Occultation and Other Stories

by Laird Barron

  He eventually emerged from the stall and took a can of beans from the shelf and cleared a space at the table. He sat, head in his hands, gazing numbly at the can of beans, realizing he’d forgotten the can opener, a plate, or a spoon.

  —Want me to fix you something? she said. —You look weak as a kitten.

  He licked his lips and smiled until they cracked and bled. —Don’t worry about me. I jogged three kilometers after a coyote. I’m winded, is all.

  —Know what my favorite story is? The Landlady, by Roald Dahl. Great story. My sister read it to me when we were kids. Scared the shit outta me, but I loved it. It stuck with me. Do you know the story I’m talking about?

  —Sounds familiar. He flicked his tongue over his lips, tasting the blood. —I feel as if I should recall because it’s famous. Like Tyson and Holyfield.

  —Hee, hee, that’s so funny. You have a hell of a sense of humor, lover boy.

  —There’s a dog that doesn’t move. A bird sitting in its cage. He closed his eyes, concentrating. Bitter almonds. The acrid silt at the bottom of his canteen, burning his throat.

  —The old lady was into taxidermy. Once you figure that part out, you know what a train wreck is coming. Not one drop of blood is spilled and it’s the creepiest, ickiest story ever. Dahl was the shit.

  —Why are you angry? he said. —This is about what happened with us back when, isn’t it? My God, girl, it wasn’t a thing. He had difficulty enunciating. —Not worth this. Not worth this.

  —I’ve spiked your water for two weeks. O mighty hunter that you are, it’s pathetic. I thought it’d be so much harder. I almost feel guilty; it’s like strangling a child.

  —Not worth this, he said.

  —Do you even know what this is? Her chair squeaked as she rose, and her bare feet scuffed on the floor as she crossed the space between them. —I wondered where you went all day. You’ve been doing some heavy thinking at long last, haven’t you? But I’m sorry to say, it’s too late, motherfucker. Too late for you.

  He looked up and saw she was holding the tin cup. She pinched her nostrils between thumb and forefinger, smiled and twitched her wrist, and dashed the contents of the cup into his face. He knew it was muriatic acid from the smell. He blocked with his left arm and twisted partially away, lurching from the chair, but some went into his eye and reality was eclipsed by a sudden blizzard of white.

  —Oh, honey, are you okay? she said. —Did you get any on you?

  Meanwhile, his eye bubbled into its socket, cooked like an egg white. He punched her with the can in his fist, not aiming, not thinking, because the acid was searing him, eating him alive, flesh and thought alike. The can smashed edgewise into her temple, and the tremor reverberated through his arm as bone gave way. She stepped backward, then sat abruptly in one of the plastic chairs. He threw the can at her, but his remaining vision flickered wildly and he couldn’t see whether he struck her or not. His lungs began to burn. Pain was a clothes hanger twisting into his soft gray matter. He shrieked and plowed through tables, chairs, a wooden partition; he tripped and sprawled on his belly. He curled into himself, writhing and retching, and slammed his head against the floor until he lost consciousness. The agony followed him down.

  The Sierras team had camped near a hot spring and everyone leaped in naked and shouting. Someone brought booze, someone else a bag of grass, and it was a hell of a party beneath the full moon. After the others had drifted to their tents, drunken and singing, rough-housing and playing grab-ass, he took her on a flat white rock by the light of a dying fire, slick from the water, steam boiling from them as they clinched. An owl screamed as she screamed and dug her heels into his ribs. Two weeks of smoldering glances and glancing touches had led to this apocalyptic moment.

  They took a vacation that began in Kenya and rambled south. He wanted to see the lions. Six weeks of safaris and relentless fucking in every hostel and two-star hotel along the Barbary Coast. She was recently divorced from a fellow geologist who worked in Washington D.C. as the head of a department in a small, but respectable museum. She described her ex-husband as a soft, lovely man. She was on top of him when she said this, hands flat on his chest, nude but for the thick belt she wore on her hiking breeches. The buckle scraped his belly as she fucked him. He wasn’t listening. His head hung off the bed and he stared through a set of billowing curtains at the clouds.

  He found the puppy, an orphaned mix, in an alley in Denver. He took the pup to the vet for shots and worming. While he stood at the counter, bemused by his impulsiveness, one of his long-lost contacts, a buddy from college days, called with a job offer; a nine-month gig in Alaska. He said yeah, and put the puppy in a box and took it to her apartment. She fell in love, as he expected. He asked to her to watch it for him during the Alaska trip. They had dinner at a French restaurant, stumbled home high on a bottle of Chablis, and made sweet, tearful love while the puppy whined and scratched at the door. The next day she drove him to the airport and told him to write. He didn’t write, not once in nine months, didn’t speak to her again, and a couple of years later he heard she was dating some guy who snuffed fires on oil rigs. The guy died in one of the fires, but whoever told him didn’t know what she was doing or where she lived.

  Sometimes, especially when he was very drunk, he’d awaken and smell her scent on the pillow. He’d think about her and the dog. Eventually, he didn’t.

  She was still sitting in the chair when he regained his senses. Her head lolled and her legs splayed crudely, the way men often sat, crotches exposed. She’d pissed herself. A fly preened on her thigh.

  The module was full of red shadows, or his head was full of red shadows. His left eye was gone, a crater leaking gelatin. He felt it sliding around. His forearm and hand were blistered; they resembled microwaved hamburger. The flesh of his cheek seemed to be sloughing, and when he touched his head, a hank of hair came free. The interior of his mouth was spongy, and his throat felt as if she’d dragged a rusty fork down his esophagus and then stabbed his lungs repeatedly. Pain broke over him in waves and when he coughed, blood and mucus shot forth. He gibbered and rocked with his head in his hands until finally he regained enough sense to find the first aid kit and take a half bottle of aspirin and a shot of morphine. Through it all, she watched him, one eye slightly higher than the other, the corner of her mouth downturned. He went to the radio, afraid to turn his back on her, but there wasn’t much choice.

  He keyed the mike and made the call. The answer, when it finally came, surfaced from dead static. The voice was garbled, made unintelligible by the white noise and gain distortion. It responded to his cries for help with bursts of vaguely menacing gobbledygook until a red light on the radio’s console blinked and the machine shut down and went cold. His cell phone couldn’t locate a signal. He slumped in the corner, gnawing his wrist bloody to quiet the ravening fire consuming his brain. He heard himself whimper and was vaguely ashamed and horrified at how abruptly a man could be reduced to an animal.

  Sometime later the power died and the interior of the module went dark. Moonlight trickled in and illuminated her face. Had her neck twisted slightly so she might focus upon him with her glistening eyes? Had her hand shifted position? He summoned the courage to stir from his niche and crawl like a wounded beast to the next compartment. He locked the door and wedged a mop from the supply locker under the handle and propped himself against the wall.

  He’d dozed for several minutes when the noises began in the main area. It was a stealthy sound, the scrape and scuffle of feet navigating wrecked furniture. The relentless throbbing in his eye dulled his senses, rendered him effectively inert as he listened to the floor squeak closer, ever closer. Why hadn’t he grabbed the gun? Or his work belt with the big hunting knife? A thick, scummy layer of foam had curdled in a ring around his mouth. He scratched it, bit down hard on his fingers, trying in vain to shock himself into action. How many times had he watched a coyote or a cougar in a leg-hold trap, dying by inches until it caved in and lay there,
impassive and docile, awaiting the end? It was too dim for him to see the door handle jiggle, but he heard it clearly enough and thought maybe this was his turn to skip from the face of the Earth.

  —Honey, unlock the door.

  He gibbered and chewed his fingers. It wasn’t her voice and he didn’t know how to assess that fact beyond the terror of the situation. The voice was soft and guttural, sexless and abominable in its alien timbre. The voice emanated pure malice, and it wanted him. Oh yes, it wanted him.

  —Open the door. We can help you.

  We, it said. What the fuck was we? Where had he heard that? From what trash book, from what horror flick? The Bible, the Old Testament. Almighty God had occasionally referred to Himself in the plural. Demons, too. But it wasn’t an angel or a devil on the other side of the door. No way, and he nodded his head to reinforce the assertion. There was a fucking cultist standing there. He’d been correct to suspect one or more of those creeps lurked in the brush, spying and plotting, poised for the moment he could move in for the kill. Either that or his sweet ex-girlfriend could alter her voice, or her ability to form words was severely impaired from her fractured skull.

  —Let us in. You aren’t well. We can smell you. You’re burned. Your flesh is suppurating. It’s rotting. It’s falling from the bone.

  He covered his good eye, trying to make his pain and fear subside, the voice to leave him in peace. He was caught in his own kind of leg-hold trap, except he couldn’t chew his leg off to escape.

  —Come, open up. Let us help.

  —Go to hell! he said, first in a mumble, then a hoarse shout. —Get the fuck away! He repeated this until his voice cracked to pieces and the only sound he could make was a dry, pathetic whine.

  —Help me, she said. Not the guttural voice, but hers. She sounded afraid.

  He wept.

  Pale light filtered through the window. His cheek was pressed against the floor, gummed to the surface by its own juices. Light pooled around his limp hand. The skin was scorched and ruined and a dark scab covered his knuckles. The tendons had tightened like violin strings and he couldn’t make a fist.

  He peeled himself free, unlocked the door and surveyed his world. Deranged chimpanzees had redecorated the interior. Every bit of equipment was smashed. Dust leaked through a gash in the hull. The hatch was missing, in its place a ragged hole. She was gone too.

  A bomb had detonated in the yard. Canned goods, wiring, bits of wood and silverware and crushed glass twinkled in the dirt. The hatch lay nearby, twisted and deformed. He wanted to call for her, but his throat was stripped. The air was hot and sickeningly bright. His good eye didn’t seem reliable. Everything shimmered like a photograph negative. Everything glowed white or oozed darkness. There was no telling the time; the face of his watch was blank. He scrabbled about the yard, tears and pus rolling down his cheek.

  He wrapped a sliver of glass in cotton and went forth on hands and knees with his nose to the earth like a dog. Her trail started at the edge of camp. It was easy to follow the broken twigs, the gore-splattered needles and leaves, and though it wound serpentine through brush and trees, he quickly guessed the destination. She’d been dragged by her hair, like a carcass.

  It was a long, bloody crawl to the den.

  He lay on his side, panting, fixated on her sandal. The sandal was caked in black grime and wedged between split halves of a stone. He’d seen the other shoe a ways back, dangling from a bush. The sun fell below the jagged rim of the mountains. Heat rapidly dissipated, sucked into the advancing red shadows. He mumbled and whined to himself, incoherent except for flashes of insight that urged him to slice his throat and be done, and he would’ve committed the act, except when the moment came, he realized he’d dropped the improvised blade, that it was lost. And so all was lost. The moon crept up from its lair and grinned its devil grin. She cried out, muffled and faint. Or a coyote yipped over the ridge. He trembled from head to toe, galvanized to pitiful life by the image of her screaming, buried alive.

  He coughed and pulled himself, hand over hand, among the roots, smelling her blood mixed with the cool dust, husked leaves and dead needles. The entrance was narrow, but he forced his head through, then his shoulders. He wriggled like a snake and his flesh scraped raw, and his hips were past the threshold and he coiled in the rank, decaying warmth of the den. The mountain breeze tickled the soles of his feet in a lingering caress, then he squirmed fully inside.

  For an eon he floated in perfect darkness, listening to insects burrowing through wood and bark. He wasn’t surprised when something larger stirred. A cold, hard hand touched his cheek and clamped his mouth, stifling any sobs, or shrieks of terror or joyous exclamation. He relaxed, too weak for the struggle. He was home.

  Her tongue went into his ear like the worm into the apple.

  A coyote sneaked from the trees and crouched near the ancient den, the forbidden ground, sniffing at the fresh furrows in the earth, at the blood and the piss and the acrid stench of fear musk. The coyote had roved far from its normal haunts tonight. It was very young and didn’t understand why none of the packs lived here, why the only scents were the scents of sickness and death.

  The animal’s ears pricked forward, and it froze, head cocked toward the mound. A cloud rippled across the face of the moon, and when it passed, the coyote bolted, racing from shadow to shadow, and vanished into the silvery gloom. Farther off, the pack howled, their cries echoing along hidden canyons in a damned chorus.

  Six Six Six

  …Over the course of the long afternoon of thunderclaps and rain squalls they had unpacked most of the living room of the ancestral home.

  He stared into a box at his feet for a long while.

  She put on a Sinatra record.

  The wind slackened and left in its stead a charged stillness that accentuated the remoteness of the house, the artificiality of the music.

  Out of the blue he said, —Pop used to play this game with me and Karl when we were kids. He called it Something Scary. His voice was hushed like a soap actor emoting as he reveals a deep, dark secret to his love interest.

  She set aside the silver and blue vase that contained some of her mother’s ashes and watched him in the mirror over the fireplace. —Uh, oh, she said.

  He chuckled, still regarding the contents of the box which was labeled “misc” in bold magic marker strokes. It was not one of the boxes unloaded by the movers, rather a venerable, dusty container he’d retrieved from the attic. —Yeah, uh-oh, but not in an inappropriate touch, danger zone, bathing suit area way, or anything.

  —Am I relieved?

  —Maybe, maybe not, he said.

  She heard a noise, a cough or a growl, off to the left in the deeper shadows, but saw nothing unusual when she glanced that direction.

  The house was a source of many unexplained noises.

  What if there were rats in the walls? Thank God for the cat.

  Pine floorboards gleamed in the light of the lamps near the arched door that let into a drawing room, then a library full of moldering books. She’d dusted a few off and found their foreign titles illegible, spines so withered and decayed she dared not handle them lest they disintegrate.

  Everything else that had defined the house as the demesne of his parents was tidily stowed away. His brother and sister, aunts and uncles, had swept through and claimed everything that wasn’t nailed down.

  So, a blank slate for the happy couple.

  There were several multi-paned windows along the far wall of the living room. Like the rest of the house the windows were old and quaint and to her mind, vaguely ominous; portals to a dimmer, less hospitable era.

  It was well past sundown and the glass was dark as steel.

  The forest across the country lane was far older than the house and it reinforced the darkness that pressed against the windows.

  There were bears and deer in the woods; and coyotes and cougars and snakes.

  Earlier that day she’d brushed a large black spider f
rom its nest in the porch eave with a long-handled broom left in the pantry. The broom handle was worn smooth as glass and it bowed in the middle; its bristles were rocky nubs, blackened.

  She thought about the woods and how someone or something could even now be lurking out there, spying on her, and imagined hoarse breathing, hot on her neck.

  Drapes would certainly be the first order of business tomorrow.

  An exterminator would soon follow.

  She said, —I’m going to see what we have for dinner, and walked through a second arch into a hallway.

  The hallway led her to the farm-style kitchen with low beams and dangling meat hooks that framed a long, scarred wooden table in shadow.

  The table had seated farmers and patricians alike for the house’s foundation predated the arrival of her husband’s kin by a decade or more.

  A gas range with double ovens squatted opposite a cold hearth.

  A cast iron pot hung from a hook at the center of the hearth.

  The pot was corroded with rust.

  She heated a kettle of water for pasta and grabbed some shrimp from the stainless steel fridge, the only concession to modern convenience in the room.

  He materialized in the doorway.

  For a moment his features were occulted by the gloom. He could’ve been anyone standing there, and her skin prickled.

  Then he emerged into the light and kissed her and fetched the cheese he’d bought in the township and poured the wine he’d also bought in the township.

  They sat together at the table and ate pasta and drank wine while Sinatra continued to sing, his voice ethereal as it stretched across time and space and echoed through the empty rooms.