Occultation and Other Stories

by Laird Barron

May 6, 2006

  (D. L. Session 33)

  —Danni, do you read the newspapers? Watch the news? Dr. Green said this carefully, giving weight to the question.

  —Sure, sometimes.

  —The police recovered her body months ago. He removed a newspaper clipping from the folder and pushed it toward her.

  —Who? Danni did not look at the clipping.

  —Leslie Runyon. An anonymous tip led the police to a landfill. She’d been wrapped in a tarp and buried in a heap of trash. Death by suffocation, according to the coroner. You really don’t remember.

  Danni shook her head. —No. I haven’t heard anything like that.

  —Do you think I’m lying?

  —Do you think I’m a paranoid delusional?

  —Keep talking and I’ll get back to you on that, he said, and smiled. —What happened at the vineyard, Danni? When they found you, you were quite a mess, according to the reports.

  —Yeah. Quite a mess, Danni said. She closed her eyes and fell back into herself, fell down the black mineshaft into the memory of the garden, the Lagerstätte.

  Virgil waited to embrace her.

  Only a graveyard, an open charnel, contained so much death. The rubble and masonry were actually layers of bones; a reef of calcified skeletons locked in heaps; and mummified corpses; enough withered faces to fill the backs of a thousand milk cartons, frozen twigs of arms and legs wrapped about their eternal partners. These masses of ossified humanity were cloaked in skeins of moss and hair and rotted leaves.

  Norma beckoned from the territory of waking dreams. She stood upon the precipice of a rooftop. She said, Welcome to the Lagerstätte. Welcome to the secret graveyard of the despairing and the damned. She spread her arms and pitched backward.

  Danni moaned and hugged her fist wrapped in its sopping rags. She had come unwitting, although utterly complicit in her devotion, and now stood before a terrible mystery of the world. Her knees trembled and folded.

  Virgil shuttered rapidly and shifted within arm’s reach. He smelled of aftershave and clove, the old, poignantly familiar scents. He also smelled of earthiness and mold, and his face began to destabilize, to buckle as packed dirt buckles under a deluge and becomes mud.

  Come and sleep, he said in the rasp of leaves and dripping water. His hands bit into her shoulders and slowly, inexorably drew her against him. His chest was icy as the void, his hands and arms iron as they tightened around her and laid her down in the muck and the slime. His lips closed over hers. His tongue was pliant and fibrous and she thought of the stinking, brown rot that carpeted the deep forests. Other hands plucked at her clothes, her hair; other mouths suckled her neck, her breasts, and she thought of misshapen fungi and scurrying centipedes, the ever scrabbling ants, and how all things that squirmed in the sunless interstices crept and patiently fed.

  Danni went blind, but images streamed through the snarling wires of her consciousness. Virgil and Keith rocked in the swing on the porch of their New England home. They’d just finished playing catch in the backyard; Keith still wore his Red Sox jersey, and Virgil rolled a baseball in his fingers. The stars brightened in the lowering sky and the streetlights fizzed on, one by one. Her mother stood knee-deep in the surf, apron strings flapping in a rising wind. She held out her hands. Keith, pink and wrinkled, screamed in Danni’s arms, his umbilical cord still wet. Virgil pressed his hand to a wall of glass. He mouthed, I love you, honey.

  I love you, Mommy, Keith said, his wizened infant’s face tilted toward her own. Her father carefully laid out his clothes, his police uniform of twenty-six years, and climbed into the bathtub. We love you, girlie, Dad said, and stuck the barrel of his service revolver into his mouth. Oh, quitting had run in the family, was a genetic certainty given the proper set of circumstances. Mom had drowned herself in the sea, such was her grief. Her brother, he’d managed to kill himself in a police action in some foreign desert. This gravitation to self-destruction was ineluctable as her blood.

  Danni thrashed upright. Dank mud sucked at her, plastered her hair and drooled from her mouth and nose. She choked for breath, hands clawing at an assailant who had vanished into the mist creeping upon the surface of the marsh. Her fingernails raked and broke against the glaciated cheek of a vaguely female corpse; a stranger made wholly inhuman by the slow, steady vise of gravity and time. Danni groaned. Somewhere, a whippoorwill began to sing.

  Voices called for her through the trees; shrill and hoarse. Their shouts echoed weakly, as if from the depths of a well. These were unmistakably the voices of the living. Danni’s heart thudded, galvanized by the adrenal response to her near-death experience, and, more subtly, an inchoate sense of guilt, as if she’d done something unutterably foul. She scrambled to her feet and fled.

  Oily night flooded the forest. A boy cried, Mommy, mommy! Amid the plaintive notes of the whippoorwill. Danni floundered from the garden, scourged by terror and no small regret. By the time she found her way in the dark, came stumbling into the circle of rescue searchers and their flashlights, Danni had mostly forgotten where she’d come from or what she’d been doing there.

  Danni opened her eyes to the hospital, the dour room, Dr. Green’s implacable curiosity.

  She said, —Can we leave it for now? Just for now. I’m tired. You have no idea.

  Dr. Green removed his glasses. His eyes were bloodshot and hard, but human after all. —Danni, you’re going to be fine, he said.

  —Am I?

  —Miles to go before we sleep, and all that jazz. But yes, I believe so. You want to open up, and that’s very good. It’s progress.

  Danni smoked.

  —Next week we can discuss further treatment options. There are several medicines we haven’t looked at; maybe we can get you a dog. I know you live in an apartment, but service animals have been known to work miracles. Go home and get some rest. That’s the best therapy I can recommend.

  Danni inhaled the last of her cigarette and held the remnants of fire close to her heart. She ground the butt into the ashtray. She exhaled a stream of smoke and wondered if her soul, the souls of her beloved, looked anything like that. Uncertain of what to say, she said nothing. The wheels of the recorder stopped.

  Mysterium Tremendum

  1.

  We bought supplies for our road trip at an obscure general goods store in Seattle—a multi-generational emporium where you could purchase anything from space-age tents to snowshoes once worn by Antarctic explorers. That’s where we came across the guidebook.

  Glenn found it on a low shelf in the rear of the shop, wedged between antique souvenir license plates and an out of print Jenkins’ Field Guide to Birds of Puget Sound. Fate is a strange and wondrous force—the aisles were dim and narrow and a large, elderly couple in muumuus was browsing the very shelf and it was time for us to go, but as I opened my mouth to suggest we head for the bar down the street, one of them, the man I think, bumped a rack of postcards and several items splatted on the floor. The man didn’t glance back as he walked away.

  Glenn despised that sort of rudeness, although he contented himself to mutter and replace the fallen cards. So we poked at the shelves and there it was. He brushed off the cover, gave it a look, then passed it around to Victor, Dane, and myself. The book shone in the dusty gloom of that aisle, and it radiated an aura of antiquity and otherworldliness, like a blackened bone unearthed from the Burgess Shale. The book was pocket-sized and bound in dark leather. An embossment of a broken red ring was the only cover art. Its interior pages were of thin, brown paper crammed with articles and essays and route directions typed in a small, blurry font that gave you a migraine if you stared at it too long. The table of contents divided Washington State into regions and documented, in exhaustive detail, areas of interest to the prospective tourist. A series of appendices provided illustrations and reproductions of hand-drawn maps. The original copyright was 1909, and this seventh edition had been printed in 1986. On the title page: attributed to Divers Hands and no publisher; entitled Mod
eror de Caliginis.

  “Moderor de Caliginis!” Victor said in a flawless imitation of Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness. He punctuated each syllable with a stabbing flourish—a magician conjuring a rabbit, or vanishing his nubile assistant. Dane tilted his head so his temple touched Victor’s. “But what does it mean?” he said in the stentorian tone of a 1950s broadcaster reporting a saucer landing. He’d done a bit of radio in college. “I flunked Latin,” Glenn said, running his thumb across the book’s spine. His expression was peculiar.

  The proprietor didn’t know anything either. He pawed through a stack of manifests without locating an entry or price for the book. He sold it to Glenn for five dollars. We took it home (along with two of the fancy tents) and I stuck it in the top drawer of my nightstand. Those crinkly, musty pages, their water stains and blemishes, fascinated me. The book smelled as if it had been fished from a stagnant well and left to dry on a rock. Its ambiguous pedigree and nebulous diction hinted at mysteries and wonders. I was the one who translated the title. Moderor de Caliginis means The Black Guide. Or close enough.

  2.

  I’d lived with Glenn for five years in a hilly Magnolia neighborhood. Our house was a brick two story built in the 1930s and lovingly restored by the previous owner. The street was quiet and crowded by huge, spreading shade trees. There was a sheer stone staircase walkup from the curb and a good-sized yard bordered by a wrought-iron fence and dense shrubbery. Glenn was junior partner at a software development firm that hadn’t quite been obliterated by the dot-com implosion. His office was a nook across from the kitchen with a view of the garden and moldering greenhouse. I wrote articles for the culture sections of several newspapers and did freelance appraisals for galleries and estates. Glenn got a kick out of showing my column photo around—I wore my hair shaggy, with thick sideburns and a thicker mustache, and everybody thought I looked like a 1970s pimp or an undercover vice cop. I moonlighted as an instructor at a dojo in the University District. We taught little old ladies to poke muggers and rapists in the eyes with car keys and hat pins. Good times.

  Dane and Victor flew in from Denver for the long-planned and plotted sojourn through the hills and dales of our fair state. The plan included them spending a week or so doing the tourist bit in town before we lit out into the wilds. I knew the fellows through Glenn who’d attended college with them. Dane managed telecommunications and advertising for the Denver Broncos. A rugged blond with a flattened nose and cauliflower ears from amateur boxing matches and tavern brawls. His partner Victor was stocky and bald and decidedly non-violent. He’d inherited a small fortune from his parents and devoted his time to editing an online poetry journal of repute. The journal was once mentioned by then U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins in his weekly column. Victor was a Charles Simic and Mark Strand man and I liked him from the start. Glenn referred to them as Ebony and Ivory on account of Victor’s resemblance to a young Stevie Wonder and Dane’s being as white as a bar of soap.

  We threw a party and invited a few friends from Glenn’s company and some writer and photographer colleagues of mine. Glenn barbequed steak on the back porch. I mixed a bunch of margaritas in pitchers and after dinner we sat around drinking as the sky darkened and the stars came out.

  The big news was Dane and Victor had gotten hitched in California before Proposition Eight overturned the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. This was a year and a half gone by, so their visit was part vacation and part honeymoon. I confess to a flash of jealousy at the matching rings, the wallet of sepia tone wedding photos and the sea of family and friends in those photos. The permanence of their relationship galled me and I loathed myself for it. Glenn hadn’t proposed and I was too stubborn, too afraid of rejection to propose to him. I slipped away while everybody was laughing about the wedding hijinks.

  Glenn sauntered in as I was rinsing the dishes and put his arm around me and kissed my cheek. He was tall and lanky and had to lean over to do it. I’d drunk four or five margaritas in the meantime and my eyes were watery and doubtless red. He was oblivious, not that I held it against him. Glenn could be tender and thoughtful and wasn’t so much indifferent as clueless. Despite his interest in classical music, literature and art, and a possibly less wholesome, but no less cerebral, fascination with the esoteric and the occult, he didn’t like to think very deeply about certain things. His father was dead; a career railroad man, second generation Irish, he dropped in his traces from a heart attack when Glenn was fifteen. Glenn’s parents had known he was gay since grade school and they accepted him. Everything came easy. He cheerfully took what we had for granted as he took everything else for granted. The guy read books and worked with strings of code, for Christ’s sake. Truly a miracle he possessed any social graces whatsoever.

  As for me, my father had been a white boy from the Bronx who served thirty years in the Army, the last decade of it as a colonel. My mother was a former Brazilian teen-queen bathing beauty who married Dad to get the hell out of her hometown. Dad passed away in his sleep from an overdose of pills a few weeks before I met Glenn. I sometimes wondered if it’d been accidental, or closer to the protagonist’s opt-out in that famous little novel by Graham Greene. Mom pretended I’d court a fine young lady one day soon and sire a brood of kids. My three brothers were scattered across the world. The eldest kept in touch from India. Otherwise, I received birthday cards, the odd phone call or email, and that was that. Glenn kissed me again—hard and on the mouth, and he tasted sweetly of booze. I wiped my eyes and grinned and let it ago like I always did.

  Gnats and mosquitoes descended. The guests retreated to the living room. Glenn put on music and began serving another round of drinks from the wet bar. I fetched Moderor de Caliginis and took it to my office. An examination of the book revealed phone numbers and mailing addresses amidst the other text, although considering the edition’s publishing date, I assumed most were dead ends. In tiny print on the copyright page was a line that read SUBMISSIONS with a P.O. Box address in Walla Walla.

  Meanwhile, the party was in full gear. Between songs, raucous laughter floated to me. My CDs—Glenn preferred classical music; Beethoven, Chopin, Gershwin, Sibelius. That wouldn’t do at our casual get-togethers. Somebody sang along to the choruses of Neil Sedaka, Miles Davis, and Linda Ronstadt, a step behind and off-key. Daulton, our grizzled tomcat, jumped onto the easy chair near my desk and went to sleep. Old Daulton was a comforting soul.

  I hunched over my computer monitor and ran searches of key phrases from the book. A guy in Germany claimed there were numerous versions of the Black Guide—he’d acquired editions for regions in France, Spain, Portugal, and South Africa. A college student in Pullman wrote of a friend of a friend who’d used the book to explore caves in Yakima. That struck me as odd—I wasn’t familiar with any notable caves in Washington. Another man, an anthropologist named Berman, explained that several of the entries provided contact information for practitioners of the occult. During the late 1990s he’d visited some of these persons and joined them in séances, divinations, and fertility rituals. He was currently a professor at Central Washington University. On a lark, I sent him an email, noting I’d inherited a copy of the guide.

  The most interesting item I retrieved during my three lonely hours at the keyboard was the journal of an individual from Ellensburg who went by the handle of Rose. Rose started her journal in April 2007. There were three entries—the first talked about not really wanting a journal at all, but keeping one on the advice of her therapist. The second was a twenty-five-hundred-word essay on her travels abroad and eventually finding the Black Guide at a gift shop in Ellensburg. Apparently Rose had sought the book for several years and was elated. The guide contained a listing of secret attractions, hidden places, and persons “in the know” regarding matters esoteric and arcane. In the final entry, she mentioned packing for a trip with three friends to the “tomb” on the Olympic Peninsula and would make a full report upon her return. The journal hadn’t been updated since June 2007. Nonetheless,
I left an anonymous message inquiring after her status. This satisfied me in a perverse way—it felt as if I’d thrown her a lifeline.

  I signed off around three a.m. Glenn was already in bed and snoring. I lay beside him and stared at the pale reflection of streetlights on the ceiling. Who was Rose? Young, pretty, wounded. Or, maybe not. The kind of girl who took pictures of herself in period costumes. Pale, thick mascara, in her rhinestone purse a deck of tarot cards she’d inherited from an older woman, a long lost sweetheart. Rose was a girl with many friends and lovers, yet who was usually alone. I pressed the Black Guide against the breast of my pajamas and wondered where she was at that moment. I dreamed of her that night, but in the morning all I remembered was flying above an endless forest and the rocky bluff of a small mountain, and into a cave that swallowed me whole.

  3.

  “C’mon. Tell Willem a Tommy story.” Glenn wore a loopy smirk. He’d done one too many shots of Cuervo. “Oh, yes!” Victor pounded his empty glass on the table. “Okay, okay. Here’s one about Thomas-san,” Dane said. His hair was tousled, his cheeks were flushed. He eyed me with an intensity that indicated such a story symbolized a great confidence, that I was on the verge of admittance to the inner circle.

  This was in the early evening after hiking up and down Queen Anne Hill since breakfast, peeking into shops, trying the innumerable bistros and pubs on for size, and yelling raucous comments at the construction boys ripping apart the sidewalk in front of the Phoenician Theatre. Now we were just off campus at a corner booth in a dimly lighted hole-in-the-wall called The Angry Norseman. We’d drunk with the vigor of sailors on shore leave the entire day and were almost sober again. A gaggle of college students in University of Washington sweatshirts congregated at the bar and overflowed the tables. It was getting rowdy.

  “Who the hell is Tommy?” I said.