The Barrens & Others

by F. Paul Wilson

  Had she given her FBI guardians the slip again? Was she on her way to find another innocent, helpless, trusting child to slaughter?

  Not if I could help it.

  I followed her to the local Gristedes, trailed her as she dawdled along the cosmetics aisle, touching, feeling, sniffing. Probably looking for the means to whore herself up. As ordinary as the photo had been, it had done her a service. In the light of day she was extremely plain. She needed all the help she could get. And her body. Caskie had described it as "incredible." It was anything but that from what I could see. I guess there's no accounting for tastes.

  I caught up to her in the housewares aisle. That was where they sold the knives. When I saw a stainless steel carving set displayed on a shelf I got dizzy. Visions of Jessica's mutilated body lying on that cold, steel gurney in the morgue flashed before me. A knife like that had ripped her up. I saw Martha's face, the expressions on her brothers' faces – Your fault! Your fault!

  That did it.

  I ripped the biggest knife from the set and spun her around.

  "Remember Jessica Santos?" I screamed.

  Shock on her face. Sure! No one was supposed to know.

  I pretended she was one of the outlines on Jessica's wall. A deep thrust to the abdomen, feeling the knife point hesitate against the fabric of her dress, and then rip through cloth and skin, into the tender innards. She screamed but I didn't let that stop me. I tugged the blade free and plunged it in again and again, each time screaming,

  "This is for Jessica! This is for Jessica!"

  Somebody pulled me free of her and I didn't resist. She'd been slashed like Jessica. The damage was irreparable. I knew my duty was done, knew I'd avenged my daughter.

  But as I looked into her dying eyes, so hurt, so shocked, so bewildered, I had the first inkling that I had made a monstrous mistake.

  *

  I slammed my fist on the table.

  "Call the FBI! Check it out with them!"

  They'd had me in this interrogation room for hours. Against my lawyer's advice – who wanted me to plead insanity – I'd given them a full statement. I wasn't going to hide anything. This was an open and shut case of a man taking justifiable revenge against his daughter's murderer. I wasn't going to be coy about it. I did it and that was that. Now they could do their damnedest to convict me. All I needed was the FBI file to prove that she was the killer.

  "We have called the FBI," said Captain Hall, chief of the Monroe police department. He adjusted his belt around his ample gut for the hundredth time since he'd stuck me in here. "And there's no such agent as Caskie assigned anywhere in New York."

  "It's a deep cover thing! That woman posing as a Jensen is Regina Ciullo, a federal witness against Bruno Papillardi!"

  "Who told you that?" Captain Hall said.

  "Agent Caskie."

  "The agent who doesn't exist. How convenient. When did you meet him?"

  I described my encounters with Caskie, from the cemetery to my apartment.

  "So you were never in his office – if he ever had one. Did anyone see you with him?"

  I thought about that. The funeral had been over and everyone was gone when I'd met him in the cemetery. We'd stood side by side for less than a minute in the foyer of the FBI building, and then we'd been together in the alley and my apartment. A cold lump was growing in my gut.

  "No. No one that I recall. But what about the picture? It's got to have Caskie's fingerprints on it!"

  "We've searched your car three times now, Mr. Santos. No picture. Maybe you should plead insane. Maybe this FBI agent is all in your mind."

  "I'm not crazy!"

  Captain Hall's face got hard as he leaned toward me.

  "Well then, maybe you should be. I know you've had a terrible thing happen to your family, but I've known Marla Jensen since she was a girl, back when she was still Marla Wainwright. And that was poor Marla you sliced up."

  He had to be wrong! Please God, he had to be! If I did that to the wrong woman –

  "No! You got to listen to me!"

  A disgusted growl rumbled from Captain Hall's throat.

  "Enough of this bullshit. Get him out of here."

  "No, wait! Please!"

  "Out!"

  Two uniformed cops yanked me out of the chair and dragged me into the hall. As they led me upstairs to a holding cell, I spotted Caskie walking in with two other cops.

  "Thank God!" I shouted. "Where have you been?"

  His face was drawn and haggard. He almost looked as if he had been crying. And he looked different. He looked trimmer and he held himself straighter. The rumpled suit was gone, replaced by white duck slacks, a white linen shirt, open at the collar, and a blue blazer with an emblem on the pocket. He looked like a wealthy yachtsman. He stared at me without the slightest hint of recognition.

  One of the cops with him whispered in his ear and suddenly Caskie was bounding toward me, face white with rage, arms outstretched, fingers curved like an eagle's talons, ready to tear me to pieces. The cops managed to haul him back before he reached me.

  "What's the matter with him?" I said to anyone who'd listen as my two cops hustled me up the stairs.

  My attorney answered from behind me.

  "That's Harold Jensen, the husband of the woman you cut up."

  I felt my knees buckle.

  "Her husband?"

  "Yeah. I heard around the club that she started divorce proceedings against him, but I guess that's moot now. Her death leaves him sole heir to the entire Wainwright fortune."

  With my insides tying themselves in a thousand tight little knots, I glanced back at the man I'd known as Caskie. He was being ushered through the door that led to the morgue. But on the threshold he turned and stole a look at me. As our eyes met, he winked and gave me a secret little thumbs up sign.

  foreword to "The Barrens"

  John Betancourt wrote to me sometime in 1989 asking if I'd be interested in participating in a "Special F. Paul Wilson Issue" of Weird Tales magazine. Like I could say no? An entire issue of the world's first and greatest horror fiction magazine – where the classics of Lovecraft and Howard and Bloch and Bradbury first saw print – devoted to me? How could I not be interested? I was restarting REPRISAL then but promised I'd send the requested 20,000 words of new fiction just as soon as I got free.

  "The Barrens" was intended to be those 20,000 words. Because Weird Tales was the target market, I designed it to be Lovecraftian, but not without my own little twists. It was August and I was cruising along on it when I got a letter from Bob Weinberg requesting a story for Lovecraft's Legacy, an anthology he and Marty Greenberg (see how that name keeps popping up?) were editing in honor of H. P. Lovecraft's centennial. I realized "The Barrens” was perfect.

  So now I had a dilemma. Which meant more: the ego stroke of an issue of Weird Tales devoted to me, or being part of a one shot anthology dedicated to the work of one of the most influential dark fantasy writers of all time?

  I chose the latter.

  Why? Because HPL is special to me.

  Donald A. Wollheim is to blame. He started me on Lovecraft. It was 1959. I was just a kid, a mere thirteen years old when he slipped me my first fix. I was a good kid up till then, reading Ace Doubles and clean, wholesome science fiction stories by the likes of Heinlein, E.E. Smith, Poul Anderson, Fred Pohl, and the rest. But he brought me down with one anthology. He knew what he was doing. He called it The Macabre Reader and slapped this lurid neato cool Ed Emshwiller cover on it. I couldn't resist. I bought it. I read it. And that was it. The beginning of my end.

  The Macabre Reader is an excellent collection – Bloch, Wandrei, Smith, Bishop, Howard. Good stories – dark, eerie, intense, the emotions jumping right off the page – like nothing I'd ever read before. But the one that grabbed me by the throat was "The Thing on the Doorstep" by somebody named H. P. Lovecraft. I was dragged into the story by the opening line ("It is true I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I
hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer."), captivated by the setting ("...witch cursed, legend haunted Arkham, whose huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic."), blown away by the dense prose that tossed off words like eldritch and foetor and Cyclopean and nacreous, that spoke of poets who die screaming in madhouses, that casually mentioned strange, forbidden books and towns like Innsmouth (where even Arkhamites fear to go) as if I should be familiar with them.

  But it was the heart of the tale that lingered in my mind long after I'd finished it – the concept of another reality impinging on ours, knowledge of which could drive you stark raving mad; a dimension of perverse logic and bizarre geometry, full of godlike creatures with unpronounceable names, aloof and yet decidedly inimical.

  My thirteen year old world did not seem quite so safe and sane, my reality seemed a tad less real.

  "The Thing on the Doorstep" delivered on the up close, breath clogging horror that The Macabre Reader's cover had promised, but it also served as my Cthulhu Mythos primer, my introduction to what is known as Cosmic Horror.

  After that first fix, I started mainlining Lovecraft. The local pushers – excuse me, book dealers – introduced me to Arkham House books and I nearly died of an overdose. Eventually I went cold turkey and kicked the habit. (Well, not completely. Occasionally I'll reread a favorite story. I can handle it now. Really.) But the Cosmic Horror concept still fascinates me. I used it in The Keep and I've used it here in "The Barrens." I'll no doubt use it again.

  So here's my official tribute to H. P. Lovecraft. I purposely avoided rereading any of his fiction before writing "The Barrens." I wasn't out to do a slavish pastiche; I wanted to capture the Lovecraft gestalt as I remembered it. The Jersey Pine Barrens, by the way, are real, a truly Lovecraftian setting; all the Piney history and lore in the story are true, every locale except Razorback Hill is real. (In fact, I liked Razorback Hill so much I returned there for the backstory of Freak Show.) The style is mine, but the Cosmic Horror is Lovecraft's.

  The following year it wound up as a finalist for the World Fantasy Award for best novella. It lost (of course) but John Betancourt did get his chance to publish it through his own Wildside Press in a signed, limited hardcover edition in 1991. More recently it was revived for Arkham House's Cthulhu 2000.

  I'm happy with "The Barrens," but it's nothing like "The Thing on the Doorstep." That's the real thing. Read it (or reread it) when you get a chance.

  The Barrens

  1. In Search of a Devil

  I shot my answering machine today. Took out the old twelve gauge my father left me, and blew it to pieces. A silly, futile gesture, I know, but it illustrates my present state of mind, I think.

  And it felt good. If not for an answering machine, my life would be completely different now. I would have missed Jonathan Creighton's call. I'd be less wise but far, far happier. And I'd still have some semblance of order and meaning in my life.

  He left an innocent enough message:

  "'The office of Kathleen McKelston and Associates!' Sounds like Big Business! How's it going, Mac? This is Jon Creighton calling. I'm going to be in the area later this week and I'd like to see you. Lunch or dinner – whatever's better. Give me a buzz." And he left a number with a 212 area code.

  So simple, so forthright, giving no hint of where it would lead.

  You work your way through life day by day, learning how to play the game, carving out your niche, making a place for yourself. You have some good luck, some bad luck, sometimes you make your own luck, and along the way you begin to think that you've figured out some of the answers – not all of them, of course, but enough to make you feel that you've learned something, that you've got a handle on life and just might be able to get a decent ride out of it. You start to think you're in control. Then along comes someone like Jonathan Creighton and he smashes everything. Not just your plans, your hopes, your dreams, but everything, up to and including your sense of what is real and what is not.

  I'd heard nothing from or about him since college, and had thought of him only occasionally until that day in early August when he called my office. Intrigued, I returned his call and set a date for lunch.

  That was my first mistake. If I'd had the slightest inkling of where that simple lunch with an old college lover would lead, I'd have slammed down the phone and fled to Europe, or the Orient, anywhere where Jonathan Creighton wasn't.

  We'd met at a freshmen mixer at Rutgers University. Maybe we each picked up subliminal cues – we called them "vibes" in those days – that told us we shared a rural upbringing. We didn't dress like it, act like it, or feel like it, but we were a couple of Jersey hicks. I came from the Pemberton area, Jon came from another rural zone, but in North Jersey, near a place called Gilead. Despite that link, we were polar opposites in most other ways. I'm still amazed we hit it off. I was career oriented while Jon was...well, he was a flake. He earned the name Crazy Creighton and he lived up to it every day. He never stayed with one thing long enough to allow anyone to pin him down. Always on to the Next New Thing before the crowd had tuned into it, always into the exotic and esoteric. Looking for the Truth, he'd say.

  And as so often happens with people who are incompatible in so many ways, we found each other irresistible and fell madly in love.

  Sophomore year we found an apartment off campus and moved in together. It was my first affair, and not at all a tranquil one. I read the strange books he'd find and I kept up with his strange hours, but I put my foot down when it came to the Pickman prints. There was something deeply disturbing about those paintings that went beyond their gruesome subject matter. Jon didn't fight me on it. He just smiled sadly in his condescending way, as if disappointed that I had missed the point, and rolled them up and put them away.

  The thing that kept us together – at least for the year we were together – was our devotion to personal autonomy. We spent weeks of nights talking about how we had to take complete control of our own lives, and brainstorming how we were going to go about it. It seems so silly now, but that was the Sixties, and we really discussed those sorts of things back then.

  We lasted sophomore year and then we fell apart. It might have gone on longer if Creighton hadn't got in with the druggies. That was the path toward loss of all autonomy as far as I was concerned, but Creighton said you can't be free until you know what's real. And if drugs might reveal the Truth, he had to try them. Which was hippie bullshit as far as I was concerned. After that, we rarely ran into each other. He wound up living alone off campus in his senior year. Somehow he managed to graduate, with a degree in anthropology, and that was the last I'd heard of him.

  But that doesn't mean he hadn't left his mark.

  I suppose I'm what you might call a feminist. I don't belong to NOW and I don't march in the streets, but I don't let anyone leave footprints on my back simply because I'm a woman. I believe in myself and I guess I owe some of that to Jonanthan Creighton. He always treated me as an equal. He never made an issue of it – it was simply implicit in his attitude that I was intelligent, competent, worthy of respect, able to stand on my own. It helped shape me. And I'll always revere him for that.

  Lunch. I chose Rosario's on the Point Pleasant Beach side of the Manasquan Inlet, not so much for its food as for the view. Creighton was late and that didn't terribly surprise me. I didn't mind. I sipped a chablis spritzer and watched the party boats roll in from their half-day runs of bottom fishing. Then a voice with echoes of familiarity broke through my thoughts.

  "Well, Mac, I see you haven't changed much."

  I turned and was shocked at what I saw. I barely recognized Creighton. He'd always been thin to the point of emaciation. Could the plump, bearded, almost cherubic figure standing before me now be–?

  "Jon? Is that you?"

  "The one and only," he said and spread his arms.

  We embraced briefly, then took our seats in a booth by the
window. As he squeezed into the far side of the table, he called the waitress over and pointed to my glass.

  "Two Lites for me and another of those for her."

  At first glance I'd thought that Creighton's extra poundage made him look healthy for the first time in his life. His hair was still thick and dark brown, but despite his round, rosy cheeks, his eyes were sunken and too bright. He seemed jovial but I sensed a grim undertone. I wondered if he was still into drugs.

  "Almost a quarter century since we were together," he said. "Hard to believe it's been that long. The years look as if they've been kind to you."

  As far as looks go, I suppose that's true. I don't dye my hair, so there's a little gray tucked in with the red. But I've always had a young face. I don't wear make-p – with my high coloring and freckles, I don't need it.

  "And you."

  Which wasn't actually true. His open shirt collar was frayed and looked as if this might be the third time he'd worn it since it was last washed. His tweed sport coat was worn at the elbows and a good two sizes too small for him.

  We spent the drinks, appetizers, and most of the entrees catching up on each other's lives. I told him about my small accounting firm, my marriage, my recent divorce.

  "No children?"

  I shook my head. The marriage had gone sour, the divorce had been a nightmare. I wanted off the subject.

  "But enough about me," I said. "What have you been up to?"

  "Would you believe clinical psychology?"

  "No," I said, too shocked to lie. "I wouldn't"

  The Jonathan Creighton I'd known had been so eccentric, so out of step, so self-absorbed, I couldn't imagine him as a psychotherapist. Jonathan Creighton helping other people get their lives together – it was almost laughable.

  He was the one laughing, however – good-naturedly, too.