Occultation and Other Stories

by Laird Barron

  Then, as they ambled along a fence holding back the wasteland beyond the barn, he spotted a cluster of three satellite dishes. The dishes’ antennas were angled downward at a sizable oblong depression like aardvark snouts poised to siphon musty earth. These were lightweight models, each no more than four meters across and positioned as to be hidden from casual view from the main house. Their trapezoidal shapes didn’t jibe with photos Partridge had seen of similar devices. These objects gleamed the yellow-gray gleam of rotting teeth. His skin crawled as he studied them and the area of crushed soil. The depression was over a foot deep and shaped not unlike a kiddy wading pool. This presence in the field was incongruous and somehow sinister. He immediately regretted discarding his trusty Canon. He stopped and pointed. “What are those?”

  “Radio telescopes, obviously.”

  “Yeah, what kind of metal is that? Don’t they work better if you point them at the sky?”

  “The sky. Ah, well, perhaps later. You note the unique design, eh? Campbell and I…invented them. Basically.”

  “Really? Interesting segue from entomological investigation, doc.”

  “See what happens when you roll in the mud with NASA? The notion of first contact is so glamorous, it begins to rub off. Worse than drugs. I’m in recovery.”

  Partridge stared at the radio dishes. “UFOs and whatnot, huh. You stargazer, you. When did you get into that field?” It bemused him how Toshi Ryoko hopscotched from discipline to discipline with a breezy facility that unnerved even the mavericks among his colleagues.

  “I most assuredly haven’t migrated to that field—however, I will admit to grazing as the occasion warrants. The dishes are a link in the chain. We’ve got miles of conductive coil buried around here. All part of a comprehensive surveillance plexus. We monitor everything that crawls, swims or flies. Howard and I have become enamored of astrobiology, crypto zoology, the occulted world. Do you recall when we closed shop in California? That was roughly concomitant with our lamentably over-publicized misadventures in New Guinea.”

  “Umm.” Partridge had heard that Campbell and Toshi disappeared into the back country for three weeks after they lost a dozen porters and two graduate students in a river accident. Maybe alcohol and drugs were involved. There was an investigation and all charges were waived. The students’ families had sued and sued, of course. Partridge knew he should have called to offer moral support. Unfortunately, associating with Toshi in that time of crisis might have been an unwise career move and he let it slide. But nothing slides forever, does it?

  “New Guinea wasn’t really a disaster. Indeed, it served to crystallize the focus of our research, to open new doors…”

  Partridge was not thrilled to discuss New Guinea. “Intriguing. I’m glad you’re going great guns. It’s over my head, but I’m glad. Sincerely.” Several crows described broad, looping circles near the unwholesome machines. Near, but not too near.

  “Ah, but that’s not important. I imagine I shall die before any of this work comes to fruition.” Toshi smiled fondly and evasively. He gave Partridge an avuncular pat on the arm. “You’re here for Nadine’s grand farewell. She will leave the farm after the weekend. Everything is settled. You see now why I called. ”

  Partridge was not convinced. Nadine seemed to resent his presence—she’d always been hot and cold when it came to him. What did Toshi want him to do? “Absolutely,” he said.

  They walked back to the house and sat on the porch in rocking chairs. Gertz brought them a pitcher of iced tea and frosted glasses on trays. Campbell emerged in his trademark double-breasted steel-blue suit and horn-rimmed glasses. For the better part of three decades he had played the mild, urbane foil to Toshi’s megalomaniacal iconoclast. In private, Campbell was easily the dominant of the pair. He leaned against a post and held out his hand until Toshi passed him a smoldering cigarette. “I’m glad you know,” he said, fastening his murky eyes on Partridge. “I didn’t have the nerve to tell you myself.”

  Partridge felt raw, exhausted and bruised. He changed the subject. “So…those guys in the suits. Montague and Phillips. How do you know them? Financiers, I presume?”

  “Patrons,” Campbell said. “As you can see, we’ve scaled back the operation. It’s difficult to run things off the cuff.” Lolling against the post, a peculiar hybrid of William Burroughs and Walter Cronkite, he radiated folksy charm that mostly diluted underlying hints of decadence. This charm often won the hearts of flabby dilettante crones looking for a cause to champion. “Fortunately, there are always interested parties with deep pockets.”

  Partridge chuckled to cover his unease. His stomach was getting worse. “Toshi promised to get me up to speed on your latest and greatest contribution to the world of science. Or do I want to know?”

  “You showed him the telescopes? Anything else?” Campbell glanced at Toshi and arched his brow.

  Toshi’s grin was equal portions condescension and mania. He rubbed his spindly hands together like a spider combing its pedipalps. “Howard…I haven’t, he hasn’t been to the site. He has visited with our pets, however. Mind your shoes if you fancy them, by the way.”

  “Toshi has developed a knack for beetles,” Campbell said. “I don’t know what he sees in them, frankly. Boring, boring. Pardon the pun—I’m stone knackered on Dewar’s. My bloody joints are positively gigantic in this climate. Oh—have you seen reports of the impending Yellow Disaster? China will have the whole of Asia Minor deforested in the next decade. I imagine you haven’t—you don’t film horror movies, right? At least not reality horror.” He laughed as if to say, You realize I’m kidding, don’t you, lad? We’re all friends here. “Mankind is definitely eating himself out of house and home. The beetles and cockroaches are in the direct line of succession.”

  “Scary,” Partridge said. He waited doggedly for the punch line. Although, free association was another grace note of Campbell’s and Toshi’s. The punch line might not even exist. Give them thirty seconds and they would be nattering about engineering E. coli to perform microscopic stupid pet tricks or how much they missed those good old Bangkok whores.

  Toshi lighted another cigarette and waved it carelessly. “The boy probably hasn’t the foggiest notion as to the utility of our naturalistic endeavors. Look, after dinner, we’ll give a demonstration. We’ll hold a séance.”

  “Oh, horseshit, Toshi!” Campbell scowled fearsomely. This was always a remarkable transformation for those not accustomed to his moods. “Considering the circumstances, that’s extremely tasteless.”

  “Not to mention premature,” Partridge said through a grim smile. He rose, upsetting his drink in a clatter of softened ice cubes and limpid orange rinds and strode from the porch. He averted his face. He was not certain if Campbell called after him because of the blood beating in his ears. Toshi did clearly say, “Let him go, let him be, Howard... She’ll talk to him…”

  He stumbled to his room and crashed into his too-short bed and fell unconscious.

  Partridge owed much of his success to Toshi. Even that debt might not have been sufficient to justify the New England odyssey. The real reason, the motive force under the hood of Partridge’s lamentable midlife crisis, and the magnetic compulsion to heed that bizarre late-night call, was certainly his sense of unfinished business with Nadine. Arguably, he had Toshi to thank for that, too.

  Toshi Ryoko immigrated to Britain, and later the U.S., from Okinawa in the latter ’60s. This occurred a few years after he had begun to attract attention from the international scientific community for his brilliant work in behavioral ecology and prior to his stratospheric rise to popular fame due to daredevil eccentricities and an Academy Award-nominated documentary of his harrowing expedition into the depths of a Bengali wildlife preserve. The name of the preserve loosely translated into English as “The Forest that Eats Men.” Partridge had been the twenty-three-year-old cinematographer brought aboard at the last possible moment to photograph the expedition. No more qualified person could be found o
n the ridiculously short notice that Toshi announced for departure. The director/producer was none other than Toshi himself. It was his first and last film. There were, of course, myriad subsequent independent features, newspaper and radio accounts—the major slicks covered Toshi’s controversial exploits, but he lost interest in filmmaking after the initial hubbub and eventually faded from the public eye. Possibly his increasing affiliation with clandestine U.S. government projects was to blame. The cause was immaterial. Toshi’s fascinations were mercurial and stardom proved incidental to his mission of untangling the enigmas of evolutionary origins and ultimate destination.

  Partridge profited greatly from that tumultuous voyage into the watery hell of man-eating tigers and killer bees. He emerged from the crucible as a legend fully formed. His genesis was as Minerva’s, that warrior-daughter sprung whole from Jupiter’s aching skull. All the great directors wanted him. His name was gold—it was nothing but Beluga caviar and box seats at the Rose Bowl, a string of “where are they now” actresses on his arm, an executive membership in the Ferrari Club and posh homes in Malibu and Ireland. Someday they would hang his portrait in the American Society of Cinematography archives and blazon his star on Hollywood Boulevard.

  There was just one glitch in his happily-ever-after: Nadine. Nadine Thompson was the whip-smart Stanford physiologist who had gone along for the ride to Bangladesh as Toshi’s chief disciple. She was not Hollywood sultry, yet the camera found her to be eerily riveting in a way that was simultaneously erotic and repellant. The audience never saw a scientist when the camera tracked Nadine across the rancid deck of that river barge. They saw a woman-child—ripe, lithe and lethally carnal.

  She was doomed. Jobs came and went. Some were comparative plums, yes. None of them led to prominence indicative of her formal education and nascent talent. None of them opened the way to the marquee projects, postings or commissions. She eventually settled for a staff position at a museum in Buffalo. An eighty-seven-minute film shot on super-sixteen millimeter consigned her to professional purgatory. Maybe a touch of that taint had rubbed off on Partridge. Nadine was the youthful excess that Hollywood could not supply, despite its excess of youth, the one he still longed for during the long, blank Malibu nights. He carried a load of guilt about the whole affair as well.

  Occasionally, in the strange, hollow years after the hoopla, the groundswell of acclaim and infamy, she would corner Partridge in a remote getaway bungalow, or a honeymoon seaside cottage, for a weekend of gin and bitters and savage lovemaking. In the languorous aftermath, she often confided how his magic Panaflex had destroyed her career. She would forever be “the woman in that movie.” She was branded a real-life scream queen and the sex pot with the so-so face and magnificent ass.

  Nadine was right, as usual. “The Forest that Eats Men” never let go once it sank its teeth.

  He dreamed of poling a raft on a warm, muddy river. Mangroves hemmed them in corridors of convoluted blacks and greens. Creepers and vines strung the winding waterway. Pale sunlight sifted down through the screen of vegetation; a dim, smoky light full of shadows and shifting clouds of gnats and mosquitoes. Birds warbled and screeched. He crouched in the stern of the raft and stared at the person directly before him. That person’s wooden mask with its dead eyes and wooden smile gaped at him, fitted as it was to the back of the man’s head. The wooden mouth whispered, “You forgot your mask.” Partridge reached back and found, with burgeoning horror, that his skull was indeed naked and defenseless.

  “They’re coming. They’re coming.” The mask grinned soullessly.

  He inhaled to scream and jerked awake, twisted in the sheets and sweating. Red light poured through the thin curtains. Nadine sat in the shadows at the foot of his bed. Her hair was loose and her skin reflected the ruddy light. He thought of the goddess Kali shrunk to mortal dimensions.

  “You don’t sleep well either, huh,” she said.

  “Nope. Not since Bangladesh.”

  “That long. Huh.”

  He propped himself on his elbow and studied her. “I’ve been considering my options lately. I’m thinking it might be time to hang up my spurs. Go live in the Bahamas.”

  She said, “You’re too young to go.” That was her mocking tone.

  “You too.”

  She didn’t say anything for a while. Then, “Rich, you ever get the feeling you’re being watched?”

  “Like when you snuck in here while I was sleeping? Funny you should mention it…”

  “Rich.”

  He saw that she was serious. “Sometimes, yeah.”

  “Well you are. Always. I want you to keep that in mind.”

  “Okay. Will it help?”

  “Good question.”

  The room darkened, bit by bit. He said, “You think you would’ve made it back to the barge?” He couldn’t distance himself from her cry as she flailed overboard and hit the water like a stone. There were crocodiles everywhere. No one moved. The whole crew was frozen in that moment between disbelief and action. He had shoved the camera at, who? Beasley. He had done that and then gone in and gotten her. Blood-warm water, brown with mud. He did not remember much of the rest. The camera caught it all.

  “No,” she said. “Not even close.”

  He climbed over the bed and hugged her. She was warm. He pressed his face into her hair. Her hair trapped the faint, cloying odor of sickness. “I’m so fucking sorry,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything. She rubbed his shoulder.

  That night was quiet at the Moorehead Estate. There was a subdued dinner and afterward some drinks. Everybody chatted about the good old days. The real ones and the imaginary ones too. Phillips and Montague disappeared early on and took their men-at-arms with them. Nadine sat aloof. She held onto a hardback—one of Toshi’s long out of print treatises on insect behavior and ecological patterns. Partridge could tell she was only pretending to look at it.

  Later, after lights out, Partridge roused from a dream of drowning in something that wasn’t quite water. His name was whispered from the foot of the bed. He fumbled upright in the smothering dark. “Nadine?” He clicked on the lamp and saw he was alone.

  It rained in the morning. Toshi was undeterred. He put on a slicker and took a drive in the Land Rover to move the radio telescopes and other equipment into more remote fields. A truckload of the burly, grim laborers followed. The technicians trudged about their daily routine, indifferent to the weather. Campbell disappeared with Phillips and Montague. Nadine remained in her room. Partridge spent the morning playing poker with Beasley and Gertz on the rear porch. They drank whiskey—coffee for Beasley—and watched water drip from the eaves and thunderheads roll across the horizon trailing occasional whip-cracks of lightning. Then it stopped raining and the sun transformed the landscape into a mass of illuminated rust and glass.

  Partridge went for a long walk around the property to clear his head and savor the clean air. The sun was melting toward the horizon when Beasley found him dozing in the shade of an oak. It was a huge tree with yellowing leaves and exposed roots. The roots crawled with pill bugs. Between yawns Partridge observed the insects go about their tiny business.

  “C’mon. You gotta see the ghost town before it gets dark,” Beasley said. Partridge didn’t bother to protest. Nadine waited in the jeep. She wore tortoise shell sunglasses and a red scarf in her hair. He decided she looked better in a scarf than Toshi ever had, no question. Partridge opened his mouth and Beasley gave him a friendly shove into the front passenger seat.

  “Sulk, sulk, sulk!” Nadine laughed at him. “In the garden, eating worms?”

  “Close enough,” Partridge said, and hung on as Beasley gunned the jeep through a break in the fence line and zoomed along an overgrown track that was invisible until they were right on top of it. The farm became a picture on a stamp and then they passed through a belt of paper birches and red maples. They crossed a ramshackle bridge that spanned an ebon stream and drove into a clearing. Beasley ground gears until
they gained the crown of a long, tabletop hill. He killed the engine and coasted to a halt amid tangled grass and wildflowers and said, “Orren Towne. Died circa 1890s.”

  Below their vantage, remnants of a village occupied the banks of a shallow valley. If Orren Towne was dead its death was the living kind. A score of saltbox houses and the brooding hulk of a Second Empire church waited somberly. Petrified roofs were dappled by the shadows of moving clouds. Facades were brim with the ephemeral light of the magic hour. Beasley’s walkie-talkie crackled and he stepped aside to answer the call.

  Nadine walked partway down the slope and stretched her arms. Her muscles stood forth in cords of sinew and gristle. She looked over her shoulder at Partridge. Her smile was alien. “Don’t you wish you’d brought your camera?”

  The brain is a camera. What Partridge really wished was that he had gone to his room and slept. His emotions were on the verge of running amok. The animal fear from his daydreams had sneaked up again. He smelled the musk of his own adrenaline and sweat. The brain is a camera and once it sees what it sees there’s no taking it back. He noticed another of Toshi’s bizarre radio dishes perched on a bluff. The antenna was focused upon the deserted buildings. “I don’t like this place,” he said. But she kept walking and he trailed along. It was cooler among the houses. The earth was trampled into concrete and veined with minerals. Nothing organic grew and no birds sang. The subtly deformed structures were encased in a transparent resin that lent the town the aspect of a waxworks. He thought it might be shellac.

  Shadows fell across Partridge’s path. Open doorways and sugar-spun windows fronted darkness. These doors and windows were as unwelcoming as the throats of ancient wells, the mouths of caves. He breathed heavily. “How did Toshi do this? Why did he do this?”