by Laird Barron
"No. Hell of a thing. Nate B and Paul from Boston were up north visiting Canadian Simon at some Podunk book festival. Those Canucks release a chapbook every other effing weekend it seems. Paul got hurt in a sledding accident, broke his wrist, but he's okay. None of the Canadians in the sled were injured. Nate should've gone sledding instead of doing whatever he was doing… He contracted a mess of flukes, so now he's getting de-wormed. Gonna be a while."
"De-wormed?" I said. "He's got worms? No shit?"
"That's what flukes are, worms," John said, so drunk he sounded sober again.
"No shit." Michael made the Scout sign. "He'll be crapping spaghetti for six weeks minimum."
"Everybody knows you don't drink the water up there," I said.
"Mentally challenged children know it," John said, taking a huge gulp of scotch. He was beginning to worry me.
"Maybe he got 'em directly from Simon," I said.
"I'm careful to stick to booze north of Maine and I don't kiss Canadians, ever," Michael said, handing me Poe's reins. He rose with the sudden grace of a mantis and fetched another round: brimming mugs of a honey mead I'd not tasted before, kind of earthy and coppery and acidic. It felt like fur sliding down my throat the wrong way. My eyes watered and the hairs in my nose bristled. "A rare cask," he said when I asked what the fuck it was. "This is the only place in New York it can be found and the proprietor only serves it to certain customers on special occasions. I'm such a customer and a live reading by L is definitely a special occasion."
"There's an occultation of the moon in three hours," John said.
"Our fair maiden in the pointy bustier mentioned it-the clincher," Michael said.
"What in blue-blazes is so special about this reading, besides a kooky horror author showing his face in public for once instead of staying in with the cats?" I said, wiping my mouth. My head felt half staved-in. Another part of my brain was turning over possibilities like a kid flipping rocks with a stick and that part of me imagined the liquor was so rare, so exotic, Michael had paid for it with a Black AMX card he only used once a decade for this singular event, and the promise of services to be rendered later. Sexual services. This simply had to be the donkey show of gourmet hooch.
We regarded one another for a few moments, then he leaned closer, so his chin was level with the tabletop, and said, "Okay, look. Here's the thing you rubes gotta know. Especially you, John-Boy. First, L won't be showing his face at all. This is the new deal. He wears a costume. And he doesn't speak."
I laughed. "Right. He doesn't speak."
"He does not."
"Oh, yeah," John said. "Meant to tell you, the guy-"
Michael shushed him with a hard look. "No, no, don't spoil the effect. He'll see soon enough."
"How does he orate if he won't open his mouth?" I said, feeling very drunk and very petulant. Pretty soon they'd be telling me the asshole didn't walk, but floated, as if on a palanquin toted by tiny elves in rhinestone jumpsuits. "Is it a pantomime like charades? An interpretive dance?"
"You'll see," Michael said and his eyes shimmered with the void I'd been noticing more and more all around me every day.
"Oh, man, it's weird," John said happily. Actually, he pitched his voice to a falsetto and held As You Know Bob in front of his face and pretended the puppet was adding its two-bits to the conversation.
"Yes, weird indeed," Michael said, brandishing Poe in a similar manner. "You'll see. You'll see."
"I do hope it's something new," I said, choosing to ignore their foolishness. "I keep the paperback of Enemy of Man in the bathroom. I've read the thing cover to cover twice."
"Yes, oh yes, you are in luck, mon frere. L's written a fresh book of essays, the companion volume to Horror of Being. No one other than his agent has even glimpsed the manuscript, but word is, it's his masterpiece. Distils fifty-odd years of spleen in one raging spume of a satirical opus. It's called The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. A howling void of blackness, I imagine." Michael said that with what I swore was a shiver of delight.
"It's going to do for the antinatalists what Ron Hubbard did for the whack jobs waiting to be whisked to Yuggoth by the E.Ts," John said.
Time and space dilated. So did the tavern and the heads of everyone inside. John and Michael were Thanksgiving parade floats tethered to chairs, smugly amused by my agnosticism toward all things L. I would see, I would see…
***
The next thing I recalled, we disembarked a subway in Brooklyn and were on the Dr. Seuss-angled steps of the Kremlin Bar that wound and wound and rose and rose from the glittery icy darkness of New York winter's night to the velvety gloom of interiors that had, in their day, seen a lot of blood from the innards of poets, and booze, and bullet holes. Wood creaked beneath our shoes and brass gleamed here and there between folds of curtains, and the space around the bar was at capacity with an audience that buzzed rather than spoke. A living, breathing, telepathically communing Yin-Yang symbol. Intimate and impersonal as an Arctic starfield. Everything smelled of cigarette smoke and liquor and sweet, sweet perfume, and musk. The golden-green light tasted exactly like the last round of mystery mead we'd shared at the nameless tavern.
I'd been in the business a while, but though I recognized an occasional face such as a genre radio show host and a couple of editors and agents and a handful of local authors, most were strangers to me, seldom glimpsed wildlife that had crept from the forest depths to gather in the sacred glade and listen to Pan wheedle on his recorder by the dark of the moon. Literally the dark of the moon as a glance at my watch confirmed the eclipse John mentioned earlier would be in progress at any moment. I was an interloper, a blasphemer, and I half-expected a torrent of white blood corpuscles to gush forth and consume me as a hostile bacterium.
John and Michael shouldered a path to our reserved spot in a corner beneath a green-gold shaded dragon lamp. Its radiance made our hands glow against the tablecloth. Ellen D, famed editor and hostess of the event, came by and said hello and snapped our pictures and bought us another round in recognition of Jack's empty seat. I just poured the whiskey straight down my gullet, inured to its puny effects, and waited for whatever was coming, to come.
Tom L was not in evidence yet. His table of honor lay near the burnished wooden podium that had propped up many generations of crazed, catastrophically inebriated authors. The table was tenanted by two women, a blonde and a brunette in slinky sheath dresses, and a man in a slinky turtleneck. The man was handsome and clean-shaven the way one can only get with a straight razor. He reminded me of the actor Jan Michael Vincent during his youth before he socked some chick in the jaw for handing his girlfriend an eight ball at a party and tanked his career. I hadn't thought of Vincent in ages. I looked sidelong at the women some more and decided they were way out of my league no matter how smashed I might endeavor to get. Both wore long velvet gloves and smoked cigarettes with hoity-toity cigarette holders. Neither wore a Dalmatian puppy stole, but that wouldn't have surprised me an iota.
"Jumping Josephat, that's W Lindblad!" John said, rattling his puppets in excitement.
"THE W Lindblad?" I said and rolled my eye.
"Is that Jan Michael Vincent?" a woman stage-whispered.
"No way… OMG! The Puppet Master is in the house! Eeeee!" I heard another woman exclaim.
"Sonofa… he flew in from Texas!" John said.
"Who wouldn't?" Michael said.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," I said and wished mightily for another shot. Drano would've worked fine. The philosophy behind HoB was becoming more appealing by the second. Every necktie made me think of nooses and solid overhead fixtures.
"Lindblad isn't allowed in the UK," Michael said, lowering his voice like we were conspiring to knock over the joint. "Larceny rap. I don't know all the details, except that he got in hot water regarding some rare book that was up for grabs on the black market by way of Finland. Ah, those wily Finns. There was a bidding war going down in some rickety warehouse on the Thames and the Bob
bies busted in and clapped the whole lot in irons. I guess twenty different consulates got frantic midnight calls. Lindblad's chummy with more Arab princes than the Bush family is, so getting the governor to pinch hit wasn't much of a trick. After much legal finessing, he was sprung on the promise he wouldn't show his face in England for a while. That, in a nutshell, is that."
"Must've been a hell of a lot of kinky nudity in ye tome," I said.
"Not really. It was the foreign edition of a US weird almanac or an occult guidebook. Rather innocuous, you ask me."
"He did a dime in Huntsville back in the late 1970s for gashing somebody with a broken wine bottle," John said with grave respect. "Lived on the mean streets, close to the bone. After getting his MFA, Lindblad was a derelict for like fifteen years, or something. L befriended him, scraped him out of the gutter and gave him a purpose. Heard that from Lee T. Lee knows everybody in Texas. Got his ear to the ground."
"That sexy little twerp over there did not do hard time in Huntsville," I said trying to remain cool. "And he sure as shit didn't do hard time in Huntsville in the '70s. Too pretty and too young. Look at those soft, effeminate hands."
"Looks sorta hard to me," John said with an intrigued arch of his brow. Luckily, his powers didn't work on suave ex cons.
"Older than he appears," Michael said. "Oil of Olay is a miracle product."
I rubbed my temples and counted to ten. Thank god right then two things happened: Ellen saw my plight and brought me another triple of whatever was cheap at the bar, and Tom L drifted from a shrouded alcove and stood near his trio of groupies. Stood, mind you, not sat. "Whoa. Okay, that's a big dude." I drank up and plunked my empty on the table and gawked, just like everybody else.
"Behold the man," John said with or without irony; I was too bombed and too awestruck to make that call.
Larger than life was a cliche that fit this apparition all too well. L was conservatively six-feet-eight and broad as the proverbial barn. His bulk was encompassed in a heavy robe of crimson silk that pooled around and hid his presumably huge feet. He wore what I can only describe as an executioner's hood, also of crimson silk. No flesh was visible, not even the glint of his eyes through the hood slits. He stood motionless, a statue briefly animated, that had shambled unto view, and was now once again frozen in place. Something about his great size and stoicism, the inscrutability of the slits for his eyes and mouth, the blithe obliviousness of his entourage as they chatted amongst themselves, ignoring the giant entirely, scared the living bejeezus out of me, scared me on the level where the coyotes and the lizards and lonely rolling tumbleweeds held sway. A polar bear had beached itself upon an ice shelf with a herd of seals and the seals barked with joy, witless to their mortal danger.
I'd seen a picture of L once, a candid shot of him in a sport coat and a bad haircut, hunched in the act of stubbing a cigarette into an ashtray, grimacing at the camera as a thief with his hand in the till might. A grainy, fuzzy, slightly out of focus picture, but clear enough and contextualized by the presence of other persons in the frame that it was utterly incongruous with the figure in crimson. The author in the photograph was of average size and build. No way no how the same individual as this behemoth holding court. I said as much to my comrades.
"He's changed over the years," Michael said. "It's rather uncanny, I admit."
"How can you be sure it's even him?"
"Who else would it be?"
I glanced at my empty glass and sighed. "Could be motherfucking Patrick Ewing in there for all we know."
The crowd was apparently sufficiently lubricated in preparation for the appointed moment. Ellen made her way to the podium where she efficiently introduced her guest with, "I present a man who needs no introduction. Please help me welcome Tom L to the Kremlin."
Applause followed, although none of the raucous hooting or whistling that usually accompanied the appearance of a famous and popular author, and the room subsided into a deep and reverential hush as the giant ascended the dais with a slow, measured shuffle and then loomed without flexing a muscle or uttering a word for at least a full minute.
This silence gathered weight. A current began to circulate through the room and the lamps dimmed further, and as they dimmed, L's already massive form seemed to absorb the light as a black hole bends and deforms everything in its well, and his silk costume shifted black and he was limned in white like the white-hot edge of a blade. Yes, my senses were swimming from enough scotch to paralyze a rhino. Nonetheless, that powerful forces were in play between performer and audience was unmistakable and unmistakably unnatural. Even though nothing was happening, everything was happening. I thought of the silvery moon going dark over the city, and behind Luna's shadow, Mars through Pluto falling into a radical symmetry, cogs linking and locking along axial darkness.
L's left sleeve rustled with inner life and slowly, horribly from its cavernous depths birthed a puppet. The thing that emerged was the girth of a toddler, soft and yellow as decayed bone, and glistening with a sheen as of jelly. It wore a skullcap, rusty bells, dark surcoat, a red cloak and red leggings; a diminutive malformed jester, or a monk of Franciscan lore. Misshapen, malignant, diabolic-the hand puppet's countenance was remarkable in its jaundiced smoothness, its cockeye, and demented smirk. Its arms were overlong, its spindly hands and fingers mockeries of human proportion. The hands were restless. They writhed and gestured, both languid and spasmodic, gracile and palsied.
The puppet gazed at the audience, tilting its head and shuttering one off-kilter eye, then the other. It reached out with the deliberateness of a hunting spider extending a pedipalp to taste prey, and tapped the microphone. During none of the creature's articulations did the towering form of L so much as twitch. So dexterous were L's manipulations, the puppet appeared to operate wholly independent from the man himself.
The puppet said breathily, the male analogue to Marilyn Monroe prepping to sing Happy Birthday, Mr. President, "I am Mandibole." And, after a pause where it groaned like an asthmatic, "Tonight, I shall recite a story created by my benefactor, the incomparable L. It has never been told. It is a true story." The voice seemed to emanate directly from the puppet's twisted lips. "Imagine the heads of everyone at every table in this room disembodied and attached, like ripe fruit, to the branches of a tree in a field. A huge, leafless tree in a wide and grassless field. The field is black dirt and the tree is also dark, fleshy and warm, however it does not live so much as persist, suckling the life force from its own fiber, its own fruit, in essence a cannibal of itself.
"The hanging heads: your comrades, your neighbors, yourselves, do not speak, cannot speak, for their mouths and yours are crammed with bloody seeds. You and they hang from the black tree in the black field, this tableaux illuminated by interior flames from the heads, for the seeds glow with fire, swelling and frothing maggots of deathly light. You sway in the breeze like Jack O' Lanterns and cannot utter protest, or question your Maker, or petition your Accuser. You are muted by choking mouthfuls of gore. And this is Hell, my friends. It will continue and continue unto Eternity, until it becomes something worse. Something worse." It repeated something worse at least twenty times, imperceptibly lowering its voice until the words trailed off.
I observed this spectacle with profound unease. I felt as a man helplessly staked near a colony of fire ants might feel, flesh crawling in anticipation of the approaching swarm. A needlessly surreptitious glance around the room confirmed that every person was slack-jawed, faces shining in rapt concentration while their bodies faded to lumps within deepening shadow. John and Michael had completely forgotten my presence. They, along with everyone else at the Kremlin, were on some distant soundstage in Hell, hanging from the Tree of Anti-Life.
Certainly my overreaction was the result of mental depression and an admittedly tenuous grasp on reality. Being wasted on god knew how many brands of liquor was likely a contributing factor. This tempered my urge to beg forgiveness of John and Michael for doubting them, for sneering at the
notion L was some evil messiah sent by the dark gods to spread a message of disharmony and dread. But only a little.
Mandibole said, "Now imagine the hours passing, the days, weeks, months…Imagine the flesh deliquescing from bone, hair peeling in strips. The blackbirds feasting on eyes, noses, tongues…But you see everything that happens, feel every exquisite inch of yourselves slithering down the craws of the flock…"
I rose and lurched to the bar, hand covering my good ear to block the persistent drone of Mandibole's oration. The bartender didn't meet my eye when I demanded a shot. He grabbed a fresh bottle of Johnnie Walker and shoved it at me. I cracked the seal and had a pull worthy of Lee Van Cleef and Lee Marvin combined, and listed against the rail, gasping for breath, and for a few moments this distracted me from whatever malevolent shit the puppet was spouting.
"Hey there, sailor," the blonde from L's table said, sliding next to me so her red lips were near my neck, the heat off her tongue tracing my skin in collaboration with the alcohol igniting my veins. Her body lotion was lilac and water. She laid her hand on my thigh and didn't exactly smile, but made an expression something like one. "Buy a girl a drink?" She took the bottle and sipped, delicate and ladylike. Her un-smile widened. "You seem sad. It's because you're alone."
"I'm with friends," I said, conscious of the thickness of my voice, wondering if its intrusion upon the scene would cause the crowd to turn on me, to hiss at me for silence. No one seemed to notice; they were a roomful of wax dummies glued into their seats, heads fused, gazes fixed upon the podium. Only the brunette and the man in the turtleneck were watching us. Both of them were doing the un-smiling thing.
"Don't worry about these…people," the blonde said, her breath hot and sweet with the Johnnie Walker. "We're all all alone in the world." She wasn't a true blonde-her roots showed dark where the peroxide ran thin.
"Of course we are. That's why I'm sad. Man alive, I carried a torch for Julie Andrews. You're more vulpine, but I'm not picky."
