Occultation and Other Stories

by Laird Barron

  Eventually she washed her hands and face in the bathroom sink, staring into the mirror at her pale, maniacal simulacrum. She skipped makeup and stumbled from the apartment to the cramped, dingy lift that dropped her into a shabby foyer with its rows of tarnished mailbox slots checkering the walls, its low, grubby light fixtures, a stained carpet, and the sweet-and-sour odor of sweat and stagnant air. She stumbled through the security doors into the brighter world.

  The fugue descended.

  Danni was walking from somewhere to somewhere else; she’d closed her eyes against the glare and her insides turned upside down. Her eyes flew open and she reeled, utterly lost. Shadow people moved around her, bumped her with their hard elbows and swinging hips; an angry man in brown tweed lectured his daughter and the girl protested. They buzzed like flies. Their miserable faces blurred together, lit by some internal phosphorous. Danni swallowed, crushed into herself with a force akin to claustrophobia, and focused on her watch, a cheap windup model that glowed in the dark. Its numerals meant nothing, but she tracked the needle as it swept a perfect circle while the world spun around her. The passage, an indoor-outdoor avenue of sorts. Market stalls flanked the causeway, shelves and timber beams twined with streamers and beads, hemp rope and tie-dye shirts and pennants. Light fell through cracks in the overhead pavilion. The enclosure reeked of fresh salmon, salt water, sawdust, and the compacted scent of perfumed flesh.

  —Danni. Here was an intelligible voice amid the squeal and squelch. Danni lifted her head and tried to focus.

  —We miss you, Virgil said. He stood several feet away, gleaming like polished ivory.

  —What? Danni said, thinking his face was the only face not changing shape like the flowery crystals in a kaleidoscope. —What did you say?

  —Come home. It was apparent that this man wasn’t Virgil, although in this particular light the eyes were similar, and he drawled. Virgil grew up in South Carolina, spent his adult life trying to bury that drawl and eventually it only emerged when he was exhausted or angry. The stranger winked at her and continued along the boardwalk. Beneath an Egyptian cotton shirt, his back was almost as muscular as Virgil’s. But, no.

  Danni turned away into the bright, jostling throng. Someone took her elbow. She yelped and wrenched away and nearly fell.

  —Honey, you okay? The jumble of insectoid eyes, lips, and bouffant hair coalesced into Merrill’s stern face. Merrill wore white-rimmed sunglasses that complemented her vanilla dress with its wide shoulders and brass buttons, and her elegant vanilla gloves. Her thin nose peeled with sunburn. —Danni, are you all right?

  —Yeah. Danni wiped her mouth.

  —The hell you are. C’mon. Merrill led her away from the moving press to a small open square and seated her in a wooden chair in the shadow of a parasol. The square hosted a half-dozen vendors and several tables of squawking children, overheated parents with flushed cheeks, and senior citizens in pastel running suits. Merrill bought soft ice cream in tiny plastic dishes and they sat in the shade and ate the ice cream while the sun dipped below the rooflines. The vendors began taking down the signs and packing it in for the day.

  —Okay, okay. I feel better. Danni’s hands had stopped shaking.

  —You do look a little better. Know where you are?

  —The market. Danni wanted a cigarette. —Oh, damn it, she said.

  —Here, sweetie. Merrill drew two containers of Mahan’s foreign cigarettes from her purse and slid them across the table, mimicking a spy in one of those ’70s thrillers.

  —Thanks, Danni said as she got a cigarette burning. She dragged frantically, left hand cupped to her mouth so the escaping smoke boiled and foamed between her fingers like dry ice vapors. Nobody said anything despite the no smoking signs posted on the gate.

  —Hey, what kind of bug is that? Merrill intently regarded a beetle hugging the warmth of a wooden plank near their feet.

  —It’s a beetle.

  —How observant. But what kind?

  —I don’t know.

  —What? You don’t know?

  —I don’t know. I don’t really care, either.

  —Oh, please.

  —Fine. Danni leaned forward until her eyeballs were scant inches above the motionless insect. —Hmm. I’d say a Spurious exoticus minor, closely related to, but not to be confused with, the Spurious eroticus major. Yep.

  Merrill stared at the beetle, then Danni. She took Danni’s hand and gently squeezed. —You fucking fraud. Let’s go get liquored up, hey?

  —Hey-hey.

  May 6, 2006

  (D. L. Session 33)

  Dr. Green’s glasses were opaque as quartz.

  —The Lagerstätte. Elucidate, if you will.

  —A naturalist’s wet dream. Ask Norma Fitzwater and Leslie Runyon, Danni said and chuckled wryly. —When Merrill originally brought me here to Cali, she made me join a support group. That was about, what? A year ago, give or take. Kind of a twelve-step program for wannabe suicides. I quit after a few visits. Group therapy isn’t my style and the counselor was a royal prick. Before I left, I became friends with Norma, a drug addict and perennial house guest of the state penitentiary before she snagged a wealthy husband. Marrying rich wasn’t a cure for everything, though. She claimed to have tried to off herself five or six times, made it sound like an extreme sport.

  —A fascinating woman. She was pals with Leslie, a widow like me. Leslie’s husband and brother fell off a glacier in Alaska. I didn’t like her much. Too creepy for polite company. Unfortunately, Norma had a mother-hen complex, so there was no getting rid of her. Anyway, it wasn’t much to write home about. We went to lunch once a week, watched a couple of films, commiserated about our shitty luck. Summer camp stuff.

  —You speak of Norma in the past tense. I gather she eventually ended her life, Dr. Green said.

  —Oh, yes. She made good on that. Jumped off a hotel roof in the Tenderloin. Left a note to the effect that she and Leslie couldn’t face the music anymore. The cops, brilliant as they are, concluded Norma made a suicide pact with Leslie. Leslie’s corpse hasn’t surfaced yet. The cops figure she’s at the bottom of the bay, or moldering in a wooded gully. I doubt that’s what happened though.

  —You suspect she’s alive.

  —No, Leslie’s dead under mysterious and messy circumstances. It got leaked to the press that the cops found evidence of foul play at her home. There was blood or something on her sheets. They say it dried in the shape of a person curled in the fetal position. They compared it to the flash shadows of victims in Hiroshima. This was deeper, as if the body had been pressed hard into the mattress. The only remains were her watch, her diaphragm, her fillings, for Christ’s sake, stuck to the coagulate that got left behind like afterbirth. Sure, it’s bullshit, urban legend fodder. There were some photos in the Gazette, some speculation amongst our sorry little circle of neurotics and manic depressives.

  —Very unpleasant, but, fortunately, equally improbable.

  Danni shrugged. —Here’s the thing, though. Norma predicted everything. A month before she killed herself, she let me in on a secret. Her friend Leslie, the creepy lady, had been seeing Bobby. He visited her nightly, begged her to come away with him. And Leslie planned to.

  —Her husband, Dr. Green said. —The one who died in Alaska.

  —The same. Trust me, I laughed, a little nervously, at this news. I wasn’t sure whether to humor Norma or get the hell away from her. We were sitting in a classy restaurant, surrounded by execs in silk ties and Armani suits. Like I said, Norma was loaded. She married into a nice Sicilian family; her husband was in the import-export business, if you get my drift. Beat the hell out of her, though; definitely contributed to her low self-esteem. Right in the middle of our luncheon, between the lobster tails and the éclairs, she leaned over and confided this thing with Leslie and her deceased husband. The ghostly lover.

  Dr. Green passed Danni another cigarette. He lighted one of his own and studied her through the blue exhaust. Danni wonder
ed if he wanted a drink as badly as she did.

  —How did you react to this information? Dr. Green said.

  —I stayed cool, feigned indifference. It wasn’t difficult; I was doped to the eyeballs most of the time. Norma claimed there exists a certain quality of grief, so utterly profound, so tragically pure, that it resounds and resonates above and below. A living, bleeding echo. It’s the key to a kind of limbo.

  —The Lagerstätte. Dr. Green licked his thumb and sorted through the papers in the brown folder. —As in the Burgess Shale, the La Brea Tar Pits. Were your friends amateur paleontologists?

  —Lagerstätten are “resting places” in the Deutsch, and I think that’s what the women meant.

  —Fascinating choice of mythos.

  —People do whatever it takes to cope. Drugs, kamikaze sex, religion, anything. In naming, we seek to order the incomprehensible, yes?

  —True.

  —Norma pulled this weird piece of jagged, gray rock from her purse. Not rock—a petrified bone shard. A fang or a long, wicked rib splinter. Supposedly human. I could tell it was old; it reminded me of all those fossils of trilobites I used to play with. It radiated an aura of antiquity, like it had survived a shift of deep geological time. Norma got it from Leslie and Leslie had gotten it from someone else; Norma claimed to have no idea who, although I suspect she was lying; there was definitely a certain slyness in her eyes. For all I know, it’s osmosis. She pricked her finger on the shard and gestured at the blood that oozed on her plate. Danni shivered and clenched her left hand. —The scene was surreal. Norma said: Grief is blood, Danni. Blood is the living path to everywhere. Blood opens the way. She said if I offered myself to the Lagerstätte, Virgil would come to me and take me into the house of dreams. But I wanted to know whether it would really be him and not… an imitation. She said, Does it matter? My skin crawled as if I were waking from a long sleep to something awful, something my primal self recognized and feared. Like fire.

  —You believe the bone was human.

  —I don’t know. Norma insisted I accept it as a gift from her and Leslie. I really didn’t want to, but the look on her face, it was intense.

  —Where did it come from? The bone.

  —The Lagerstätte.

  —Of course. What did you do?

  Danni looked down at her hands, the left with its jagged white scar in the meat and muscle of her palm, and deeper into the darkness of the earth. —The same as Leslie. I called them.

  —You called them. Virgil and Keith.

  —Yes. I didn’t plan to go through with it. I got drunk, and when I’m like that, my thoughts get kind of screwy. I don’t act in character.

  —Oh. Dr. Green thought that over. —When you say called, what exactly do you mean?

  She shrugged and flicked ashes into the ashtray. Even though Dr. Green had been there the morning they stitched the wound, she guarded the secret of its origin with a zeal bordering on pathological.

  Danni had brought the weird bone to the apartment. Once alone, she drank the better half of a bottle of Maker’s Mark and then sliced her palm with the sharp edge of the bone and made a doorway in blood. She slathered a vertical seam, a demarcation between her existence and the abyss, in the plaster wall at the foot of her bed. She smeared Virgil and Keith’s initials and sent a little prayer into the night. In a small clay pot she’d bought at a market, she shredded her identification, her (mostly defunct) credit cards, her social security card, a lock of her hair, and burned the works with the tallow of a lamb. Then, in the smoke and shadows, she finished getting drunk off her ass and promptly blacked out.

  Merrill wasn’t happy; Danni had bled like the proverbial stuck pig, soaked through the sheets into the mattress. Merrill decided her friend had horribly botched another run for the Pearly Gates. She had brought Danni to the hospital for a bunch of stitches and introduced her to Dr. Green. Of course Danni didn’t admit another suicide attempt. She doubted her conducting a black-magic ritual would help matters either. She said nothing, simply agreed to return for sessions with the good doctor. He was blandly pleasant, eminently nonthreatening. She didn’t think he could help, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to please Merrill and Merrill insisted on the visits.

  Back home, Merrill confiscated the bone, the ritual fetish, and threw it in the trash. Later, she tried like hell to scrub the stain. In the end she gave up and painted the whole room blue.

  A couple days after that particular bit of excitement, Danni found the bone at the bottom of her sock drawer. It glistened with a cruel, lusterless intensity. Like the monkey’s paw, it had returned and that didn’t surprise her. She folded it into a kerchief and locked it in a jewelry box she’d kept since first grade.

  All these months gone by, Danni remained silent on the subject.

  Finally, Dr. Green sighed.—Is that when you began seeing Virgil in the faces of strangers? These doppelgängers? He smoked his cigarette with the joyless concentration of a prisoner facing a firing squad. It was obvious from his expression that the meter had rolled back to zero.

  —No, not right away. Nothing happened, Danni said. —Nothing ever does, at first.

  —No, I suppose not. Tell me about the vineyard. What happened there?

  —I… I got lost.

  —That’s where all this really begins, isn’t it? The fugue, perhaps other things.

  Danni gritted her teeth. She thought of elephants and graveyards. Dr. Green was right, in his own smug way. Six weeks after Danni sliced her hand, Merrill took her for a daytrip to the beach. Merrill rented a convertible and made a picnic. It was nice; possibly the first time Danni felt human since the accident; the first time she’d wanted to do anything besides mope in the apartment and play depressing music.

  After some discussion, they chose Bolton Park, a lovely stretch of coastline way out past Kingwood. The area was foreign to Danni, so she bought a road map pamphlet at a gas station. The brochure listed a bunch of touristy places. Windsurfers and birdwatchers favored the area, but the guide warned of dangerous riptides. The women had no intention of swimming; they stayed near a cluster of great big rocks at the north end of the beach—below the cliff with the steps that led up to the posh houses; the summer homes of movie stars and advertising executives; the beautiful people.

  On the way home, Danni asked if they might stop at Kirkston Vineyards. It was a hole-in-the-wall, only briefly listed in the guidebook. There were no pictures. They drove in circles for an hour tracking the place down—Kirkston was off the beaten path; a village of sorts. There was a gift shop and an inn, and a few antique houses. The winery was fairly large and charming in a rustic fashion, and that essentially summed up the entire place.

  Danni thought it was a cute setup; Merrill was bored stiff and did what she always did when she’d grown weary of a situation—she flirted like mad with one of the tour guides. Pretty soon, she disappeared with the guy on a private tour.

  There were twenty or thirty people in the tour group—a bunch of elderly folks who’d arrived on a bus and a few couples pretending they were in Europe. After Danni lost Merrill in the crowd, she went outside to explore until her friend surfaced again.

  Perhaps fifty yards from the winery steps, Virgil waited in the lengthening shadows of a cedar grove. That was the first of the phantoms. Too far away for positive identification, his face was a white smudge. He hesitated and regarded her over his shoulder before he ducked into the undergrowth. She knew it was impossible, knew that it was madness, or worse, and went after him, anyway.

  Deeper into the grounds she encountered crumbled walls of a ruined garden hidden under a bower of willow trees and honeysuckle vines. She passed through a massive marble archway, so thick with sap it had blackened like a smoke stack. Inside was a sunken area and a clogged fountain decorated with cherubs and gargoyles. There were scattered benches made of stone slabs, and piles of rubble overrun by creepers and moss. Water pooled throughout the garden, mostly covered by algae and scum; mosquito l
arvae squirmed beneath drowned leaves. Ridges of broken stone and mortar petrified in the slop and slime of that boggy soil and made waist-high calculi amongst the freestanding masonry.

  Her hand throbbed with a sudden, magnificent stab of pain. She hissed through her teeth. The freshly knitted, pink slash, her Freudian scar, had split and blood seeped so copiously her head swam. She ripped the sleeve off her blouse and made a hasty tourniquet. A grim, sullen quiet drifted in; a blizzard of silence. The bees weren’t buzzing and the shadows in the trees waxed red and gold as the light decayed.

  Virgil stepped from behind stalagmites of fallen stone, maybe thirty feet away. She knew with every fiber of her being that this was a fake, a body double, and yet she wanted nothing more than to hurl herself into his arms. Up until that moment, she didn’t realize how much she’d missed him, how achingly final her loneliness had become.

  Her glance fell upon a gleaming wedge of stone where it thrust from the water like a dinosaur’s tooth, and as shapes within shapes became apparent, she understood this wasn’t a garden. It was a graveyard.

  Virgil opened his arms—

  —I’m not comfortable talking about this, Danni said. —Let’s move on.

  August 9, 2006

  Friday was karaoke night at the Candy Apple.

  In the golden days of her previous life, Danni had a battalion of friends and colleagues with whom to attend the various academic functions and cocktail socials as required by her professional affiliation with a famous East Coast university. Barhopping had seldom been the excursion of choice.

  Tonight, a continent and several light-years removed from such circumstances, she nursed an overly strong margarita, while up on the stage a couple of drunken women with big hair and smeared makeup stumbled through that old Kenny Rogers standby, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.” The fake redhead was a receptionist named Sheila, and her blonde partner, Delores, a vice president of human resources. Both of them worked at Merrill’s literary magazine and they were partying off their second and third divorces respectively.