by Laird Barron
—Excellent question and one that I put to Karl when we met with the executor. He still talked to Pop on the rare occasion and I hoped he might have some insight. Little brother was cagey. It’s been two months since the reading of the will. I’ve called Karl every other day, left him a dozen messages. He’s gone.
—Gone on vacation?
—Gone as in vapor. I filed a police report.
—And this is another thing you decided not to tell me?
—We’re a secretive bunch, my clan. The cops say he’s around, but won’t say where. I think they’re wrong. Or lying. Something happened when that helicopter crashed and my father got turned into hamburger. I feel strange. Physically, emotionally. Don’t even try to suggest it’s grief.
—The police aren’t going to lie. That’s tinfoil hat jibber-jabber, man. He skipped town after the funeral, probably to blow the wad he nabbed. Your parents left him fifty grand. Not too shabby. Coke and hookers would keep him busy for a while, especially if he went to someplace with a depressed economy. Mexico, Costa Rica, Haiti, one of those places where Main Street is all whitewashed facades and discos, and one block over everybody’s living under corrugated tin roofs and pissing in buckets.
He didn’t say anything. Firelight moved across his face and she had a bad moment where he resembled his father so much her stomach turned over. He rose and went to the “misc” box and rummaged and brought forth a selection of wooden sticks that telescoped into a tripod. Next, he unwrapped a bulky metal contraption with gears and lenses and a small hand crank. He set the metal gadget on the tripod and pointed its central aperture at a blank section of the wall, a pale block where a cabinet had rested until recently. —Behold my father’s favorite toy in the whole wide world. He used this to put on phantasmagoria performances for the kids.
—Phantasmagoria?
—A horror show. Very popular with the Victorian set. You’ll see. He switched off the lamp and shut the panels in the fireplace so the glow became dim. He made adjustments to the magic lantern and vigorously cranked the handle like he was winding a jack in the box. Lastly, he inserted the edge of an object that resembled a film reel into the side of the box. He said, —A rudimentary model appeared in Europe during the fifteen hundreds. This one was built by a Viennese clockmaker in 1930 and is exponentially more sophisticated than its predecessors. The clockmaker was an occultist who cherished Chivalric and Renaissance theatrical traditions. He built several dozen variations on this design and they were purchased by wealthy collectors such as Pop.
—Is this the game?
—The game has a lot of components. This worked on us when we were tykes, less so later. Voila! A switch snapped into place and a yellow light came on in the guts of the machine and magnified through the apertures into a series of ovals on the wall. The ovals gradually brightened and ran together with a jittery, liquid quality like cells combining under a microscope. Black-trunked trees unfolded from the shimmering edges of the imagery and spread talons. The canopy intertwined and creepers slithered forth in a primitive Claymation effect, off-kilter and mesmerizing, and bubbles of swamp gas floated and sputtered among the branches, and the light brightened and dimmed, surging, retreating as branches became snakes and knotholes glittered like eyeballs and slowly widening mouths, oozing sap and slime.
—Wow, she said. —That’s amazing.
—Shh, he said.
Figures, distorted by the shuddering frames, skulked between the boles of the trees, capered as the light downshifted to red, then black, and when the panel brightened, beneath a conical hat a white, lunatic face with strips of flesh peeled to chipped bone leered at her, twisting a stork neck to get a better view. She screamed even as the ghoulish visage rippled and morphed into a hillock amidst a sea of long grass beneath a too-full moon. More figures loped and gamboled toward the foreground; tall, yet stooped, garbed in cowls and robes, sinewy arms raised in an apish manner. The oval fractured and the pictures multiplied and flowed up the walls, rippled across the floor, warped as they passed through curtains and furniture. The room fell away, its wood and stone dissolving, leaving her on cushion floating in undefined space. Vertigo stunned her. A scabrous hand clawed at her and she screamed again and toppled backward. She covered her eyes and lay sobbing until he touched her arm and stroked her hair. He said, —I’d forgotten. I’m sorry. It’s safe to look. She peeked through her fingers. The magic lantern still whirred and clicked and projected grainy, diffuse blob of light. The ghouls and specters had receded into the undulating murk. He kissed her forehead. —Pop would set that rig in my room and commence playing. If I shut my eyes, he’d slap me with his belt. If I screamed, I’d get the belt. I got the belt a lot. There are four hundred plates in that box. See what I mean? See what I was dealing with?
—Shut it off.
—It’s off.
—All the way off. Do it, or I’m going to get a hammer and smash that Goddamned thing into a billion Goddamned pieces.
—Easy, the spring has to unwind. I put the dropcloth over it.
She wiped her eyes and sat on the couch. —What the hell was that?
—A phantasmagoria, like I said. It’s called Lepers of the Black Wood. Made by a guy in Snoqualmie around 1890. He probably enjoyed scaring the bejeezus out of his kids, just like my old man. Damn, you’re shaking like crazy.
—The face, the half skull…thing. That was Carling.
—Really. A keen light entered his eyes, less sympathetic than interested. —It’s not a real picture. It’s a drawing, a facsimile. The artists would gather a well-heeled crowd into a parlor and lay this on them. Then the girls would faint, the gents would scream, and everyone had hot toddies after and pretended it was all so very vulgar and it hadn’t affected them in the slightest.
—That was your sister.
—No. It’s an abstracted figure etched onto a plate over one hundred years ago.
She leaped to her feet, took three steps and grabbed the tripod and slung it across the room. The magic lantern crashed through the window and sailed on, shutters shuttering, frail beams of blue and red and yellow rotating, a satellite launched beyond the solar system and into deep space. A breeze ruffled the curtains, snagged them in the jagged hole in the window glass.
—Feel all better? The little fake smile was back, sharper than before. His arms were folded. He clicked the button on the foot of the lamp with his toe. Click, click, clickety-click, and no light. He tried the other lamp. More clicking and the living room remained in darkness but for a bit of light seeping through the hall from the distant kitchen. —Bloody ancient wiring, he said.
—I need a drink, she said. Her pleasant high had been snuffed in the rush of terror.
—Well, that’s a shame, he said. —We’re plumb dry. Dry as a dry county in Bible-thumping country.
—The hell we are, she said. She shrugged on her pea coat and tucked her hair under the collar and walked out the front door. The walkway was paved in irregular stones and bordered by a knee-high stone fence cluttered with roses and other thorny plants. The weak illumination from the kitchen window showed her the way to the car. Clouds hung low against the impenetrable mass of trees and the air was thick and damp and the wan light in the window gave the impression that the house floated atop a vast dark sea. She unlocked the car and considered sliding behind the wheel and making good her escape. The dome light flashed and died. Her gym bag lay on the back seat. She’d stuffed two bottles of whiskey and one of brandy inside. She wasn’t much for hard liquor, save for special occasions. Tonight seemed a worthy exception and she popped the cork and had a slug of whiskey. It helped. A patch of sky brightened and the clouds thinned over the field that separated the lane from the forest. A beam of moonlight filtered down and shone upon the long wet grass, spread rapidly across the field. Mist steamed from the grass and hung like cobwebs in the branches of the trees. The trees shuddered, tops whipping together without wind to stir them, and the grass vibrated rapidly and clods of leaves and di
rt drifted lazily into the air. The vista was a snow globe shaken until its innards separated. She swayed, realizing in that instant the phantasmagoria, like a bad acid trip, was still altering her perceptions, and with an act of will she forced the world to steady. Mist and the clouds reformed and the light reversed itself and the curtain of darkness dropped upon the field. Someone shrieked in the distance. She quickly returned to the house. She bolted the door. He came through the French doors that let into the back yard. He carried a flashlight in one hand and some tools wrapped in canvas under his arm.
—A terrible thought has occurred to me, he said. She stared at him, not wanting to know what form this terrible thought of his would assume. She didn’t say anything. He said, —I’m gonna see why Pop spiked my bedroom door. Wanna help?
—After, maybe. She showed him the bottle. They went into the kitchen. There was a bag of crushed ice in the freezer and she put a handful of it into a pair of water glasses and filled them the rest of the way with whiskey. They drank the whiskey and then stood for a while, holding their empty glasses without speaking or glancing at one another. She thought he was looking worse for the wear. His face was pale and the flesh around his eyes was bruised. A bat smacked into the window and they both jumped. The bat scrabbled and fluttered against the panes and she thought it was trying to warn them.
—Bah. I’m going. He set his glass in the sink and collected his tools. His face was sweaty and pale. He shuffled with his head below his shoulders.
She said quickly, —Let’s get a hotel. For tonight. We’ll come back in the daylight and do whatever it is you’ve got to do. He shook his head and continued into the hall and toward the stairs at the far end. She followed, and again resisted the temptation to run to the car and burn rubber for the city. The hall was dark. His footsteps creaked on the landing just above her, but when she climbed to the third floor he was already kneeling before the door of his old bedroom, prying at it with a crowbar. He muttered and growled, his hair sticky and disheveled, his features contorted in the shine of the flashlight lying nearby. —What was the terrible thought? she said. He turned his head toward her. His mouth articulated, but made no sound. He stood, gripping a hatchet instead of the crowbar, and she took an unsteady step backward, grabbed the railing at the top of the stairs and narrowly avoided a tumble. —What is it? she said, trying not to sound desperate. At some point during the evening reality had reconstituted at the quantum level, had remade itself, was accelerating toward a final, apocalyptic transmogrification. He swung the hatchet in a ponderous overhand blow against the middle of the door. And again. And again until it cracked and splintered and became a toothy maw. He stopped to survey his work. She cautiously approached him and peeked over his shoulder at what he’d made. An angular hole bored into a space as stale and dry as a tomb. The flashlight was in his hand and its beam wavered across vague shapes, revealing piecemeal, a chair, a trunk, the brass footboard of a child’s bed. The bed itself lay in the thicker darkness.
—Wait here, he said. He wriggled through the hole, head and shoulders first. His pants leg ripped. From her perspective she couldn’t make sense of the proportions of the room, nor his movements. Suddenly his silhouette, seemed farther away than it should’ve, as if he’d descended into a cavern. A breath of air sighed from the hole in the door and fluttered her hair. She called his name. He said, —There’s something on the…Oh, no. He gave a cry of anguish. The flashlight beam swept in erratic circles as he repeated Oh no,oh no,oh no! The light went out and his cries ceased. She peered into the void and said his name again. He didn’t answer. Another faint puff of stale air stirred dust motes and burned her nose and throat. The dust stuck to her lips like pollen and tasted vaguely sweet. She briefly entertained the idea of clambering after him, but this notion filled her with overwhelming dread and sent a cascade of disjointed images through her mind. A sluice of blood poured from a split skull, a carrion bird ate a string of guts, a lake of maggots churned and she fell into it from a great height. Was this what he saw whenever he contemplated selling the house? She recoiled with a groan and after a few moments of shocked paralysis, regained her strength and screamed for him until her fear grew too strong and she backed away from the door and made her way down the stairs, leaning against the rail lest she collapse. The record player scratched at a low volume, back to Sinatra and that old black magic. There was a soft, flickering light at the bottom of the stairs. The light emanated from white and black candles arranged at the points of a pentagram scrawled in black wet paint on the living room floor. Her naked husband knelt inside the pentagram and beside a pair of bare feet. She could not see the owner of the feet as the couch partially blocked her view. Carling reclined on the couch. Carling wore a black robe; the robe was open, revealing the white curve of her hip and breast. The family patriarch stood, dressed in a black robe with the cowl thrown back. He was flushed and beaming with paternal joy. His left hand rested upon his son’s head. Her husband made a labored sawing motion and the feet twitched and danced, slapping against the floorboards. The room blurred in and out of focus and began to slide toward the crimson edge of her vision. She made a small sound and the trio glanced toward the stairs. They seemed surprised to see her.
