Worse Angels

by Laird Barron

  He thanked me for my efforts in a subdued tone. Prison wears on weak and tough alike, and tends to knock the starch out of the best of them. He’d held at least a meager hope that someone might be made to pay for his nephew’s death. That little match twinkling in the darkness had seemed like a blaze now that it flickered, pitiful and wan. There were select details I might’ve shared, a plan I might’ve laid out for his approval. I withheld my intentions primarily because my last shot was aimed at the moon. It seemed cruel to revitalize his optimism and then dash it completely in the likely event of yet another dead end.

  * * *

  ■■■

  The universe, in its boundless perversity, signaled less than a week after that phone conference. I’d gotten ahold of the Jeffers Colony caretaker, Lenny Herzog (who really did check his messages weekly at most), and paid him a tidy sum to act as my eyes and ears in Morrow Village. I allayed his wariness by explaining that all I wanted was a bead on Danny Buckhalter or Linda Flanagan—two people he didn’t actively associate with personal danger.

  Who knew a lonely, doddering coot would jump at the chance to play detective? I sent him a photo of Linda and said to buzz me if he saw her or Danny. I promised a hefty cash reward in addition to what I paid him to linger at the likeliest bars in or around Morrow, swilling booze as he’d probably intended to do anyhow. It would be fair to rate my expectations as low. But the phone rang around midnight and Lenny cheerfully related that he was sitting not twenty feet from the woman. She looked sort of awful and was carrying on with a tableful of fellas, one of whom resembled Buckhalter, although he wasn’t sure. The two were more hands-on with each other than a pair of octopi. I asked if he knew where Buckhalter lived. No, but for a hundred dollars he’d follow the couple when they left the bar and report back. I told him that was a great idea.

  I gave Lionel the rundown and he smirked at my ruthlessness. I reminded him that as an avowed Peeping Tom, Herzog brought skills to the game. Then he said, yeah, but what about the dog? I said if Herzog disappeared or got it in the neck because he didn’t know how to tail someone discreetly, we’d go find Gracie and bring her to Hawk Mountain. Lionel, despite the impracticality of the scheme, was satisfied.

  Several hours passed and I admit to a pang of regret as my imagination concocted gruesome fates for Lenny H. Then Herzog called in with an address and a demand that I email his PayPal account with the agreed-upon payment. It wasn’t lost on me that I was as amazed that this flea-bitten hermit availed himself of online banking as I was that cultists were prancing through the woods in varsity duds.

  What a world.

  * * *

  ■■■

  I’d gotten my hands on a 1980s Dodge cargo van for cheap. White and rust with two bucket seats up front. My buddy at the salvage yard reinforced the bumpers and installed a winch mount in the front. Unable to predict how events might unfold, we prepared for the worst; loaded the van with an array of tools and equipment, then covered them with a tarp.

  Meg asked how long I’d be gone. She’d grudgingly grown accustomed to me languishing at the house four or five nights a week, licking my wounds and poring over curious and quaint volumes of forgotten lore. As we talked, she supervised my efforts to reattach a section of gutter that sprang loose during the last heavy snow. Me on a shaky ladder had us both pondering mortality.

  “A few days,” I said. “Or forever.”

  “Oh, sweetie, you aren’t killing the comedy.”

  I could never quite tell when her dry wit was referencing something serious (my former life with the mob, for instance), nor what response was expected. I did what all guys learn to do, if they’re savvy—I improvised. I fell off the ladder.

  She kissed me and made it better.

  “I hope I don’t ever die,” I said.

  “Oh?” she said.

  “Yeah. I’d miss you.”

  * * *

  ■■■

  I borrowed the Monte Carlo. Lionel drove the van. We departed Hawk Mountain at different times and traveled separate routes. Weeks had passed since my California vacation and there were no signs of surveillance. Some of Mandibole’s people might’ve been ex-intelligence, which was a concern. However, the logistics of monitoring my activities and those of my associates over a prolonged duration would require a much larger team and support staff. Could the Redlicks theoretically afford a full-blown surveillance operation? Yes, a small chance existed. Could a small, under-supported team function effectively and without tipping their hand? The odds dwindled to near zero. Horseheads was the real danger. Once I showed my face in town, the fuse would be lit.

  I cruised into a golden late-winter morning. On the way, I listened to audio from the Campbell-Ryoko files. These pieces were the last in my possession. I was slightly nostalgic to think we were at the end of our journey. I played them several times.

  The first piece was a somewhat recent excerpt of both men discussing their research into social media and the Internet as a lurking threat to civilization:

  Dr. Campbell:

  Memes, the relentless onslaught of data on social media. MTV and quick-cut photography changed the brain chemistry of a generation of viewers. Try an experiment. Immerse yourself in a few hours of contemporary thrillers and action films, then try to sit without squirming during Angie Dickinson’s escape from the apartment of her one-night stand in Dressed to Kill. You’ll fail.

  Dr. Ryoko:

  So, have we retired into senility, you ask? Are we working, you ask? Dare we? YES! We’re investigating the parallels between weaponized social media and traditional organic disease vectors. Some esteemed colleagues have long posited that a synthetic virus can be developed and transmitted through a digital medium. Seizure disorder, hypnosis, hypnagogic or fugue states, mind control. Programmers and spiritualists alike suspect the data stream to be capable of sentience that will evolve and propagate. Such an enlightened data stream might infiltrate and hijack the minds of its human consumers. It could manipulate them, control them. Wouldn’t such a transaction resemble demonic possession? Is there an appreciable difference between machine behavior and the predatory behavior of animals or plants or fungi?

  Dr. Campbell:

  Early in the new millennium, an Internet phenomenon emerged. Prosaic images overrun by inky blackness. Digital kudzu. Bizarre, unwholesome text, and blackness oozing from eyes and mouths of popular animated characters and real-life celebrities. The manifest power of an entity known as Zalgo. Seldom seen, always felt. A corruptor to exceed the abominable purview of Satan Hisownself. The phenomenon was revealed to be a parody of pop culture created by Dave Kelly, an e-zine writer. Powerful and disturbing despite its innocuous provenance. It lingers like a stain in the mind’s eye. I consider whether the Zalgo craze was the initial stirring of a non-organic superintelligence, an amalgamation of projected thought and the echo of that thought given substance. Someone, somewhere in a basement, or bunker under the forest floor, has gazed through the Black Kaleidoscope, heedless of Nietzsche’s maxim. Now the entity tests its limits.

  The final excerpt was the oldest material. It felt enigmatically crucial; the answer to a riddle on the tip of my tongue.

  A muffled voice asked Campbell to discuss the Redlicks and Labradors. Campbell claimed familiarity with both families dating to his youth. The interviewer joked about the order of Freemasons and the founding of Redlick Manor. Dr. Campbell chuckled darkly and said:

  Communities of any size husband secrets. Secrets span generations. Secrets corrode and deform. They persist like a tumor because most people who come into contact with them choose, or are encouraged, to look away, if not forget . . . Redlick Manor is an edifice in service of occult arts. Naturally, to seal the pact with [garbled] the Redlick patriarchs sacrificed the architect and his army of master carpenters in an elaborate ritual at the Wendigo Stone in the woods. Laborers were taken to another location, the mauso
leum, perhaps, and buried alive . . .

  The interviewer interrupted with a garbled comment. Campbell continued:

  I condone nothing, sir. I observe and I theorize. This was, 1896? 1897? Sacrifice is an ancient custom. Constructions of . . . power must be consecrated in blood, else all this effort comes to naught and the spirit of the forest turns a blind eye to the supplicants’ travails.

  The doctor went on at length. Unimportant at that moment. Dr. Campbell’s words echoed and reinforced what Adeyemi said to me. Blood, not science. I’d begun to entertain the wild idea that both men were right.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Sneaking around Horseheads would’ve been the safest course. We could’ve staked out Linda Flanagan and her beau and pounced at an opportune moment. We probably could’ve done it without alerting anyone to our presence. To what purpose, though? Nobody was going to roll over and confess his or her role in a murder. Nobody would help me wrap my case in a pink ribbon. Adeyemi and the doctors said something that stayed with me—whatever Redlick and associates were up to with the Jeffers Project was bigger than one man’s death.

  When conflict is inevitable, take the fight to the enemy. As far as I was concerned, conflict was absolutely inevitable.

  I ate supper at the Hotel Roan, my home away from home. I wore an okay suit and comfortable shoes. Gun, knife, and my grandfather’s jade war club. Wireless lightweight two-way radio. The idea was to be seen. The FIN on Mandibole’s pocket square bobbed to the surface of my consciousness.

  The Hotel Roan restaurant did a better-than-average T-bone steak. Bloody with a baked potato, salad, and a pitcher of ice water. I savored the meal, then stepped into the lounge for a drink. Four tables on the cramped floor, four stools at the bar, and a window booth. Behind the bar was a mirrored alcove shaped like an altar to a scant yet discerning selection of bourbon, scotch, and liqueur. Toward the tippy-top of the alcove perched a signed photograph of Donald Sutherland aping his iconic spine-chilling doppelgänger pose at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  The bartender switched the channel to boxing.

  Two fighters bludgeoned away at center ring in some grimy overseas arena. I didn’t recognize either of them offhand. Harsh lights splashed upon tattered posters and partially whitewashed graffiti. Men and women in sock hats and wool coats yelled encouragement. Chilly venue, wherever it was. Steam mantled the boxers—a heavyweight from the Republic of Congo and a Russian built like a tree. The middle rounds had arrived and the Congolese fighter was intent upon chopping the Russian down. The Russian had no answer for his opponent’s left jab or short, clubbing right. He circled, threw an occasional haymaker that was easily slipped, clinched, and lost every exchange. He gulped and flailed like a drowning man. A drowning man who received a punch to the snout every time he surfaced for air.

  “It’s the straight right that puts you to sleep,” the bartender said, watching the action. “He needs one to put him out of his misery.”

  I couldn’t disagree.

  “You fight?” He glanced at my hands. He was a grizzled gentleman with small, bruised eyes and a gin-blossom nose.

  “See these pretty ears? Not enough cauliflower.”

  “You got some cartilage in your nose, still.” Back to my hands again, unconvinced.

  “Broken, never squashed.”

  Between rounds eight and nine, I texted Meg and told her how much I loved her and Devlin and wished them good night and sweet dreams. I put my phone away and returned to the bout, which only got worse for the Russian. His face was marbled like a slab of raw meat.

  Lionel boxed in the military. We frequently discussed the squared circle and the octagon and lamented that Greco-Roman wrestling didn’t enjoy much popularity in the States. Lionel laid money on the more important bouts, although he laid money on practically anything. My admiration for the sweet science was purely aesthetic, and a touch envious because fighting and boxing are closely related but utterly incomparable.

  I’m drawn to the revelation of character that occurs when two peak athletes spend upward of forty-five minutes beating each other to a pulp. Fighters in the championship rounds are seldom the same men who begin the bout. Their inner selves are revealed blow by blow, given and received, like sculptors carving blocks of granite. Men are equals when fresh and full of hope; by smashed noses, broken ribs, lacerations, contusions, exhaustion, and fear is truth revealed.

  My favorite boxer? Of the heavyweights, it has to be David Tua. Toward the end of his career he was whaling on a beefy white boy; whacked that patented left hook into the opponent’s body so hard his whole rib cage buckled. White boy dropped; he couldn’t breathe, much less continue fighting. If we’re talking middleweights, I love Tommy Hearns, but pound for pound, Marvelous Marvin Hagler was among the toughest human beings who’ve ever laced on gloves. I watched him battle Mugabi in 1986, at a bar on a large screen with my dad and a gaggle of his air force buddies. Mugabi swung a wrecking ball. Hagler absorbed hideous punishment and each knock in the chassis caused him to shift into a higher gear and punch harder. That contest and the gruesome match between Ali and Foreman in Zaire in 1974 are testaments to the obdurate, bellicose disposition of man. Those performances molded my disposition on a fundamental level in a way all my dad’s tough love never could. Street fighting and boxing are supremely contrasted. Dad taught me close quarters combat from a bag of World War Two dirty tricks; the champion boxers instilled within my soul a love of tactics and the courage to see them through.

  The already cozy bar started to fill up. Besides me and the bartender, a young lady in a green velvet dress muttered into her phone, and two men argued heatedly in the booth. Golf Pro and Mr. Denim back for another go at me. The Mares of Thrace wore the antiquated Valley High jackets, but lacked the funky death mask makeup at the moment. Just a pair of dudes reliving past glory until the moment was right to slap on their ghoulish aspect.

  Golf Pro removed his glasses, wiped them, and laughed. He called for a round of martinis. Phone Woman was enraptured by her glowing cathode. For me, another double Auchentoshan to neutralize the lingering aftertaste of dinner. A young, beautiful couple wandered in and ordered cosmos. He wore a tux, and she a white Cinderella gown. They were past their limit and made an adventure of navigating to a table.

  The televised beating continued. I nursed the scotch to the bitter foregone conclusion. The referee visibly considered stopping the show in the eleventh. The Russian, slumped, eyes swollen, survived to watch the Congolese get his arm raised in a unanimous decision.

  Mr. Denim and Golf Pro observed a moment of silence before resuming their conversation. The beautiful couple were drunk in love in addition to being drunk-drunk, and too busy mooning over each other to register the human tragedy on the screen.

  Phone Lady swore. She snapped her fingers and demanded a vodka neat.

  “I’m dead,” she said to the phone or to herself. “He’s going to fucking kill me.”

  “Good.” The bartender poured her a vodka. The woman stared at him, flabbergasted. He reflected her stare, a dishrag draped over his forearm.

  Thunderclouds gathered.

  I texted Lionel to alert him, then pinned a few bucks on the bar with my empty glass and headed for the exit.

  Mr. Denim and Golf Pro patently ignored me as I moved past. Their martinis were virtually untouched. I detest guys like them. Guys who pretend to drink. The thunderclouds caught me as I went through the lobby doors.

  Come on then, I said. Come on.

  I’d parked the Monte Carlo in a slot across from the entrance. Nancy the Beautician leaned on the hood. She was in costume and smiling evilly. A cheerleader transported from an alternate history Cold War America. Inebriated partygoers were cutting up in the loading zone; laughing, snapping pictures, and waving an open bottle of champagne while an exasperated taxi driver looked on.

  Nancy beckoned, perhaps h
esitant because of the crowd.

  “Mr. Detective!”

  Ghastly pale in brutal contrast with her red, red lips. Ancient and vital. Her seams and wrinkles were armor. As I approached, she sprang off the hood and grabbed my arm. The movement was like a crocodile lurching from tall grass, jaws agape. Her perfume stung my nose and throat. I’d gotten a whiff of her scent in the past. This was magnitudes more potent; the reek of chemical burning, of rancid meat, black horses milling in a stable, whinnying as they tore at one another, hooves churning.

  I reacted violently.

  The war club was out of my belt and into my fist. Gagging, I raised the club, then brought its calcified knob down in a savage tomahawk stroke that caught her above the eye. Her skull dented; the eye likely destroyed. She slumped, dead weight, claws yet sunk into my arm. I shoved her down.

  “You animal!” Nancy shuddered with an electric current. She began to rise. Blood decanted in a rivulet from her forehead and covered her face. “You animal! You animal!” She raked blindly at where I’d been.

  I was in the car and reversing. Fast, but not too fast. Making a getaway wasn’t the goal. Here came the crimson and bronze Mercury Monterey screeching rubber around the side of the hotel. A blaze of chandeliers in the building’s bay windows illuminated Ichabod at the wheel. Golf Pro and Mr. Denim ran out the front doors and piled in. I whipped onto the road and accelerated away before I could see in the jittery rearview whether Nancy joined the posse. Oh, I dearly hoped so. I wanted them all together.

  * * *

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