Occultation and Other Stories

by Laird Barron

  I remembered the woman’s voice whispering in the dark—There are frightful things. I got goose bumps. He said, “Something else I didn’t mention when I told you about the dreams I had of Tommy. I think I pushed it down into my subconscious. Whenever I first see him, for a split second he’s somebody else. He covers his face with his hands, as if he’s rubbing his eyes, or sobbing, and when he looks up, it’s him, smiling this evil little smile. Once in a while, he ducks his head and pantomimes pulling on a ski mask. Same thing—it’s him again. The act bothers the fuck outta me. Anyway. Goodnight.”

  Shadows from the dying fire capered against the trunks of the trees and the boulders nearby. The goose bumps returned and I recognized the nauseated thrill in my stomach as a reaction to being watched. This sense of being observed was powerful and I became conscious again of our frailty, the dim sliver of firelight, the flimsy shelter of the tent, our insignificance. I massaged my aching forearm. Farther out, branches crashed and grew still.

  A few minutes passed as I listened to the night. Weariness overcame my nerves. I decided to make for the tent and as I rose, a large, dark shape emerged from the brush and moved onto the road about seventy feet away. There was sufficient starlight to discern its bulky outline, a patch of thicker blackness against the blurry backdrop, but not enough to identify individual features. It had to be a bear, and so I’m sure my brain gave it a bearlike shape. Bears didn’t particularly frighten me—I’d gone hunting on occasion as a teen and hiked plenty since. Bears, cougars, moose; critters could be reliably expected to live and let live. This encounter, however, alarmed me. Had the cooking smells drawn it in? Glenn’s gun lay snug in my pocket since the brawl, but that didn’t comfort me—it was a .25 automatic with no stopping power; more likely to infuriate a bear than kill it.

  The animal stood in the center of the road and there was no mistaking it was staring at me. Then another shape appeared near the first and that caused my balls to tighten. The second animal rose directly from the road, as if the shadows had coalesced into solid form, and as it materialized I noted that even obscured by darkness, it didn’t resemble any bear I’d ever seen. The beast was too lean, too angular; the neck and forelegs were abnormally long, and its skull lopsided and cumbersome. I pulled the automatic and chambered a round. I considered calling to my companions, but hesitated because of the impression this entire situation was balanced on the edge of some terrible consequence and any precipitous action on my part would initiate the chain reaction.

  There are terrible things.

  A cloud rolled across the stars and as the darkness thickened, the animals moved in an unnatural, sideways fashion, an undulation at odds with their bulk, and vanished. Symbols of warning conjured from night mist and shadows; ill omens dispensed, they drained back into the earth. I half-crouched, gun in my fist, until my legs cramped. A scream echoed far off from one of the hidden gulches, and I almost blew a hole in my foot. It took me a long while to convince myself it had been the cry of a bear or a wildcat and not a human.

  By then it was dawn.

  11.

  During breakfast I relayed my encounter with the mystery animals, floating the idea that perhaps we should skip the hike. “Wow, a couple of bears outside? Why didn’t you get us up? I would’ve loved to see that.” Victor seemed truly disappointed while Dane and Glenn dismissed my concerns that we might run afoul of them during the day. Dane said, “We’ll just let Vicky run his yapper while we walk. Bears will hear that a mile away and beat it for the hills.”

  “Gonna be hotter than the hobs of Hades,” Glenn said after shrugging on his backpack. “What the hell are hobs?” Dane said. “Hubs, farm boy,” Glenn said. “Don’t neglect your canteens, fellow campers. Put on some sunscreen. Bring extra socks.”

  “How far we going? The Andes?”

  “It’s a surprise. Let’s move out.”

  I took the lead, Moderor de Caliginis in hand. The sky shone a hard, brilliant blue and I already sweated from the rising heat. Fortunately, half the road lay in shadow and we kept to that. I felt rather absurd trudging along like a pith-helmeted explorer in a black and white pulp film, novelty almanac map clutched in a death grip—Dane and Glenn even carried the requisite hatchets and machetes.

  Despite my morbid curiosity, it would’ve relieved me if the book had proved inaccurate, if we’d tromped for an hour or two until my comrades grew hot and irritable and voted to call it a trip and bolt for civilization. The beating I’d received in Sequim had taken its toll and I just wanted to face the music, to deal with any legal repercussions of the battle royal and then soak in the hot tub for a month.

  But, there it was behind a screen of bushes and rocks—the path, little more than a deer trail, angled away from the road and climbed through a ravine overgrown with brush and ferns. There weren’t any trail markers, nor recent footprints. We picked our way over mossy stones and deadfalls, pausing frequently to sip from our canteens and for Dane and Victor to share a cigarette. Victor unlimbered his camera and snapped numerous pictures. Walking was slightly difficult with the sling throwing off my balance. Glenn stayed close, taking my elbow whenever I stumbled.

  We pressed onward and upward, past a dozen points where the game trail forked and I would’ve lost the way if not for the landmarks detailed in the guide entry and by the subtle blazes the author had slashed into the bark of trees along the way. I whistled under my breath. My companions were silent but for the occasional grunt or curse. A similar hush had fallen over the woods.

  We rounded a bend and came to a spot where the trail forked yet again, except this time both paths were wider and recently trod by boots. Glenn spotted the ruins a second before I did and just after Dane wondered aloud if we’d gotten lost and pegged me in the back with a pinecone. “Everybody, hold on!” Glenn kept his voice low and pointed along the secondary path where it passed through a notch in the trees. I swept the area with binoculars. There was a clearing beyond the screen of trees, and piles of burned logs, like a palisade had ignited into an inferno. Further in, discrete piles of charcoal debris glittered with bits of melted glass. This appeared to be the old ruins of an encampment, or a village. I could imagine a mob of men in tri-corner hats loitering about, priming their muskets.

  “This is weird,” Victor said. “You guys think this is weird?” I said, “In my opinion this qualifies as weird. Also highly unsettling.”

  “Unsettling?” Dane said. Victor said, “Well duh. Don’t know about you, but I’m picking up a creepy vibe. I dare you to walk down there and see if anybody’s around.”

  “There’s nothing left,” Dane said. Victor said, “That path didn’t make itself. Somebody uses it. Like I said, walk your sweet little butt down there and take a gander.”

  “Not a chance,” Dane said, and briefly mimed plucking strings as he hummed “Dueling Banjos.”

  Glenn took the binoculars and walked uphill to get a better vantage. He slowly lowered the glasses and held them toward me. “Will...” I joined him and scanned where he pointed. Offset from the main ruins, a canted stone tower rose four or so stories. The tower was scorched and blackened and draped in moss and creepers, on a slight rise and surrounded by the remnants of a fieldstone wall. Window slots were bricked over and it was surmounted by a crenellated parapet. “Anything about this in the guide?” he said. I told him about the Devil Tower notation. “I thought the entry referred to a rock formation, or a dead tree. Not a real live fucking tower.”

  “Something strange about that thing,” Dane said. “Besides the fact it’s the completely wrong continent and time period for a medieval piece of architecture, and that said architecture is sitting on the side of a mountain in the Pacific Northwest, miles from any human habitation?” Victor said. Dane said, “Yeah, besides that. I’ve seen it before—in a book or a movie. Fucked if I remember, though. I mean, it looks like it should be on the moor, Boris Karloff working the front door when the dumbass travelers stop for the night.”

  “How muc
h farther?” Glenn said. I consulted the book. “Close.” He said, “Unless you guys want to hunt for souvenirs in the burn piles, let’s mosey.” None of us liked the ruins enough to hang around and we continued walking.

  Fifteen minutes later, we arrived at our destination. The trail wound under the arch of a toppled dead log, and ended in a large hollow partially ringed by firs and hemlocks. The hollow was a shadowy-green amphitheatre that smelled of moist, decayed leaves and musty earth. Directly ahead, reared the dolmen—two squat pillars of rock supporting a third, enormous slab. I was amazed by its cyclopean dimensions. The dolmen was seated near the slope of the hill and blanketed with moss, and at its base: ferns and patches of devil’s club. It woke in me a profound unease that was momentarily overshadowed by my awe that the structure actually existed.

  None of us spoke at first; we stood close together and took in our surroundings. Glenn squeezed my wrist and pressed his hip against mine. Victor hadn’t taken a single picture, demonstrably cowed upon encountering something so far beyond his reckoning, and Dane’s mouth actually hung open. I whispered into Glenn’s ear, “The History Channel isn’t quite the same, is it?” He smiled and pecked my cheek. That broke the tension and, after shucking their packs, the others began exploring the hollow. My uneasiness remained, a burr that I couldn’t work loose. I checked the book again—the author hadn’t written much about the site proper, nor documented any revelations about its history or importance besides the astronomical diagrams in the appendix. I stowed the guide and tried to set aside my misgivings as well.

  The moss that bearded the dolmen was also thick upon the ground and it sucked at my boots as it sucked at the voices of my friends and the daylight itself. I thought of lying in a sticky web, of drowsing in the heart of a cocoon. The pain in my arm spiked and I shook off the sudden lassitude. We approached within a few feet of the tomb and stared into the opening. This made me queasy, like peering over the lip of a pit. This was a stylized maw, the mossy path its unfurled tongue.

  “This isn’t right,” Glenn said. Victor and Dane flanked us, so our group stood before the structure in a semicircle. “A hoax?” I said without conviction, thinking of the artificial Stonehenge modern entrepreneurs had erected in Eastern Washington as a tourist attraction. “I don’t think so,” Glenn said. “But, I’ve seen a few of these in France. They don’t look like this at all. The pile of rocks is close. That other stuff, I dunno.” The stones were covered in runes and glyphs. Time had eroded deep grooves and incisions into shallow, blurred lines of demarcation. Lichen and horrid white fungi filled the crevices and spread in festering keloids.

  Dane forged ahead and boldly slashed at some of the creepers, revealing more carvings. Fat, misshapen puffball mushrooms nested in beds among the creepers and his machete hacked across some and they disintegrated in clouds of red smoke. I joined him at the threshold and shined the beam of my flashlight through the swirling motes of mushroom dust, illuminating a chamber eight feet wide and twenty feet deep. Stray fingers of reddish sunlight came through small gaps. Vines had penetrated inside and lay in slimy, rotten loops and wallows along the edges of the foundation. My hair brushed against the slick threshold and beetles and pill bugs recoiled from our intrusion. Just inside, the chamber vaulted to a height of fifteen feet and was decorated with multitudes of fantastical carvings of symbols and creatures and stylized visages of the kind likely dreamt by Neanderthals. The far end of the chamber dug into the mountain; a wall of shale and granite sundered by long past seismic violence into a vertical crack, its plates and ridges splattered rust orange by alkaline water oozing from rock.

  The floor was composed of dirt and sunken flagstones, and at its center, a low mound of crumbling granite that was an oblong basin, the opposite rim worked into the likeness of a massive, bloated humanoid. The statue was worn smooth and darkened by grime with only vague hollows for its eyes and mouth in a skull too proportionally small for its torso.

  I clicked off the flashlight and allowed my eyes to adjust to the crimson gloom. “Okay, I’m thunderstruck,” Glenn said. “Gob smacked!” Victor said, his jovial tone strained. He shot a rapid series of pictures that promptly ruined my night vision with the succession of strobe flashes. The glyphs crawled and the primeval visages yawned and leered. Dane must’ve seen it as well. “Stash that goddamned camera or I’m going to ram it where the sun don’t shine!”

  Victor frowned and snapped the lens cap in place and in the midst of my visceral reaction to our circumstances, I wondered if this exchange was a window into their souls, and how much did Glenn know about that. I watched Glenn as he examined the idol and the pool. I felt a brief, searing contempt for his gawky frame, his mincing steps and too-skinny ass. I hung my head, ashamed, and also confused that something so petty and domestic would impinge upon the bizarre scene. For the hundredth time I considered the possibility my meninges were filling with blood like plastic sacks.

  Up close, the basin was larger than I’d estimated, and rudely chiseled, as if it were simply a hollowed-out rock. Small squarish recesses were spaced at intervals around the rim, each encrusted with lichen and moss so they resembled mouths. Cold, green water dripped from the ceiling and filled the basin, its surface webbed with algae scum and fir needles and leaves. The attendant figurehead loomed, imposing bulk precariously inclined forward, giving the illusion that it gazed at us. I glanced at my companions, their faces eerily lighted by the reflection of the water.

  …A horrible idea took root—that these men masked in blood, eyes gleaming with febrile intensity, had conned me, maneuvered me to this remote and profane location. They were magicians, descendants of the Salamanca Seven, necromancers of the secret grotto, Satan’s disciples, who planned to slice my throat and conduct a black magic ritual to commune with their dear dead Tom, perhaps to raise him like Lazarus. Everything Glenn ever told me was a half truth, a mockery—Tom hadn’t been the black sheep sidekick, oh no!, but rather the darksome leader, a sorcerer who’d initiated each of them into the foul cabal. Any moment now, Dane or my sweet beloved Glenn would reach into his pocket and draw the hunting knife sharpened just for my jugular, Victor’s coil of rope would truss me, and then… Glenn touched my arm and I choked back a cry and everybody flinched. Their fear and concern appeared genuine. I allowed Glenn to comfort me, smiled weakly at his solicitous questions.

  Victor said, “Boys, what now? I feel like calling CNN, the secretary of the interior. Somebody.” Glenn rubbed his jaw. “Vicky, it’s in the book, so apparently people are aware of this place. There’s a burned-down village back thataway. That explorer, Pavlov, Magalov, whoever, named it after himself. People surely know.”

  “Just because it’s in the book doesn’t mean jack shit. How come there’s no public record? I bet you my left nut this site isn’t even on the government radar. Question is, why? How is that possible?”

  I said, “An even better question is, do we want to screw around with the ineffable?” Victor sighed. “Oh, come on. You got the heebie-jeebies over some primitive art?”

  “Take a closer look at the demon faces,” Dane said. “This is forces of darkness shit. Hardcore Iron Maiden album cover material.” He snorted and spat a lump of gory snot into the water. For a moment, we stood in shocked silence.

  “If you want to flee, dears, say the word.” Victor laid the sarcasm on too thick to fool anybody. “Let’s march back to the land of beer, pizza, and long, hot showers.” He drew a cigarette and leaned against the basin to steady himself. The snick of his lighter, the bloom of flame, shifted the universe off its axis. He shuddered and dropped the lighter and stepped back far enough that I glimpsed a shivering cord the diameter of a blue ribbon leech extended from beneath the lip of the basin and plunge into the junction of his inner thigh and groin.

  Greasy bubbles surfaced from the depths of the stagnant water, and burst, their odor more foul than the effluvium of the dead vines liquefying along the walls, and the scum dissolved to reveal a surface as clear as g
lass. The trough was a divining pool and the water a lens magnifying the slothful splay of the farthest cosmos where its gases and storms of dust lay like a veil upon the Outer Dark. A thumbnail-sized alabaster planetoid blazed beneath the ruptured skein of leaves and algae, a membranous cloud rising.

  The cloud seethed and darkened, became black as a thunderhead. It keened—chains dragging against iron, a theremin dialed to eleven, a hypersonic shriek that somehow originated and emanated from inside my brain rather than an external source. Whispers drifted from the abyss, unsynchronized, unintelligible, yet conveying malevolent and obscene lust that radiated across the vast wastes of deep space. The cloud peeled, bloomed, and a hundred-thousand-miles-long tendril uncoiled, a proboscis telescoping from the central mass, and the whispers amplified in a burst of static. I went cold, warmth and energy drained from my body with such abruptness and violence, I staggered.

  Glenn shouted and jerked my shoulder, and we tripped over each other. I saw Dane scrambling toward the entrance, and Victor frozen before the idol, face illuminated in the lurid radiance. His expression contorted and he gripped his skull in both hands, fingernails digging. The slimy cord drew taut and released from the muscle of his leg with a wet pop, left a bleeding circle in the fabric of his pants. Another of these appendages partially spooled from the niche nearest me, writhing blindly as it sought to connect with warm meat.

  The howl intensified. My vision distorted into streaks of white, resolving to the flickering vacuum of space where I floated near the rim of the Earth, and the moon slid as a black disk across the face of the sun.