Occultation and Other Stories

by Laird Barron

  “Now I really, really want to go camping,” Glenn said. “The turn should be on the right. Another three miles or so.” Victor screamed and I almost swerved the Land Rover into the ditch. Considering the size of the trees, we would’ve likely been squashed like a can of soup under a steamroller. Glenn and Dane yelled at Victor for almost making them pee their pants. I didn’t say anything; I glimpsed his expression in the rearview. His eyes were shiny as quarters in Glenn’s flashlight beam.

  “Dude, what was that?” Dane said. “Willem almost hit a deer? Spider climb into your shorts? What?”

  “Sorry, guys. I looked back to the storage compartment and something moved.”

  “WTF? One of those Native American bogeymen of Willem’s? It have red eyes?”

  “Yeah. Bright red as the Devil. That’s why I yelled.”

  “You didn’t yell, you screamed.”

  “Because a black form moved in the back of the truck and its eyes glowed. Course I screamed. Diabolical Disney cartoon shit going down, I’m giving a shout out. Just Glenn’s coat, though. Headlight’s reflected off the mile marker must’ve lit up the tape on the sleeves.”

  “Glad that’s solved and we aren’t parked inside one of these ginormous cedars.”

  I almost pulled over and asked Glenn to drive. Victor’s cry had shaken me and the mist was screwing with my vision, because as I considered Victor’s explanation, shadows slipped among the shrubbery a few yards ahead. Smaller than deer, and lower to the ground. I counted three of these jittery, fast-moving shapes before they melted into the greater darkness. Coyotes? Dogs? My febrile imagination powered by dopamine, a fistful of Ibuprofen, and God knew how many beers? The heavy, ponderous vehicle seemed fragile now, and I imagined how it must appear from above—a lonely speck trundling through an immense forest. Mild vertigo hit me and the vehicle swayed just enough to cause an intake of breath from Glenn. I clamped my jaw and rallied.

  Thick branches obscured the Mystery Mountain Campground signpost, but I saw it in time and braked hard and swung into a gravel lane. I proceeded a hundred yards to the darkened ranger shack. A carved wooden sign read CAMPGROUND FULL. A few lights glimmered through the trees. A Winnebago was the closest vehicle. Its occupants, a family of four dressed in identical bright orange shirts, clustered around a meager fire roasting hotdogs. “Argh—we forgot the bloody marshmallows,” Victor said.

  “Maybe it’s for the best there’s no room at the inn,” Glenn said. “The rangers might be on the lookout for us too.” Victor said, “Aw, who cares. What now?”

  The road forked: the paved section veered to the right and into the campground. The leftward path was unpaved and led into the boonies. If the Black Guide was accurate, this was the southern terminus of a logging road network that crisscrossed the mountains. The Kalamov Dolmen lay at the end of a footpath a few miles ahead. I said, “Two-thirds of a tank. I say we cruise up the trail and find a place to bivouac.” The others agreed and I eased the rig along the washboard lane. It climbed and climbed. Brush closed in tight and lashed the windows.

  A hillside rose steeply to my left. The hillside was covered in uprooted trees and rocks and boulders. A few of the rocks had tumbled loose and lay scattered in the path. I picked my way through them; some were the size of bowling balls. Victor and Glenn warned me to hug the left-hand side of the road as they were looking at a precipitous drop. I glanced over at the tops of trees below us, a phantom picket floating in an abyss. Erosion and debris narrowed the lane until the Land Rover had perhaps a foot to spare between its wheels and the cliff. I halted and shut off the engine and engaged the parking brake. I asked Victor to get my rucksack from behind his seat and hand me the humidor in the belly pouch.

  “Oh, snap,” Victor said. “Honduran?”

  “Nicaraguan,” I said. “Be a love and snip one for me. Glenn, that bottle of scotch still in the glove box?” He knew better than to say a word. He rummaged through the compartment, retrieved the quarter bottle of Laphroaig and popped the cap. I had a slug of whiskey, then accepted the cigar from Victor and got it burning with Victor’s lighter. The sweet, harsh taste filled my mouth and lungs, sent a rush of energy through me. I exhaled and watched the smoke curl against the windshield. Nobody spoke. The only sound was the tick of cooling metal and Dane’s wet breathing. “I saved these for a special occasion. A wedding, a funeral, a conjugal visit. But, hell…no better time for scotch and cigars than right before you roll your rusted-out Land Rover over a two-hundred-foot cliff. You boys help yourselves.” Glenn and Victor lighted cigars. Dane said no thanks and held the towel to his face again. He said, “You up to this, Willem?” Glenn said, “He’s got it handled. He drove transports in the Army.”

  “Oh. I didn’t realize you’d been in the military,” Dane said. “Thanks a lot, Glenn.” Glenn shrugged. “He doesn’t like to spread it around. So I don’t.”

  “Hell, man. Thanks for all you guys do.” Dane roused himself and leaned over and patted my shoulder. “Were you in Iraq?”

  “Yugoslavia. They stationed me in Kosovo for a year. And no, I didn’t shoot anybody. I drove transports.” We sat like that for a while. Finally, I drained the scotch and threw the bottle on the floorboard at Glenn’s feet. I turned the key and pegged it.

  10.

  Eventually the grade leveled and swung away from the cliff. I parked in the middle of the road near a stand of fir trees. We pitched the tent by headlight beam, unrolled our sleeping bags, and collapsed. “Wait,” Glenn said. “We need to make a bargain.” He sounded strange, but it’d been a strange day. My heart beat faster. Dane and Victor kept quiet and that chilled me somehow, lending weight to the word bargain. These guys knew from bargains, didn’t they? Glenn said, “Look, after what happened in town…maybe we’ll get lucky and nobody will press charges. But, wow, Dane. You might’ve ruined a couple of those guys.”

  “I hope I smashed their guts out.”

  “Be serious.” The edge in Glenn’s voice surprised me. I wished I could see his face. “I’m not asking for anything heavy. Let’s just promise to see this through, okay? Will, I’m so proud of you. We were going to tuck our tales and go yipping home. Thanks for showing grit. The plan was to camp out a couple of nights and see the dolmen. That’s what we should do. Tommy would approve.” The mention of dead Tom gave me the creeps and it reminded me how hurt I was that Glenn still hadn’t confided the truth to me. Mostly, though, it gave me the creeps. Dane and Victor muttered acquiescence to Glenn’s rather nebulous charge and we did the hand over hand thing, like a sports team. It was all awkward and phony, yet deadly serious in a Boy Scout way, and I squirmed and went along. Right before we fell asleep, I pulled him close and murmured, “We’re going to talk about the gun when we get home.” He kissed me, and put his cheek against my chest.

  I dreamt horror-show dreams and woke panicked, Glenn mumbling into my ear, sunlight blazing through the mesh of the tent flap. I crawled outside and vomited. My skull felt as if a football team had taken turns stomping it with cleats. I couldn’t make a fist with my left hand. From wrist to elbow, my arm was puffed like a black and purple sausage. The possibility I might have a hairline fracture further soured my mood.

  “Man alive, I thought a bear was ralphing in the blueberry bushes,” Dane said. His face resembled a bowl of mashed potatoes with the skins still on. He hunched on a log near the cold fire pit. The end of the log was charred to a point. I started to laugh and puked again. I worried my nausea might be due to a cerebral hematoma rather than a hangover, but it was pointless to follow that line of thought. Until I could find a loop, intersection, or wide spot in the road, we were committed to this rustic interlude of the vacation. No way was I man enough to back the truck down to the campground.

  Glenn and Victor emerged from the lair. Glenn didn’t look nearly as bad as Dane, but his black eye was impressive and he limped and complained about pissing blood. Dane told him pissing blood was a rite of passage (then corrected it as “pissage” to some eff
ect). I broke out the propane camp stove and boiled water for coffee and instant oatmeal. Dane poured two fingers of Schnapps from his hip flask over his oatmeal and I almost barfed again. He grinned at us, and I saw that yes, indeed, he’d lost a tooth during the skirmish. His lip was fat and blistered and Victor tenderly dabbed it with a napkin as they huddled together and shared a mug of coffee.

  Glenn spread the Triple-A roadmap of Washington State on the ground and weighed down the corners with rocks. “We’re in this general vicinity.” He poked the map with a dead stick. “Unfortunately, the area is represented as a green blob. No roads, nothing. Green blobbiness, and more green blobbiness. Willem?”

  I fetched the Black Guide and opened it to the relevant entry which was accompanied by a rude sketch not unlike the Hollywood-popularized treasure maps, and cryptic directions such as—Left at ravine and Keep north of Devil Tower. ’Ware crevasse. Leech. “The dolmen is about twelve miles yonder. I propose we pull stakes and ease along a bit. Got to find a spot to turn this beast around.” I indicated the Land Rover. “Good grief,” Glenn said. “I didn’t realize how far seventeen miles was when we were sitting around the bar back in Seattle.” Dane said, “I’m with Willem—let’s see what’s over the next hill, so to speak. As for that dolmen, the more I think on it, the more I think we’ve been had. There aren’t any goddamned dolmens in this part of the world. I ought a know, Eric The Red being kin and such.”

  “This whole expedition is your idea!” Victor swatted his shoulder. “There better be a ‘dolmen’ or I’m kicking your ass back down this mountain.”

  “Yo, man. Don’t get so excited. I said dolmen, not Dolemite.”

  Breaking camp proved twice the job as setting it up because everyone was hurting from the previous evening’s brutality—we hobbled like old men and it was noon before we got packed and moving. Glenn took over at the wheel while I navigated. With my arm injury, I couldn’t be trusted to keep the rig out of the ditch. The road continued along the mountainside, wending its way through a series of valleys. Our path intersected a handful of decrepit logging roads. There were occasional fields where forest had been leveled to stumps and roots, but nothing more recent than a decade or two. “Who comes out here if not loggers?” Victor said. I said, “Mountain bikers. Hikers. Doper growers. Game wardens and surveyors. The state keeps tabs, I’m sure. The timber companies will be back with chainsaws buzzing sooner or later.”

  “Think anybody owns land, a house? Y’know, regular people.”

  The Land Rover hit a pothole and I almost flew through the windshield. “Nah,” I said. “Imagine what this will be like when it rains in September. A man would need mules to get around.” The ravines were steep and rugged with exposed rock and descended into cool, fuzzy shadows that never quite melted even during this, the hottest span of summer. Ridgelines hemmed the winding road, topped by evergreens and redwoods. Rabbits shot across our path. Far below in the vast crease of the landscape was the highway and civilization, obscured by a shifting blue haze. A hawk glided in the breeze.

  As the afternoon light reddened near the horizon, we arrived at a T-intersection. There was a convenient site bracketed by several trees and a picturesque scatter of boulders, a couple the approximate height and girth of the Land Rover, and it reminded me of a scene from a western film where the cowboys sit around a cozy fire in the badlands, eating beans and drinking coffee from tin cups. If the guide was to be trusted, a semi-hidden footpath to the dolmen lay about a quarter of a mile down the southerly wending road. From there the anonymous author claimed it to be an hour’s hike to the dolmen.

  Once the tent was pitched we took stock of our supplies and determined that between trail mix, canned hash, chili, and fruit cocktail, three five-gallon Jerry cans of water, and a case of beer, the situation was golden for another night, and possibly two should the next day’s expedition prove too exhausting. Dane and Glenn took a hatchet into the woods and chopped several armloads of firewood while Victor dug a shallow pit and lined it with stones. I munched aspirin and supervised. Glenn had made me sling from a shirt. I wore it to be on the safe side, and because it reduced the pain in my arm to the category of a toothache.

  Night crept over the wilderness and the temperature cooled rapidly. Dane lighted a roaring bonfire and boiled a pot of chili and we washed that down with the better part of the case of beer. After supper, Glenn unpacked a teapot and mugs and fixed us instant cocoa. We sipped cocoa while Victor played a harmonica he’d bought in Seattle for the occasion.

  “Dear God, not the harmonica,” Dane said, and spat a gob of blood into the fire. His nose was definitely broken. He’d crunched it back into joint himself, much to my horror—at which Glenn and Victor snickered and mocked my squeamishness. Evidently, they’d seen this show many a time during their debauched college adventures.

  Glenn fiddled with the transistor radio until he dialed in a grainy, but reasonably clear signal—a canned programming station playing big band music from the 1930s and ’40s. Victor rolled his eyes and tossed the harmonica through the open window of the truck. He rolled a couple of joints and we passed them around. Talk turned to the macabre and I entertained them with Baba Yaga legends I’d heard around similar campfires while stationed in Eastern Europe; then Glenn and Dane discussed their favorite horror movies, most of which I knew by heart, and I nodded off, lulled by their easy laughter, the warmth of the fire.

  Victor said something about “doorways” and I snapped awake, but missed the rest as he and the others were speaking softly. He said, “It’s only a coincidence.” Dane said, “Come on, dude. Don’t even start down that road—” I cleared my throat. “What road?” Victor said, “The road not taken, of course. I need to shake hands with the Governor—ta, ta, my lovelies!” He rose and walked into the shadows. “That’s a wrap—I’m for bed,” Glenn said, and he kissed me and headed for the tent. Dane stared into the flames and the red light bathed his ravaged face, and he glanced at me as if about to speak. He smiled, a sad, pained smile, and followed Glenn.

  Victor returned, zipping his fly. “C’mere, pull up a rock.” I patted the log I was sitting on. He settled next to me, his posture stiff as a plank. Soon, Dane’s snores drifted from the tent and Victor’s shoulders relaxed. He tossed some dead leaves and twigs onto the fire, and said quietly, “What’s on your mind, Will, old bean?” He was high as a kite.

  “Not much. The book. Weird, weird thing happened to me before we left on the trip.” I told him, as I had Glenn, about Tom’s visitation, except I didn’t pull any punches. As I spoke, Victor’s expression became increasingly unhappy. He fumbled in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes and lighted one with apparent difficulty. He offered me a drag. I declined and said, “Glenn didn’t tell you, huh? I sort of figured he would’ve.”

  “This explains a lot. No wonder he’s treated me like I’m loony tunes for… He prefers to pretend we weren’t a pack of superstitious nerds in college. Dane follows his lead. It’s a survival tool. The front office in Denver sucks—they don’t even know Dane is gay. And the hoodoo aspect—that shit ain’t cool now that we’re grownups. Getting your face punched like a speed bag is trendy; crystal meditation and The Golden Bough reading circle is for wackos. I mention anything along those lines, Dane gives me the stink eye and Glenn changes subjects like he’s a senator putting the moves on the press corps. Why are we talking about it?”

  “Because I can tell you want to. You aren’t the kind of guy to keep deep, dark secrets.”

  “The thing with Tommy isn’t really a deep, dark secret. A minor scandal. I had a bed-wetter type dream about him the other night. Neither of the other bozos dream about him, which seems unfair. But whatever, man. I couldn’t stand him and you didn’t even know him, yet we’re the schleps who’ve got him on the brain.”

  “Seems rather simple to me,” I said. “He’s obviously haunting you from beyond the grave. You stole Dane away, then he got killed in a tragic manner that trapped his soul on the material pl
ane.”

  “Oh, yeah? He didn’t care for Dane like that. Well, fuck, maybe he did. Tommy loved to hump and he didn’t seem too picky regarding with whom. What’s he messing with you for?”

  “He’s not messing with either of us. I was checking your credulity.”

  “You got me, Tex. I’m a credulous motherfucker these days. Our boys are goddamned credulous too, if you could get them to cop to it. You’re a devious one. Funny, you and Glenn getting together. He’s such a rube.” I chuckled. “Yeah, yeah, Glenn is as pure as the driven snow. Plus, unlike us his family was damned progressive. A well-adjusted man’s one of my turn-ons.”

  “That’s the attraction?”

  “He reads. He can be a devil. I like that a whole lot.”

  “He’s hot and makes a heap of money.”

  “Goodness, Vicky, you’re a real bitch when you want.” I didn’t mean anything by that, however. His bluntness was sweet in its own way.

  The fire burned low. Victor stood and stretched. “I was raised Pentecostal. Got any idea what that’s like? I saw a few things you wouldn’t believe. My daddy was a snake-handlin’, babblin’ in tongues psycho-sonofabitch, let me tell you what. I’ve no problem with the plausibility of the fundamentally implausible after witnessing my daddy and two uncles cast ‘demons’ from my cousin one sultry, backwoods night. I can’t say I’m religious, but I surely do believe we aren’t alone on this mortal coil. There are frightful things lurking in the shadows.”