Occultation and Other Stories

by Laird Barron

  Anyone who’s lived beyond the walls of a cloister has had at least one bad moment, an experience that becomes the proverbial dark secret. In this Pershing was the same as everyone. His own dark moment had occurred many years prior; a tragic event he’d dwelled upon for weeks and months with manic obsession, until he learned to let go, to acknowledge his survivor’s guilt and move on with his life. He’d done well to box the memory, to shove it in a dusty corner of his subconscious. He distanced himself from the event until it seemed like a cautionary tale based on a stranger’s experiences.

  He was an aging agnostic and it occurred to him that, as he marched ever closer to his personal gloaming, the ghosts of Christmases Past had queued up to take him to task, that this heat wave had fostered a delirium appropriate to second-guessing his dismissal of ecclesiastical concerns, and penitence.

  In 1973 he and Walker got lost during a remote surveying operation and wound up spending thirty-six hours wandering the wilderness. He’d been doing field work for six or seven years and should have known better than to hike away from the base camp that morning.

  At first they’d only gone far enough to relieve themselves. Then, he’d seen something—someone—watching him from the shadow of a tree and thought it was one of the guys screwing around. This was an isolated stretch of high country in the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula. There were homesteads and ranches along its fringes, but not within ten miles. The person, apparently a man, judging from his build, was half-crouched, studying the ground. He waved to Pershing; a casual, friendly gesture. The man’s features were indistinct, but at that moment Pershing convinced himself it was Morris Miller or Pete Cabellos, both of whom were rabid outdoorsmen and constantly nattering on about the ecological wonderland in which the crew currently labored. The man straightened and beckoned, sweeping his hand in a come-on gesture. He walked into the trees.

  Terry zipped up, shook his head and trudged that direction. Pershing thought nothing of it and tagged along. They went to where the man had stood and discovered what he’d been staring at—an expensive backpack of the variety popular with suburbanite campers. The pack was battered, its shiny yellow and green material shredded. Pershing got the bad feeling it was brand new.

  Oh, shit, Terry said. Maybe a bear nailed somebody. We better get back to camp and tell Higgins. Higgins was the crew leader; surely he’d put together a search and rescue operation to find the missing owner of the pack. That would have been the sensible course, except, exactly as they turned to go, Pete Cabellos called to them from the woods. His voice echoed and bounced from the cliffs and boulders. Immediately, the men headed in the direction of the yell.

  They soon got thoroughly lost. Every tree is the same tree in a forest. Clouds rolled in and it became impossible to navigate by sun or stars. Pershing’s compass was back at camp with the rest of his gear, and Terry’s was malfunctioning—condensation clouded the glass internally, rendered the needle useless. After a few hours of stumbling around yelling for their colleagues, they decided to follow the downhill slope of the land and promptly found themselves in mysterious hollows and thickets. It was a grave situation, although, that evening as the two camped in a steady downpour, embarrassment figured more prominently than fear of imminent peril.

  Terry brought out some jerky and Pershing always carried waterproof matches in his vest pocket, so they got a fire going from the dried moss and dead twigs beneath the boughs of a massive old fir, munched on jerky, and lamented their predicament. The two argued halfheartedly about whether they’d actually heard Pete or Morris calling that morning, or a mysterious third party.

  Pershing fell asleep with his back against the mossy bole and was plunged into nightmares of stumbling through the foggy woods. A malevolent presence lurked in the mist and shadows. Figures emerged from behind trees and stood silently. Their wickedness and malice were palpable. He knew with the inexplicable logic of dreams that these phantoms delighted in his terror, that they were eager to inflict unimaginable torments upon him.

  Terry woke him and said he’d seen someone moving around just beyond the light of the dying fire. Rain pattering on the leaves made it impossible to hear if anyone was moving around in the bushes, so Terry threw more branches on the fire and they warmed their hands and theorized that the person who’d beckoned them into the woods was the owner of the pack. Terry, ever the pragmatist, suspected the man had struck his head and was now in a raving delirium, possibly even circling their camp.

  Meanwhile, Pershing was preoccupied with more unpleasant possibilities. Suppose the person they’d seen had actually killed a hiker and successfully lured them into the wild? Another thought insinuated itself; his grandmother had belonged to a long line of superstitious Appalachian folk. She’d told him and his brother ghost stories and of legends such as the Manitou, and lesser-known tales about creatures who haunted the woods and spied on men and disappeared when a person spun to catch them. He’d thrilled to her stories while snug before the family hearth with a mug of cocoa and the company of loved ones. The stories took on a different note here in the tall trees.

  It rained hard all the next day and the clouds descended into the forest. Emergency protocol dictated staying put and awaiting the inevitable rescue, rather than blindly groping in circles through the fog. About midday, Terry went to get a drink from a spring roughly fifty feet from their campsite. Pershing never saw him again. Well, not quite true: he saw him twice more.

  2.

  Pershing moved into the Broadsword Hotel in 1979, a few months after his first wife, Ethel, unexpectedly passed away. He met second wife, Constance, at a hotel mixer. They were married in 1983, had Lisa Anne and Jimmy within two years, and were divorced by 1989. She said the relationship was doomed from the start because he’d never really finished mourning Ethel. Connie grew impatient of his mooning over old dusty photo albums and playing old moldy tunes on the antique record player he stashed in the closet along with several ill-concealed bottles of scotch. Despite his fondness for liquor, Pershing didn’t consider himself a heavy drinker, but rather a steady one.

  During their courtship, Pershing talked often of leaving the Broadsword. Oh, she was queenly in her time, a seven-floor art deco complex on the West Side of Olympia on a wooded hill with a view of the water, the marina, and downtown. No one living knew how she’d acquired her bellicose name. She was built in 1918 as a posh hotel, complete with a four-star restaurant, swanky nightclub-cum-gambling hall, and a grand ballroom; the kind of place that attracted not only the local gentry, but visiting Hollywood celebrities, sports figures, and politicians. After passing through the hands of several owners, the Broadsword was purchased by a Midwest corporation and converted to a middle-income apartment complex in 1958. The old girl suffered a number of renovations to wedge in more rooms, but she maintained a fair bit of charm and historical gravitas even five decades and several facelifts later.

  Nonetheless, Pershing and Connie had always agreed the cramped quarters were no substitute for a real house with a yard and a fence. Definitely a tough place to raise children—unfortunately, the recession had killed the geophysical company he’d worked for in those days and money was tight.

  Connie was the one who eventually got out—she moved to Cleveland and married a banker. The last Pershing heard, she lived in a mansion and had metamorphosed into a white-gloved, garden-party-throwing socialite who routinely got her name in the lifestyle section of the papers. He was happy for her and the kids, and a little relieved for himself. That tiny single-bedroom flat had been crowded!

  He moved up as well. Up to the sixth floor into 119; what the old superintendent (in those days it was Anderson Heck) sardonically referred to as an executive suite. According to the super, only two other people had ever occupied the apartment—the so-called executive suites were spacious enough that tenants held onto them until they died. The previous resident was a bibliophile who’d retired from a post at the Smithsonian. The fellow left many books and photographs when he died
and his heirs hadn’t seen fit to come around and pack up his estate. As it happened, the freight elevator was usually on the fritz in those days and the regular elevator wasn’t particularly reliable either. So the superintendent offered Pershing three months’ free rent if he personally dealt with the daunting task of organizing and then lugging crates of books and assorted memorabilia down six steep flights to the curb.

  Pershing put his muscles to good use. It took him three days’ hard labor to clear out the apartment and roughly three hours to move his embarrassingly meager belongings in. The rest, as they say, was history.

  3.

  Pershing would turn sixty-seven in October. Wanda Blankenship, his current girlfriend of nine months and counting, was forty-something—she played it coy, careful not to say, and he hadn’t managed a peek at her driver license. He guessed she was pushing fifty, although she took care of herself, hit the Pilates circuit with her chums, and thus passed for a few years on the uphill side. “Grave robber!” he said when she goosed him, or made a half-hearted swipe at his testicles, which was often, and usually in public. She was a librarian too; a fantasy cliché ironically fulfilled during this, his second or third boyhood when he needed regular doses of the little blue pill to do either of them any justice.

  Nine months meant their relationship had slid from the danger zone and come perilously near the edge of no return. He’d gotten comfortable with her sleeping over a couple of nights a week, like a lobster getting cozy in a kettle of warm water. He’d casually mentioned her to Lisa Anne and Jimmy during one of their monthly phone conferences, which was information he usually kept close to his vest. More danger signals: she installed a toothbrush in the medicine cabinet and shampoo in the bath. He couldn’t find his extra key one night after coming home late from the Red Room and realized he’d given it to her weeks before in a moment of weakness. As the robot used to say, Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! Danger! He was cooked, all right, which was apropos, considering the weather.

  “Oh, ye gods! Like hell I’m coming up there!” she said during their latest phone conversation. “My air conditioner is tip top. You come over here.” She paused to snicker. “Where I can get my hands on you!”

  He wanted to argue, to resist, but was too busy melting into the couch, and knew if he refused she’d come flying on her broom to chivvy him away most unceremoniously. Defeated, he put on one of his classier ties, all of which Constance had chosen, and made the pilgrimage—on foot in the savage glare of late afternoon because he walked everywhere, hadn’t owned a car since he sold his El Camino in 1982. Walking generally suited him; he’d acquired a taste for it during his years of toil in the wilderness. He took a meager bit of pride in noting that his comfortable “traveling” pace left most men a quarter his age gasping and winded after a short distance.

  He disliked visiting her place, a small cottage-style house in a quiet neighborhood near downtown. Not that there was anything wrong with the house itself, aside from the fact it was too tidy, too orderly, and she insisted on china dishes for breakfast, lunch, supper, and tea. He lived in constant fear of dropping something, spilling something, breaking something with his large, clumsy hands. She cheerily dismissed such concerns, remarking that her cups and dishes were relics passed down through the generations—“They gotta go sometime. Don’t be so uptight.” Obviously, this served to heighten his paranoia.

  Wanda made dinner; fried chicken and honeydew, and wine for dessert. Wine disagreed with his insides and gave him a headache. When she broke out the after-dinner merlot, he smiled and drank up like a good soldier. It was the gentlemanly course—also, he was loath to give her any inkling regarding his penchant for the hard stuff. Her husband had drunk himself to death. Pershing figured he could save his own incipient alcoholism as an escape route. If things got too heavy, he could simply crack a bottle of Absolut and guzzle it like soda pop, which would doubtless give him a heart attack. Freedom either way! Meanwhile, the deceit must perforce continue.

  They were snuggling on the loveseat, buzzed by wine and luxuriating in the blessed coolness of her living room, when she casually said, “So, who’s the girl?”

  Pershing’s heart fluttered, his skin went clammy. Such questions never boded well. He affected nonchalance. “Ah, sweetie, I’m a dashing fellow. Which girl are you talking about?” That heart attack he sometimes dreamt of seemed a real possibility.

  Wanda smiled. “The girl I saw leaving your apartment the other morning, silly.”

  The fact he didn’t know any girls besides a few cocktail waitresses didn’t make him feel any better. He certainly was guilty of looking at lots of girls and couldn’t help but wonder if that was enough to bury him. Then, instead of reassuring her that no such person existed, or that there must be some innocent mistake, he idiotically said, “Oh. What were you doing coming over in the morning?” In short order, he found himself on the porch. The sky was purple and orange with sunset. It was a long, sticky walk back to the hotel.

  4.

  The next day he asked around the Broadsword. Nobody had seen a girl and nobody cared. Nobody had seen Hopkins either. Him they cared about. Even Bobby Silver—Sly to his friends—didn’t seem interested in the girl, and Sly was the worst lecher Pershing had ever met. Sly managed a dry cackle and a nudge to the ribs when Pershing described the mystery girl who’d allegedly come from his apartment. Young (relatively speaking), dark-haired, voluptuous, short black dress, lipstick.

  “Heard anything about when they’re gonna fix the cooling system? It’s hotter than the hobs of Hell in here!” Sly sprawled on a bench just off the columned hotel entrance. He fanned himself with a crinkled Panama hat.

  Mark Ordbecker, a high school math teacher who lived in the apartment directly below Pershing’s with his wife Harriet and two children, suggested a call to the police. “Maybe one of them should come over and look around.” They made this exchange at Ordbecker’s door. The teacher leaned against the doorframe, trying in vain to feed the shrieking baby a bottle of milk. His face was red and sweaty. He remarked that the start of the school year would actually be a relief from acting as a househusband. His wife had gone east for a funeral. “The wife flies out and all hell breaks loose. She’s going to come home to my funeral if the weather doesn’t change.”

  Ordbecker’s other child, a five-year-old boy named Eric, stood behind his father. His hair was matted with sweat and his face gleamed, but it was too pale.

  “Hi, Eric,” Pershing said. “I didn’t see you there. How you doing, kiddo?”

  Little Eric was normally rambunctious or, as Wanda put it, obstreperous, as in an obstreperous hellion. Today he shrank farther back and wrapped an arm around his father’s leg.

  “Don’t mind him. Misses his mom.” Mark leaned closer and murmured, “Separation anxiety. He won’t sleep by himself while she’s gone. You know how kids are.” He reached down awkwardly and ruffled the boy’s hair. “About your weirdo visitor—call the cops. At least file a report so if this woman’s crazy and she comes at you with a pair of shears in the middle of the night and you clock her with a golf club, there’s a prior record.”

  Pershing thanked him. He remained unconvinced this was anything other than a coincidence or possibly Wanda’s imagination, spurred by a sudden attack of jealousy. He almost knocked on Phil Wary’s door across the hall. The fellow moved in a few years back; a former stage magician, or so went the tales, and a decade Pershing’s senior. Well-dressed and amiable, Wary nonetheless possessed a certain aloofness; also, he conducted a psychic medium service out of his apartment. Tarot readings, hypnosis, séances, all kinds of crackpot business. They said hello in passing, had waited together outside Superintendent Frame’s office, and that was the extent of their relationship. Pershing preferred the status quo in this case.

  “Cripes, this is all nonsense anyway.” He always locked his apartment with a deadbolt; he’d become security-conscious in his advancing years, not at all sure he could handle a robber, what with his bad
knees and weak back. Thankfully, there’d been no sign of forced entry, no one other than his girlfriend had seen anything, thus he suspected his time schlepping about the hotel in this beastly heat playing amateur investigator was a colossal waste of energy.

  Wanda didn’t call, which wasn’t surprising considering her stubbornness. Dignity prohibited him ringing her. Nonetheless, her silence rankled; his constant clock watching annoyed him, too. It wasn’t like him to fret over a woman, which meant he missed her more than he’d have guessed.

  As the sun became an orange blob in the west, the temperature peaked. The apartment was suffocating. He dragged himself to the refrigerator and stood before its open door, straddle-legged in his boxers, bathed in the stark white glow. Tepid relief was better than nothing.

  Someone whispered behind him and giggled. He turned quickly. The laughter originated in the living area, between the coffee table and a bookshelf. Because the curtains were tightly closed the room lay in a blue-tinged gloom that played tricks on his eyes. He sidled to the sink and swept his arm around until he flicked the switch for the overhead light. This illuminated a sufficient area that he felt confident to venture forth. Frankie Walton’s suite abutted his own—and old Frankie’s hearing was shot. He had to crank the volume on his radio for the ballgames. Once in a while Pershing heard the tinny exclamations of the play-by-play guys, the roar of the crowd. This, however, sounded like a person was almost on top of him, sneering behind his back.

  Closer inspection revealed the sounds had emanated from a vent near the window. He chuckled ruefully as his muscles relaxed. Ordbecker was talking to the baby and the sound carried upstairs. Not unusual; the hotel’s acoustics were peculiar, as he well knew. He knelt and cocked his head toward the vent, slightly guilty at eavesdropping, yet in the full grip of curiosity. People were definitely in conversation, yet, he gradually realized, not the Ordbeckers. These voices were strange and breathy, and came from farther off, fading in and out with a static susurration.