The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (7 page)

“Maybe the flavor didn’t agree with me.” In truth it had, and packing it back up to turn over to him had taken more strength than she’d known she possessed. Wah sat down on the stair beside the lantern, casually resting a hand on her bunched-up skirts to prevent Dr. Yam’s prescription from knocking against the step. “It’s not Chinese, so what was it doing in China?”

“The same thing I was,” Mr. Kernochan said, tucking the book into the hip pocket of his suit. “Spreading the good word.”

“Uh-huh,” said Wah, snaking her fingers into her skirts but never taking her eyes from his. “Your word’s not all you spread, is it, Mr. Kernochan? Something in my tea, last time you called?”

“So that’s what he told you.” Mr. Kernochan took a step toward her, and the lantern’s flame wavered and dimmed, recoiling from his advance. At the same time, Mr. Kernochan’s silhouette seemed to undulate, and Wah felt the heavy pulsing of the silkworms behind her eyes. “That Chinaman doctor of yours wouldn’t know his ass from an aspirin, Miss Sung. Whatever potion or poison he gave you won’t work, not on me.”

“Why did you come here?” Wah demanded, rolling the larva around on her tongue as Mr. Kernochan came closer. He could reach up and touch her slipper now, if he wished. “Why me? I don’t think you needed us to recover your book.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said the pale man, his face rippling as he spoke, as though his skin were coming loose from his jawbones. “It’s all a question of potency, Miss Sung. In Old Cathay, sorcerers believed the strongest toxin came from shutting up several venomous creatures in a jug or box. They devoured one another in the dark, and whichever one remained in the end would have the combined strength of all. The concentrated poison of such an animal could have all sorts of applications.”

“If I go with you, you’ll leave my father alone,” Wah said, tightening her hand on the medicine secreted in her skirts. “You hear me? You leave him alone.”

“Don’t worry on that account.” Mr. Kernochan smiled, his yellow teeth squirming like pupae. He rested a long-fingered hand on the banister, set a foot on the bottom step. It was bare, his toes even paler than the rest of him. “Your father will never be alone again, Miss Sung.”

Dr. Yam’s prescription came free of her skirts, but her elbow knocked the lantern over, its already pitiful light snuffed out as it fell. In the blackness she could hear Mr. Kernochan panting, her own heart pounding, and the silkworms squirming, but not the lantern landing on the next step. It seemed to be falling forever. Just like Wah.

“What do you have there?” Mr. Kernochan’s voice blew warm and wet against her exposed ankles, stirring the edge of her skirts. “Whatever herbs that quack gave you won’t help.”

“No herbs,” she said, steadying one hand with the other, focusing on the spot where his rich, earthy breath emanated from the inky basement.

“Taoist witchcraft, then? Or wushu?” Fingers that felt like worms brushed against her ankle, leaving a tacky trail as they pushed up her calf. “Some other ancient Chinese secret?”

“Something like that,” said Wah, the iron digging into her thumb as she levered the hammer back.

“Wait,” he said, perhaps recognizing the tell-tale click, but she didn’t stop. The first muzzle flash illuminated something quite different from what she expected, and it filled her stomach with warmth… warmth and eagerness for what lay ahead. The next shot filled the basement with white light, and he was only Mr. Kernochan again, his body flopping like a landed carp as the second bullet struck. The breast of his black suit flapped wetly with the third shot.

And the fourth.

And the fifth.

Then it was quiet in the basement for a very long time.

Wah groped her way up the stairs and stumbled into the dim shop. She steadied herself against a shelf and looked longingly toward the table where she and her father had drunk so many cups of tea. It wasn’t too late. The only voice she now heard drumming in her head was her own. It wasn’t too late…

Then she went to the third aisle, inspecting the knives on the top shelf. Wah Sung took her time selecting one that seemed ideal for skinning, and then she went back down into the sweet and silken darkness.

Walpurgisnacht

Orrin Grey

O
n the train, Nicky told me about the Brocken Spectre. “It’s a sort of optical illusion,” he said, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. Nicky was younger than me, and prettier, and his dark hair fell in front of his face whenever he slouched, which was often. “The sun casts a giant shadow of you on the clouds below, right, and your head gets this prismatic halo. Like an angel.”

“I hear the sun only shines here like sixty days a year,” I said. “Besides, it’s night.” I was only half-listening anyway, my head lolling against the cool glass of the window. I’d had more than a few drinks at the airport bar, and I could feel a headache trying to force its way out past my eyes. Outside, I could see our destination looming up out of the darkness, the two towers of the
Sender Brocken
, old and new. Like Tolkien’s Minas Morgul and Orthanc. The sun was still going down, and the towers stood out like shadows against the gloaming, their lights already on. Gleaming yellow ones in the windows of the old tower, now the Brocken Hotel, and blinking red ones to warn planes away from the new tower, a candy-cane-striped lance that jutted skyward from the peak.

“It doesn’t look terribly inviting,” Nicky said, noticing my inattentiveness and nodding at the towers.

“Now to the Brocken the witches ride
.
”
I intoned, and then, without bothering to glance and see his puzzled expression, explained, “It’s Goethe. From
Faust
.”

That was why we were going, of course. It was Walpurgisnacht, the night when the witches and devils gathered on the crown of the bald mountain to welcome the spring. Nicky and I, and whoever else was on the train with us, were the witches in this equation, and we were all gathering on the Brocken to kiss the ass of a black goat.

***

We met Henri at the Steadman Gallery. Nicky had some of his photographs there, as part of a show called “The New Decadence.” From his “Conqueror Worm” cycle—my name—all graveyards and ossuaries, done in lots of blues and greens with the occasional splash of red or yellow. A leaf, a salamander. They were good pictures, some of Nicky’s best, in my opinion, and I guess Henri thought so, too.

I don’t remember the other stuff in the show, but I remember Henri. Tall, old-fashioned handsome, Van Dyke beard, clothes like a Vincent Price villain. He carried a cane that was pure affectation, black wood with an amethyst top. He was a regular in the galleries, though word was that he spent more time in Europe than the States. Why he was in New York that year, I never learned, just as I never learned his real name. DuPlante was the most common surname associated with him, but how accurate it was, I can’t say. Henri kept as much about himself veiled in mystery as he could, kept himself interesting.

Even before we’d met, I’d heard about him. Rich, listless, a Decadent of the old school. He was known for throwing wild parties with strange themes, and for occasionally throwing large wads of money at young artists who caught his fancy, which meant that Nicky and I were of course very happy to make his acquaintance, to catch his eye.

Where exactly all his money came from was the subject of some speculation. One story went that his father was a lord, another that he was heir to a fortune in pornography. Some said that he’d been some kind of
wunderkind
and had invented some patent as a child and still lived off the dividends.

There were lots of stories about Henri, many of them contradictory, but he seemed to welcome all of them. There was only one that I had ever known him to actively refute. Supposedly he had an older sister, one whose tastes made Henri’s seem positively Puritan by comparison. Some people claimed to have met her, though never in his company. They always described her the same way, which was odd. Tall, dark hair, stylishly dressed. Always named Alexandria. I was so bold as to ask Henri about it once, but he replied, with uncharacteristic clarity, “I’m an only child.”

“Maybe she was an old lover,” Nicky hypothesized once. “Somebody who just pretended to be his sister.” It was certainly kinky enough.

Real or imagined, Henri didn’t like to talk about her. The subject made him visibly uncomfortable, was maybe the only subject I’d ever come across that did.

Luckily for him, I was less concerned with stories about where Henri’s money came from, and more concerned with where it went. The fact was, he spent it like water and never wanted for more, and Nicky and I had expensive tastes and no inclination to a hard day’s work, so men like Henri were bread and butter for us.

At the Steadman Gallery, he kissed Nicky’s hand but shook mine. He struck me then as I would continue to think of him throughout our acquaintance: as a spoiled dandy who enjoyed playing the beast because it amused him, more than because there was much actual beast in him.

Aside from his money and his interest in the arts, he was known mostly for what he called his “revels.” “Party,” he said to me once, “is far too small a word.” I don’t remember how many of them Nicky and I attended in the years that we knew Henri. Nicky always brought his camera, and he got a couple of decent series out of them, neither of them half as good as the work he was doing when we met, but then, booze and drugs and other temptations flowed freely at the revels, and Nicky was no less susceptible to them than I, and they took their toll on both of us, in different ways.

How to describe one of Henri’s revels? He once told a reporter, “I take intent, and marry it with time and place.” Which isn’t really very helpful, either. I guess that fundamentally they
were
just parties, on a grand scale, complete with the kinds of party games that would have shocked and titillated Victorians, but Henri saw them—or maybe he just
sold
them—as something more like performance art. A séance held at midnight in a haunted hotel. A black mass in the catacombs under Paris. Diversions for the bored and the rich and the morbid. Nicky and I were two of those, and Henri was rich enough for everybody.

This one, though, the one atop the Brocken, on Walpurgisnacht, was supposed to be different. More intimate, more personal, and his last. That’s what the invitations had said. Henri had supposedly discovered a rare film print by Eadweard Muybridge, something suitably infernal, not just studies of animals in motion, and he was going to screen it for a few dozen of his closest friends at midnight, “in its native habitat.” There was to be a small chamber orchestra, and Henri had reserved the entire hotel, so we wouldn’t be disturbed. “Unless of course some other witches decide to drop in.”

***

When the train pulled up to the station, Nicky and I got out, along with a few others that I recognized from Henri’s inner circle, and still more that I didn’t. Maybe new additions, maybe lapsed recruits pulled back in for one last hurrah. I helped Nicky shoulder one of his camera bags, and we all walked down to the cars that were waiting to take us the rest of the way to the top of the mountain.

We shared our car with a girl who looked young, and too thin for my tastes. She was wearing a black dress, with diamonds glittering at her wrists and neck, and silver hair that was probably a wig but might have been some impressive dye job. Nicky pulled out his camera and held it up, giving her a quizzical look to which he received a nod and giggle. He snapped several photos on the car ride up, flattering her, I’m sure, but I knew that he was just warming up, getting ready for the main event.

Would I have accepted Henri’s invitation, if it hadn’t been for Nicky? I don’t know. We’d not had the best time at the last of his revels that we attended, in some hunting lodge in some godforsaken part of Washington state, and it had left a bad taste in my mouth. I couldn’t really remember why, too much booze turning the filmstrip of my memory into a series of disassociated snapshots. Something about sitting in the dark by the fire, after the meat of the party was over, playing some idiotic child’s game called “Something Scary.” I’d never heard of it, but apparently Nicky played it when he was a kid, with his abusive father, the one he never talked about. He told me so afterward, on the car ride home, and he cried and shook in his sleep that night, and didn’t say why.

Everything else was blurred, just a bad, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, but enough that I might have thrown the overwrought bit of paper—with its wax seals and calligraphic script—in the trash, had it not been for the mention of Muybridge. The old photographer fascinated Nicky, and I was happy for anything that got Nicky’s attention onto something I found interesting.

The cars deposited us on the foot of the steps leading up to the Brocken Hotel. The building had once been a TV tower, maybe the oldest one in the world, built before World War II. It had transmitted the first live broadcast of the Summer Olympics in Berlin. The war didn’t do it any favors, and when the new tower was built they converted the old one into a hotel. The only thing left to mark its former function was the golf-ball-like radome that crouched on the roof and held air traffic control equipment.

The lights that had looked so tiny from the train were dazzling up close, but the tower that rose above us, with its tiny windows and the radome on top, reminded me of something from a futuristic prison. Not terribly inviting, as Nicky had said.