel. My brother underwent a
kenosis
, an emptying; he divested himself of all he had become. He learned, you understand. From the vantage point we established, here, my brother taught himself to decipher Ymir’s dying thoughts. Spelled out in a language of dying suns, he found the key that unlocked the exit to this cadaver universe. That key was nothing, the place that is not a place, the state that is not a state. There, where all things are equally nonexistent, he would have parity with Ymir, and might discover what the ancients called the
Ginnungagap
, the breach that birthed the giant.

“Funny,” Choate said, “it all sounds rather Eastern, doesn’t it? The renunciation of everything and all that. I had always dismissed such notions as so much hippie nonsense. According to my brother, though, those fellows were onto something.

“I helped him to expunge the more… developed aspects of his self. But when it came to helping him out of that most fundamental encumbrance, his life, I could not bring myself to offer him that assistance.” Choate smiled tightly. “I will admit, of the multitude of vices I might have numbered amongst my practice, sentimentality, family-feeling, would not have been one of them. Well. I could not take my brother’s life; any more, I suspect, than Joshua could have taken mine. I searched for a suitable vehicle to deliver my brother’s death to him. You may imagine, I have a substantial list of potential names. By this time, however, Barret’s interest in me and mine had drawn my attention, and after I conducted an inquiry into him, I discovered Ms. Osterhoudt in his employ. Further research into the particulars of her history convinced me that she was the person for the job. It seems I was correct.”

“All right,” Barry said, “all right.” The words quivered with strain. “We’ve done what you brought us here for. It’s time for us to go.”

The great, dark shape behind Tyler Choate rushed forward, as if the distance between it and him had collapsed. His body rippled, the skin tearing up and down his arms and legs. His mouth split at the corners, widening across his considerable face. Curved teeth that would have been at home in a tiger’s jaws burst from his gums. A hellish light ignited within his eyes. “Go?” he said, and the single syllable contained a brief monologue’s worth of sinister statements.
My brother may have believed in renunciation, but as far as I’m concerned, the jury’s still out. He may have wanted it, but you killed my brother. We haven’t had anything to eat, and I’m
starving. Blood streamed from his body, steaming with whatever energy was burning through it. He stepped towards them.

Would the single bullet remaining in her pistol be any use against whatever vision of raw appetite Tyler Choate was becoming? Even allowing for a miraculous shot to the eye or forehead, she doubted it. She raised the pistol, turned, and shot Barry in the head. His expression blank, he fell dead. She tossed the gun down beside him.

Choate’s face was mostly a gaping maw; the look on what was visible of the rest of it was unreadable. Marissa said, “Loyalty.”

He gave a wet, barking cough she realized was a laugh.

“Fuck you,” she said.

And he was gone. In his place was the child, the one who had traveled with her in the elevator, the one who had been standing on the ice in front of the Hummer, the one whose death she had felt tremble the steering wheel of her truck. Its mouth was open, alight with unearthly fire.

“You,” she said. “Okay. I’m ready for this. Okay. Let’s go. I’m ready.”

As it turned out, she was not.

For Fiona, and for Laird, amigo

Of a Thousand Cuts

Cody Goodfellow

O
nly in the final, volatile moments of the ludus, when vows made by will are broken by flesh, does the Samurai forget himself and mar his hitherto flawless performance by trying to die.

Dragging his left leg, javelin jutting from butchered knee, hastily resected bowel waving like a gory pennant, yet the Samurai circles his remaining opponent with calculated poise, herding him downwind into the black, creamy smoke wafting from the pyre of his identical twin.

Frenzy and fatigue vie to take the Roman even before the Samurai can close with him. Plunging his broken
katana
into the smoldering corpse to goad his enemy, the Samurai presents his
wakizashi
like a gift and settles into a waiting pose.

The Roman has abandoned all technique. Draws a whickering, whooping breath into the broken basket of his ribs, roars hollow blood-flecked hate and charges through charnel smoke, gladius swinging in a blind woodsman’s coup de grace.

And then the moment that puts the lie to perfection, proclaims it the act not of a masterful athlete, but of a slumming, drunken god, or a troubled automaton. Samurai bows his head, arms out in supplication. Throws up an arm, not in defense, but to tear off his helmet. Impossible, of course…

The Roman’s chopping stroke shears an antler from the Samurai’s helmet and glances off his leather cuirass. Overextended, he tramples his opponent and lands among his brother’s blazing remains. Before any outside his inner cadre have noticed his deathwish, the Samurai recovers and hamstrings the Roman. Wakizashi eagerly swims up hyperextended calf muscle, flensing meat catbox-bitter with lactic acid from spiral-fractured bones.