The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (38 page)

The heat, the humidity, it’s like breathing steam. On a rundown former plantation in the jungle above Sipitang, Salazar hides with his bride-to-be. They make plans, they fuck and they fight. Did so many have to die? Stand-ins for each of them accompanied the party into the hotel. The device planted in her luggage. The children and their nanny, the security detail, all expendable. It shocks him that he mourns more for her sons than she does. She rakes his face with her nails, tries to slash him with the neck of a two-thousand dollar bottle of champagne. “He made them,” she screams. “He took them out of me and he made them dirty and they… as soon as they were old enough… they tried…”

What she tells him then about her boys makes him sick up the last of his remorse.

Before dawn, a truck driver smuggles them out of Brunei on mountain forest roads for ten thousand dollars. From Tarakan, a fisherman is to take them across the Celebes Sea to Sulawesi, but Salazar plans to hijack him to the Philippines, where they will use new passports to fly to Mexico City and vanish in South America. Even if their scheme unravels and the authorities prematurely discover the truth, Karen tells him, they’ll never be caught. She knows of plastic surgeons in Mexico; she has the numbers for holding accounts into which she’s siphoned petty household cash for years. Millions. Enough to hide for a long time, or live well for a while.

They’re going to get away because they are young and in love, and they are going to grow old together and the story of their romance and heroic escape and flight will become a fairytale, and innocent bystanders never die in fairytales.

She says it again and again, and when he goes out to the beach to signal the fisherman, he believes it. If there is any balance, any order, any meaning to the universe, his life has been darkness and blood, a slow whittling away of all that he called himself. He believes now that the dawn must come, for he has earned it.

And he thinks this right up until he goes back into the beachside hut to find not Karen, but only the bloody obsidian knife that was the Aztec’s chosen tool, the shard of volcanic glass with which he cut more throats than he cared to count. It drips fresh red on the grass mats, still damp with their sweat.

He takes the knife and runs from the hut, through the village and into the mountainous rain forests of Kalimantan.

Lord Sun discovered the whole architecture of their ruse before they got out of Brunei, and identified his wife’s location by the GPS chip implanted in her skull.

Lord Sun’s hunger for vengeance is no less than any reasonable man’s would be under the circumstances, but he gives Salazar eight hours to go to ground in the trackless highlands before he and his operators come searching. After all he’s invested in Salazar, he might as well get one last bit of sport out of him.

***

The body on the steel slab quivers. Salazar opens his eyes and weeps with joy at the revelation of having eyes again, before he even realizes he’s on fire.

His screams only suck the flames down his throat. Choking, gasping for air—

Drowning, thrashing for the surface but unable to find which way is up, and the cold and the pressure crushing him—

The hypnotist smiles. “What news from beyond the veil?”

Salazar chokes on air, gags out noises that no one else would recognize as words.

“You were in transit for nearly eighteen months. Much has changed while you were away.”

His arms are lead with rubber bones. Try to strangle Balance, they roll off his torso to hit the steel like shit in a bedpan. More noises.

“You are in no condition to fight. That part of your life is behind you. As punishment for your actions, Lord Sun has elected to subject you to the most terrible suffering which he could imagine.”

Salazar’s eyes nearly roll out of their petrified sockets when the hypnotist shows him a hand mirror.

His face is sunken, jaundiced, withered, wreathed in yellow-white beard like dead roots from an uprooted onion. It is the most hateful face he has ever seen.

He is Lord Sun.

“The old coward finally took the plunge,” Balance says, smiling. “You gave him a reason.”

Make him grimace and shake. Make his jaw drop like he is trying to throw up. His hands try to crawl away.

“His son, the one who survived the bomb… His father let the world suppose he was dead, and raised him for this. I never believed he would go through with it, frankly…”

Salazar wonders what he should feel. Nausea, exhaustion, the gravity of despair crushing this ruined, used-up vessel… Still, does it lighten his load to know the boy survived his mother’s murder attempt? Perhaps he yet lives. The son’s brain could be living in his old suitcase. Meanwhile…

“Where…? Let me…” Stick out his tongue. Swallow it. Choke on it.

“It is impossible. You will have no chance. We have worked for months to resuscitate you after the operation. It was nearly a failure, but no one was surprised you pulled through. Some part of you, at least, clings to life. But now you are alert and in full possession of your faculties, you will finally be executed…”

A spray of spit. Black spots swarming over Dr. Balance’s sad smile. Salazar clings, mind and soul, to this rotten raft until the Dark subsides.

“Of course, at the moment of expiration, every effort will be made to recover your brain and transplant it again and… well, it is obvious. If he has his way, you will never stop dying.”

Bow his head. Try to gouge out his eyes. “Ssssaaaaaw… errrrrrr….”

Balance touches his widow’s peak, dabbing at his nose. “That is too bad, my friend. She… is not the one… but the resemblance
is
remarkable, no? That is no doubt why he took an interest.”

Make him shed tears. “Sssssshhhhh…”

“She… is her mother’s daughter. And the father… it’s complicated, but… biologically speaking…”

MAKE HIM BREAK FREE MAKE HIM STRANGLE—

Balance easily pushes him back and cinches the straps around his concave chest. He’s not going anywhere.

Lord Sun lives to inflict pain. Why would he throw her away? Especially when he learned she was ripe with a seed he could nurture and nourish to become what he’d always wanted…

“Put all dreams of vengeance out of your mind. They are worlds away from this one. Now begins as many lifetimes of suffering as your soul can withstand… but you need not suffer any more than you wish to.”

The hypnotist draws close and recites the haiku that he taught Salazar.

Eyes gleam. Pupils dilate. Breathing subsides to a tidal purr. Make his ears
listen
.

“You have learned at great cost that you are not your body. How much less difficult, indeed how liberating, to grasp that you are also not your brain?

“You are a dream your brain has always dreamt, a story it tells itself. But a tale once told does not belong to the teller, but to the reader, the world. Compose your story, and you may not only withstand the pain and the darkness, but you may escape your body altogether…”

Make him look again at the face in the mirror. Salazar tries to tear it off his skull and eat it.

***

The ancient Chinese practice of
ling chi
or “slow slicing”—more popularly known as the Death of a Thousand Cuts—in the Western imagination grew into a nightmarish ordeal of precision torture which dragged on for days or even weeks. Like the infamous, equally exaggerated “water torture” and similar techniques involving ants or swiftly growing bamboo, it fueled Western paranoia about the inscrutable patience and eerie cruelty of the Oriental mind long after it was banned under British colonial pressure in 1905.

In reality,
ling chi
was reserved only for the worst criminals—traitors, fratricides—and even the most skilled Chinese executioner could not stave off death beyond a few hours.

Dr. Tsukue tells Salazar right away that he’s going for a record. Perhaps never in history has such painstaking care been taken to preserve the life of a patient slated to die by torture.

Two pit crews of three caring professionals will see to his dismantling. Dr. Tsukue conducts the primary excruciation, while his apprentices follow along, debriding and dismantling tissue, cauterizing or clamping critical blood vessels until the maximum amount of agony has been milked from each limb and amputation can proceed; and an antianesthetist with two nurses are charged with keeping Salazar paralyzed with suxamethonium chloride in an intratracheal drip along with epinephrine and acetylcholine to keep him exquisitely alert, yet just below the threshold for shock and cardiac arrest. The pain manager has the most difficult job. Lord Sun abused his body as if certain he would someday get a new one, but in his new incarnation, he is equally adamant that his discarded body survive long enough to satisfy an impossible grievance.

Traditional
ling chi
customarily opens by dramatically mortifying the pectoral muscles and the fronts of the thighs in shallow, gaping wounds that bare the ribcage and straps of skeletal muscle. Tsukue is wary of blood loss and premature myocardial trauma. Still, this is an operating
theater
, and just as in the Pageant, all must perform here for a demanding audience. Using a Blumlein ablation knife, he digs into the chilled, rubbery flesh of the chest like a pudding, plowing out jaundiced scoops of skin backed by pale adipose jelly and dropping them in a steel bowl.

Fully alive to all that is inflicted on him yet unable to move beyond the feeblest galvanic twitch, Salazar seems to slip immediately into shock. The pain manager calls for a recess. Observing from his own hermetically sealed recovery ward, Lord Sun demands escalation. Burn his genitalia off with a laser to wake him up, or better yet, peel and invulse them, making a woman of him. But only after coming within a hair’s breadth of triggering a heart attack does the pain manager recognize that Salazar is quite awake, yet in a meditative trance.

The next incisions begin at the fingertips and the soles of his feet, long, sweeping slices with a fluted scalpel that turns up the lips of the wounds like furrows of tilled soil. A few nicked capillaries add only stray trickles to the slime of cold sweat beading on Lord Sun’s mortified castoff body. Nerves assaulted, outraged, jolted to twitching overload, but never severed. Exhausted parchment skin peels away from flaccid fascia, livid and throbbing with the terminal arousal of amputation.

Goosepimpled flesh shivers in restraints as slices become slashes, as digits in all four extremities are systematically degloved and filleted. So adept is Dr. Tsukue with scalpels, lasers and forceps that even when he strips muscle and sinew from the nerve-rich fingertips, exposed nerves linger on clinging to barren bone, still aquiver with microscopic messages of apocalyptic pain.

The medics constantly check Salazar’s mental acuity. He remains lucid throughout, gritting his teeth whenever he is queried, but more with the air of a man upset at a distraction, than one in the throes of shock.

While they flay him, he loses himself in words, recalled to the torments of his body only long enough to stretch out to pick up several larger scraps of his own skin on his outthrust tongue and ball them up in his mouth. Dr. Tsukue notes this gravely, but says nothing to the pain manager. If he is not truly paralyzed, so be it. In the longest recorded executions of
ling chi
, the victim would be allowed only his own discarded flesh for sustenance.

But Salazar does not swallow.

After sixteen hours, a recess is called for Tsukue’s sake. While he rests and self-administers extensive acupuncture, Salazar is wheeled into his closet-sized cell, suspended supine on a trolley, slathered in ferric acid and industrial Neosporin, to rest.

Before Tsukue’s hands have stopped shaking, he returns to the theater. Lord Sun is most unimpressed so far, but even his most aesthetically drastic efforts fail to arouse any perceptible reaction from Salazar.

Waves of pain pass far above his head, but he barely notices them now, like distant traffic through a sealed window.

Salazar is making a new body, a new palace in the Dark, out of words. Literally, he composes himself, weighing words, images, snapshot reminiscences that well up from the seemingly emptied void of his memory. Paring away fat and redundant and flat impressions to vivisect the image, the idea, of himself. Within the rigorous latticework of the haiku, he distills himself into a flow of words and images that set him free and bind him in the surge of red darkness to an anchor. Reciting the words, he holds the walls against the deeper darkness that hungers to reclaim him.

With only three recesses, the
ling chi
of the gladiator Salazar lasts six days and three hours. Dr. Tsukue has his record, but he hardly seems proud of it, now.

Salazar’s brain is pitted with lesions and dull, partially decayed parts, but still emits a stable comatose EEG when reconnected to the monitor and nutrient feeds of his second home, the suitcase.

Only Dr. Balance examines Salazar’s cell with any diligence once the last remnants of Lord Sun’s corpse are vacuumed away. At first, he mistakes it for a bit of misplaced gore, even as he searches for just such an artifact as it turns out, upon further inspection, to be.