by Laird Barron
Nadine laughed and took his hand playfully. Hers was dry and too-warm, like a leather wallet left in direct sunlight. “Toshi only discovered it. Do you seriously think he and Howard are capable of devising something this extraordinary?”
“No.”
“Quite a few people spent their lives in this valley. Decent farming and hunting in these parts. The Mooreheads owned about everything. They owned a brewery and a mill down the road, near their estate. All those busy little worker bees going about their jobs, going to church on Sunday. I’m sure it was a classic Hallmark. Then it got cold. One of those long winters that never ends. Nothing wanted to grow and the game disappeared. The house burned. Sad for the Mooreheads. Sadder for the people who depended on them. The family circled its wagons to rebuild the mansion, but the community never fully recovered. Orren Towne was here today, gone tomorrow. At least that’s the story we hear told by the old-timers at the Mad Rooster over cribbage and a pint of stout.” Nadine stood in the shade of the church, gazing up, up at the crucifix. “This is how it will all be someday. Empty buildings. Empty skies. The grass will come and eat everything we ever made. The waters will swallow it. It puts my situation into perspective, lemme tell you.”
“These buildings should’ve fallen down. Somebody’s gone through a lot of trouble to keep this like—”
“A museum. Yeah, somebody has. This isn’t the only place it’s been done, either.”
“Places like this? Where?” Partridge said. He edged closer to the bright center of the village square.
“I don’t know. They’re all over if you know what to look for.”
“Nadine, maybe…Jesus!” He jerked his head to peer at a doorway. The darkness inside the house seemed fuller and more complete. “Are there people here?” His mind jumped to an image of the masks that the natives wore to ward off tigers. He swallowed hard.
“Just us chickens, love.”
A stiff breeze rushed from the northwest and whipped the outlying grass. Early autumn leaves skated across the glassy rooftops and swirled in barren yards. Leaves fell dead and dry. Night was coming hard.
“I’m twitchy—jet lag, probably. What do those weird-looking rigs do?” He pointed at the dish on the hill. “Toshi said they’re radio telescopes he invented.”
“He said he invented them? Oh my. I dearly love that man, but sometimes he’s such an asshole.”
“Yeah. How do they work?”
Nadine shrugged. “They read frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum.”
“Radio signals from underground. Why does that sound totally backwards to me?”
“I didn’t say anything about radio signals.”
“Then what did you say?”
“When we get back, ask Toshi about the node.”
“What are you talking about?” Partridge’s attention was divided between her and the beautifully grotesque houses and the blackness inside them.
“You’ll see. Get him to show you the node. That’ll clear some of this stuff up, pronto.”
Beasley called to them. He and the jeep were a merged silhouette against the failing sky. He swung his arm overhead until Nadine yelled that they would start back in a minute. She removed her shades and met Partridge’s eyes. “You okay, Rich?” She refused to relinquish her grip on his hand.
“You’re asking me?”
She gave him another of her inscrutable looks. She reached up and pushed an unkempt lock from his forehead. “I’m not mad, in case you’re still wondering. I wanted you to see me off. Not like there’re any more weekend rendezvous in the stars for us.”
“That’s no way to talk,” he said.
“Just sayin’.” She dropped his hand and walked away. In a moment he followed. By the time they made the summit, darkness had covered the valley. Beasley had to use the headlights to find the way home.
Gertz served prawns for dinner. They ate at the long mahogany table in the formal dining room. Jackson Phillips begged off due to an urgent matter in the city. Beasley packed him and one of the muscle-bound bodyguards into the helicopter and flew away. That left six: Toshi; Campbell; Nadine; Carrey Montague and the other bodyguard; and Partridge. The men wore suits and ties. Nadine wore a cream-colored silk chiffon evening gown. There were candles and elaborate floral arrangements and dusty bottles of wine from the Moorehead cellar and magnums of top-dollar French champagne from a Boston importer who catered to those with exclusive tastes and affiliations. Toshi proposed a toast and said a few words in Japanese and then the assembly began to eat and drink.
Somewhere in the middle of the third or fourth course, Partridge realized he was cataclysmically drunk. They kept setting them up and he kept knocking them down. Toshi or Campbell frequently clapped his back and clinked his glass and shouted “Sic itur ad astra!” and another round would magically appear. His head was swollen and empty as an echo chamber. The winking silverware and sloshing wineglasses, the bared teeth and hearty laughter came to him from a sea shell. He caught Nadine watching him from across the table, her eyes cool, her mouth set inscrutably. He poured more liquor down his throat to break their moment of recognition, and when he checked again she’d left the table, her untouched meal, and sailed from the room.
Dinner blurred into a collage of sense and chaos, of light and dark, and he gripped his glass and blinked dumbly against the shattering flare of the low-slung chandelier and laughed uproariously. Without transition, dinner was concluded and the men had repaired to the den to relax over snifters of Hennessy. They lounged in wing-backed leather chairs and upon opulent leather divans. Partridge admired the vaulted ceiling, the library of towering lacquered oak bookcases and the impressive collection of antique British rifles and British cavalry sabers cached in rearing cabinets of chocolate wood and softly warped glass. Everything was so huge and shiny and far away. When the cigar and pipe smoke hung thick and the men’s cheeks were glazed and rosy as the cheeks of Russian dolls, he managed, “I’m supposed to ask you about the node.”
Campbell smiled a broad and genial smile. “The node, yes. The node, of course, is the very reason Mr. Phillips and Mr. Montague have come to pay their respects. They hope to buy their way into Heaven.”
“He’s right, he’s right,” Mr. Carrey Montague said with an air of merry indulgence. “Jack had his shot. Didn’t he though. Couldn’t hack it and off he flew.”
“I was getting to this,” Toshi said. “In a roundabout fashion.”
“Exceedingly so,” Campbell said.
“Didn’t want to frighten him. It’s a delicate matter.”
“Yes,” Campbell said dryly. He puffed on his pipe and his eyes were red around the edges and in the center of his pupils.
“Shall I. Or do you want a go?” Toshi shrugged his indifference.
“The node is a communication device,” Campbell said through a mouthful of smoke. “Crude, really. Danforth Moorehead, the Moorehead patriarch, developed the current model. Ahem, the schematic was delivered to him and he effected the necessary modifications, at any rate. Admittedly, it’s superior to the primitive methods—scrying, séances, psychedelic drugs, that nonsense. Not to mention some of the more gruesome customs we’ve observed in the provincial regions. Compared to that, the node is state of the art. It is a reservoir that filters and translates frequency imaging captured by our clever, clever radio telescopes. It permits us to exchange information with our…neighbors.”
Partridge dimly perceived that the others were watching him with something like fascination. Their eyes glittered through the haze. “With who? I don’t—”
“Our neighbors,” Campbell said.
“Oh, the things they show you.” Carrey Montague sucked on his oxygen mask until he resembled a ghoul.
Partridge swung his head to look from face to face. The men were drunk. The men seethed with restrained glee. No one appeared to be joking. “Well, go on then,” he said dreamily. His face was made of plaster. Black spots revolved before him like ashen snowflakes.
“Like what?”
Toshi chuckled. “Assuming we don’t obliterate ourselves, or that a meteorite doesn’t smack us back to the Cambrian, if not the Cryptozoic, this planet will succumb to the exhaustion of Sol. First the mammals, then the reptiles, right down the line until all that’s left of any complexity are the arthropods: beetles and cockroaches and their oceanic cousins, practically speaking. Evolution is a circle—we’re sliding back to that endless sea of protoplasmic goop.”
“I’m betting on the nuclear holocaust,” Campbell said.
Partridge slopped more brandy into his mouth. He was far beyond tasting it. “Mmm hmm,” he said intelligently and cast about for a place to inconspicuously ditch his glass.
“NASA and its holy grail—First Contact, the quest for intelligent life in the universe…all hogwash, all lies.” Toshi gently took the snifter away and handed him a fresh drink in a ceramic mug. This was not brandy; it was rich and dark as honey in moonlight. “Private stock, my boy. Drink up!” Partridge drank and his eyes flooded and he choked a little. Toshi nodded in satisfaction. “We know now what we’ve always suspected. Man is completely and utterly alone in a sea of dust and smoke. Alone and inevitably slipping into extinction.”
“Not quite alone,” Campbell said. “There are an estimated five to eight million species of insects as of yet unknown and unclassified. Hell of a lot of insects, hmm? But why stop at bugs? Only a damned fool would suppose that was anything but the tip of the iceberg. When the time of Man comes to an end their time will begin. And be certain this is not an invasion or a hostile occupation. We’ll be dead as Dodos a goodly period before they emerge to claim the surface. They won’t rule forever. The planet will eventually become cold and inhospitable to any mortal organism. But trust that their rule will make the reign of the terrible lizards seem a flicker of an eyelash.”
“You’re talking about cockroaches,” Partridge said in triumph. “Fucking cockroaches.” That was too amusing and so he snorted on his pungent liquor and had a coughing fit.
“No, we are not,” Campbell said.
“We aren’t talking about spiders or beetles, either,” Toshi said. He gave Partridge’s knee an earnest squeeze. “To even compare them with the citizens of the Great Kingdom…I shudder. However, if I were to make that comparison, I’d say this intelligence is the Ur-progenitor of those insects scrabbling in the muck. The mother race of idiot stepchildren.”
Campbell knelt before him so they were eye to eye. The older man’s face was radiant and distant as the moon. “This is a momentous discovery. We’ve established contact. Not us, actually. It’s been going on forever. We are the latest…emissaries, if you will. Trustees to the grandest secret of them all.”
“Hoo boy. You guys. You fucking guys. Is Nadine in on this?”
“Best that you see firsthand. Would you like that, Rich?”
“Uhmm-wha?” Partridge did not know what he wanted except that he wanted the carousel to stop.
Campbell and Toshi stood. They took his arms and the next thing he knew they were outside in the humid country night with darkness all around. He tried to walk, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate much. They half dragged him to a dim metal door and there was a lamp bulb spinning in space and then steep, winding concrete stairs and cracked concrete walls ribbed with mold. They went down and down and a strong, earthy smell overcame Partridge’s senses. People spoke to him in rumbling nonsense phrases. Someone ruffled his hair and laughed. His vision fractured. He glimpsed hands and feet, a piece of jaw illumed by a quivering fluorescent glow. When the hands stopped supporting him, he slid to his knees. He had the impression of kneeling in a cellar. Water dripped and a pale overhead lamp hummed like a wasp in a jar. From the corner of his eye he got the sense of table legs and cables and he smelled an acrid smell like cleaning solvents. He thought it might be a laboratory.
—Crawl forward just a bit.
It was strange whatever lay before him. Something curved, spiral-shaped and darkly wet. A horn, a giant conch shell, it was impossible to be certain. There was an opening, as the external os of a cervix, large enough to accommodate him in all his lanky height. Inside it was moist and muffled and black.
—There’s a lad. Curl up inside. Don’t fight. There, there. That’s my boy. Won’t be long. Not long. Don’t be afraid. This is only a window, not a doorway.
Then nothing and nothing and nothing; only his heart, his breathing and a whispery static thrum that might’ve been the electromagnetic current tracing its circuit through his nerves.
Nothingness grew very dense.
Partridge tried to shriek when water, or something thicker than water, flowed over his head and into his sinuses and throat. Low static built in his ears and the abject blackness was replaced by flashes of white imagery. He fell from an impossible height. He saw only high-velocity jump-cuts of the world and each caromed from him and into the gulf almost instantly. Fire and blood and moving tides of unleashed water. Bones of men and women and cities. Dead, mummified cities gone so long without inhabitants they had become cold and brittle and smooth as mighty forests of stone. There loomed over everything a silence that held to its sterile bosom countless screams and the sibilant chafe of swirling dust. Nadine stood naked as ebony in the heart of a ruined square. She wore a white mask, but he knew her with the immediacy of a nightmare. She lifted her mask and looked at him. She smiled and raised her hand. Men and women emerged from the broken skyscrapers and collapsed bunkers. They were naked and pallid and smiling. In the distance the sun heaved up, slow and red. Its deathly light cascaded upon the lines and curves of cyclopean structures. These were colossal, inhuman edifices of fossil bone and obsidian and anthracite that glittered not unlike behemoth carapaces. He thrashed and fell and fell and drowned.
Nadine said in his ear, Come down. We love you.
The cellar floor was cool upon his cheek. He was paralyzed and choking. The men spoke to him in soothing voices. Someone pressed a damp cloth to his brow.
—Take it easy, son. The first ride or two is a bitch and a half. Get his head.
Partridge groaned as gravity crushed him into the moldy concrete.
Someone murmured to him.
—They are interested in preserving aspects of our culture. Thus Orren Towne and places, hidden places most white men will never tread. Of course, it’s a multifaceted project. Preserving artifacts, buildings, that’s hardly enough to satisfy such an advanced intellect…
Partridge tired to speak. His jaw worked spastically. No sound emerged. The concrete went soft and everyone fell silent at once.
Partridge stirred and sat up. He tried to piece together how he ended up on the back porch sprawled in a wooden folding chair. He was still in his suit and it was damp and clung to him the way clothes do after they have been slept in. The world teetered on the cusp of night. Parts of the sky were orange as fire and other parts were covered by purple-tinted rain clouds like a pall of cannon smoke. Partridge’s hair stood in gummy spikes. His mouth was swollen and cottony. He had drooled in his long sleep. His body was stiff as an old plank.
Beasley came out of the house and handed him a glass of seltzer water. “Can’t hold your liquor anymore?”
Partridge took the glass in both hands and drank greedily. “Oh, you’re back. Must’ve been a hell of a party,” he said at last. He had slept for at least sixteen hours according to his watch. His memory was a smooth and frictionless void.
“Yeah,” Beasley said. “You okay?”
Partridge was not sure. “Uh,” he said. He rolled his head to survey the twilight vista. “Beasley.”
“Yeah?”
“All this.” Partridge swept his hand to encompass the swamped gardens and the decrepit outbuildings. “They’re letting it fall down. Nobody left from the old days.”
“You and me. And Nadine.”
“And when we’re gone?”
“We’re all go
nna be gone sooner or later. The docs…they just do what they can. There’s nothing else, pal.” Beasley gave him a searching look. He shook his shaggy head and chuckled. “Don’t get morbid on me, Hollywood. Been a good run if you ask me. Hell, we may get a few more years before the plug gets pulled.”
“Is Montague still here?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I heard someone yelling, cursing. Earlier, while I slept.”
“Huh. Yeah, there was a little fight. The old fella didn’t get his golden ticket. He wasn’t wanted. Few are. He shipped out. Won’t be coming back.”
“I guess not. What was he after?”
“Same thing as everybody else, I suppose. People think Toshi is the Devil, that he can give them their heart’s desire if they sign on the dotted line. It ain’t so simple.”
Partridge had a wry chuckle at that. “Damned right it’s not simple, partner. I’m still selling my soul to Tinsel Town. No such luck as to unload the whole shebang at once.” Partridge shook with a sudden chill. His memory shucked and jittered; it spun off the reel in his brain and he could not gather it fast enough to make sense of what he had seen in the disjointed frames. “Lord, I hate the country. Always have. I really should get out of here, soon.”
“My advice—when you get on that bus, don’t look back,” Beasley said. “And keep your light on at night. You done with that?”
“Um-hmm.” He could not summon the energy to say more right then. The strength and the will had run out of him. He put his hand over his eyes and tried to concentrate.
Beasley took the empty glass and went back into the house. Darkness came and the yard lamps sizzled to life. Moths fluttered near his face, battered at the windows and Partridge wondered why that panicked him, why his heart surged and his fingernails dug into the arm rests. In the misty fields the drone of night insects began.
He eventually heaved to his feet and went inside and walked the dim, ugly corridors for an interminable period. He stumbled aimlessly as if he were yet drunk. His thoughts buzzed and muttered and were incoherent. He found Toshi and Campbell crouched in the den like grave robbers over a stack of shrunken, musty ledgers with hand-sewn covers and other stacks of photographic plates like the kind shot from the air or a doctor’s X-ray machine. The den was tomb-dark except for a single flimsy desk lamp. He swayed in the doorway, clinging to the jam as if he were in a cabin on a ship. He said, “Where is Nadine?”
