The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

by Laird Barron

  "It's a different thing entirely. Sun and moon. Heaven and Hell." Her fingers roamed my thigh as she talked. Strange though, rather than erotic; jittery and unsynchronized as Mandibole's hand movements or Poe moonwalking as Michael pulled its strings.

  I stuck out my hand, although the gesture seemed superfluous at this point. "I'm-"

  "We know who you are, Mr. B."

  "We?"

  "Certainly. You're recognizable enough if one squints just right."

  "What's your name, baby?"

  "I'm W Lindblad. Whom else?" She swept her fingers perilously near my crotch, then tweaked my nose, leaned back and laughed coldly. Over her shoulder, the man in the turtleneck gesticulated and pantomimed the blonde's motions and behind him Mandibole exaggerated a pantomime of Mr. Turtleneck. Elsewhere, Pluto groaned and rolled off its axis.

  "I fucking knew it would be something like this." I had to chuckle, though. The last time a beautiful woman approached me at a bar she'd bought me a scotch and then asked if I'd found Jesus. JC was still missing, apparently. "Of all the poor schmucks in this joint, you had to pick on me?"

  "You're the only one rude enough to interrupt this momentous performance, this ritual that will open the way and bridge the gulf between new stars and old ones." She laughed a dog's laugh without changing expression.

  "Oh, okay. Amazing work with that puppet. I assume it's one of yours."

  "You refer to puppets as it. Refreshing. Most people say he or she."

  "No sense in imbuing inanimate objects with sexual characteristics, even in jest."

  "Says a world about you. In this case it is more correct than you could possibly conceive. The precise term, in fact. None other would do. However, Mandibole is no invention of mine. It comes from elsewhere. It's a traveler. A visitor."

  In the background, Mandibole said, "Something worse, something worse, something worse," and kept chanting it and chanting it. Several of the listeners joined in and soon it was like a church revival meeting with the parishioners chorusing the right reverend's punch lines. All of the lights had died except for the one hanging directly over the podium. Beyond the first row, all was darkness. The blonde and I sat, bumping knees, in darkness too.

  The blonde's face blended into the ink. Her eyes glinted red though, seeming to hang in blank space. "Why the ring? She's gone gone gone."

  I didn't understand for a moment, then reached instinctively for my throat where I kept my wedding ring on a chain under my collar. The ring was an empty gesture, not that acknowledging this changed anything, and so the emptiness conquered all. I couldn't decide how to feel, so I tittered uneasily. "Nice. Are you a cold reader? Do divinations for old biddies and their toy poodles in Manhattan?"

  "I like Rick James and long walks on the beach. Maybe I'm too forward. My secret weakness. I read minds as a party trick. Free of charge. So, if you had to guess, why do you think your woman left you?"

  "Leave me? Ha! She kicked my ass to the curb."

  "Why do you suppose this sad thing has occurred?"

  "Why is the center of the universe as soft as a tootsie pop undulating with nuclear sludge serenaded by an orchestra of idiot flautists playing Hail to the Chief?"

  "Fair enough," she said.

  "Wanna get out of here?" I said.

  Her red eyes burned like coals. "A minute ago you were thinking of our Lord & Savior. There's a fascinating case."

  "Is this a long story? Because-"

  "Silence, fool. That Christ was a puppet, strings played by a master in the gallery of stars, is the kind of truth that would get you burned in earlier days. The parallel between God and Gepetto, Christ and Pinocchio, surely an absurdist's delight. I think the supernatural element is bunk and lazy storytelling to boot. That the holy carpenter was only a simple lunatic with delusions of grandeur makes his fate all the more grisly, don't you agree? His suffering was the ultimate expression of the form. Torturers long ago discovered that pleasure and pain are indistinguishable after a certain point. Jesus ejaculated as the thorns dug in and the spearhead stabbed, and he waited in vain for his imaginary father. Suicide is a sin, so they say. Unless you're a martyr, then green light go. Doesn't have to be hard, even though it's harder for some. Some have a talent for destruction. I swallowed seventy sleeping pills and half a magnum of raspberry champagne on prom night. Wow, my mascara was a mess. The homecoming queen was my sister, if you can believe. She snuffed it right with a bag of bleach over her face on New Year's Eve, 2001. Bitch was better at everything."

  I froze, dreams of a semi-anonymous fare-thee-well blow job in the bathroom across the hall going down like the Titanic, so to speak, and considered the possibility that besides obvious derangement, the woman might be physically dangerous to me, especially in my current helpless state. The scene had taken on the tones of the anaconda from The Jungle Book cartoon mesmerizing that sap Mowgli with its whirly eyes and thespian lisp: trust in me! It seemed wiser to keep my trap shut and grunt noncommittally, which is what I did.

  She said, "But he's beyond all this and he finally knows. He's a real boy now."

  "What does Jesus know? The obvious answer would be everything, at the Right Hand of God and such."

  "He's seen the beautiful thing that awaits us all. Waiting at the bottom of the hole beneath everything."

  "If you're saying shit rolls downhill, I have to concur." I turned away and she grabbed my wrist. Her flesh was icy beneath the gloves. I witnessed Christ broken upon the cross. The sky burned. Christ's battered face was my own. The sky dimmed to starless black and filled his eyes with its void. "Jesus!" I said and blinked rapidly and flinched from the woman, convinced she'd somehow projected this image into my brain.

  Mandibole cried, "Death is the aperture, the cathode into truth, the beginning! The beginning, my sweet ones. More fearsome words were never spoken. A more vile threat has never been uttered. Yes, there are worse things, worse things, and death is not among them."

  The blonde's grip tightened and tightened. Oh, yeah, an anaconda, all right. "That's a goo-ood boy," she said and her many teeth glinted as her eyes glinted. Not a serpent, but a monstrous rat with tabby tom under her claw and pleased as punch. Good ol' Punch. Or, maybe just maybe it was Judy who'd become a real girl. "I can see that you've seen. Infinite dark, infinite cold, infinite sleep. Much better than the alternative-infinite existence as a disembodied spirit. Awareness for eternity. All you have to do is let go. Let Mandibole eat your consciousness. Then, trot back to your little hotel room and go on permanent vacation."

  "My choice is non-being via having my mind dissolved or be a screaming head for eternity? What the fuck happened to door number three?" I said.

  "Be glad of the choice. Most don't receive one. Talk to L after the gig. He can help you get your mind right for the voyage into nothing. Don't quit your quest a few miles from home. Don't linger like HP and die of a tumor, last days spent wasting away on tins of cat food and the indifference of the universe. Don't end it foaming and raving in a ditch as dear Edgar did. Who'd come to your grave with a flower and a glass of brandy every winter to mark your sad demise? You don't rate, I'm afraid."

  Something cold and hard pressed against my temple and across the way, Mandibole, haloed in a shaft of hellish angelic light, the far wandering ice-light of devil stars, swiveled and stared into the gloom directly at me, into me, and winked, and an abyss was revealed.

  "Oh, what is this bullshit again?" A bulb in the liquor case behind the bar blinked to life as a diving bell surfacing from the deeps, and worldfamous publisher GVG appeared and pried the bottle from the woman's hand where she'd stuck it to my head. "Go tell Tom I don't care how many Horror Writer's Guild Awards he's got rusting on his mantle. I still don't regret not publishing that crap." He smacked her sequin-studded ass and shooed her away, and she retreated to her friends with a hiss and a glare.

  GVG owned a venerable science fiction magazine and had given me my first pro sale. I hadn't seen him since the previous year's World
Fantasy Convention.

  "Thanks," I said, slumping with sudden weariness. "Quite a scene. One minute I'm getting lucky, the next I don't even know what."

  "You weren't getting lucky, farm boy. In New York City we call that shit getting unlucky. Take a hedge trimmer to that beard and you might not scare away all the nice girls. Or, on second thought, write something remotely commercial for once. Yeah, try that second thing."

  "The girlies like a man with folding green," I said.

  "Ain't that the truth, my friend." He smiled sadly and looked me in the eye. "The secret is chicks don't dig seldom-read hosers like Mark S. So don't be that guy. A little less of your Henry James lovin'-grampa's favorite toilet reading and a bit more twenty-first century. Come into the light."

  I didn't have the heart to crack wise, or to confess that it was way too late for a career-defining shift. We listened as Mandibole dispassionately described skulls stripped to bloody bone kicked around the equivalent of an Elysian soccer field while the gods cheered and diddled each other in the grandstands. But for me the spell was broken. I said, "Not giving Tommy boy the spring cover, huh?"

  GVG shrugged and adjusted his Buddy Holly glasses. "I'm immune to the charms of pseudo philosophizing horror writers and their vampire bride entourages. Wanna see horror, come see what my three year old and a bottle of rubber cement did to the cat and a pile of slush manuscripts in my living room. Gonna have to bite the bullet and go electric one of these days. Just remember something, okay? Dunno what that spooky chick told you, what you've got planned, but the only thing that changes when you check out is that nothing ever changes again. It's no different on the other side. No different at all." With that, he squeezed my shoulder and darted back into the shadows, good deed for the evening accomplished.

  "The faithful shall be eaten first as a reward. The non believers, the scoffers, the faithless, shall be eaten last, or not at all. As for you, my sweets, your fate is this-" Mandibole ceased speaking midsentence and became inert. As slowly as it had appeared, its body now receded into L's sleeve and the sleeve collapsed upon the brief, discomfiting jangle of rusty bells, an echo of Poe and a cask of Amontillado and the masonry of ancestral catacombs, a whiff of moldy death. The lights brightened and the audience awakened, table by table, from its daze and clapped with sustained appreciation. My bottle was damn near empty and I snatched it and sidled away before the bartender remembered to charge me. One for the road to Eldorado.

  "Okay, you keep an eye on our buddy here-I'm going in," John said as I returned to our spot. He smoothed what remained of his hair, scooped up As You Know Bob and Poe, and charged off to meet his destiny.

  L had expeditiously-for such a hulking man-retreated behind the beaded curtain of his alcove. A candle or lantern flickered murkily on the other side. A conga line quickly formed-at least a dozen starry-eyed supplicants bearing books, tattered magazines from the glory days of commercial horror lit, and in John's case, a pair of cheap marionettes swiped from his kid.

  "Good luck, pal," I said to myself as Michael lolled in his seat, drooling and muttering imprecations in Pig Latin, far beyond paying John's departure or my grousing any heed. I killed the bottle and left it crossways among the cascade of empty glasses and made for the stairwell, which proved jammed with a secondary crowd of night owls who knew nothing of the reading we'd just survived, or the beautiful thing that W Lindblad swore awaited us all, but were instead standing on line for the midnight jazz club upstairs to throw open its doors. How nice for them to be them and not us!

  No one stepped aside, kissy-faces too enamored with one another, too intoxicated by their own adorableness, each of them locked elbow and flank in a swanky retro mass, as I pushed my way through the gauntlet of cocktail dresses, feathery boas and pinstripe suits and white fedoras. The people smelled pretty, and all I could see were their skulls dangling in Hell. Fuck you, Tommy L, fuck you and your little hand puppet too!

  Freezing rain tick-tacked on the sidewalk awning, the roofs of parked cars. I tightened the collar of my overcoat and hunched in the stairwell, sharing the smoke of a drunk woman balanced on high heels as she waved a cigarette and cackled into her cell phone. The air was just chilly enough to slice through the fog and remind me of how much alcohol I'd guzzled over the past few hours, and for the first time since I'd walked into the Kremlin I visualized the gun waiting for me in the dresser drawer, back at the hotel. The psycho blonde had accused me of loneliness, but that wasn't quite right. Loneliness didn't justify self-destruction. Despair and grief, self-loathing and self-recrimination, failure and desertion… those were justifications.

  Yet, the whole suicide plan sounded lame in the frigid glare of the lamps along the boulevard; a piker's lament to avoid paying the tab. Robert Service once said dying is easy, it's the keeping on living that's hard, and of course the poet was on the money, as poets usually are when it comes to smugly self-evident affirmations. I planned to blast a hole through my skull less because of insurmountable heartache, but more because I'd become too weak and too chickenshit to carry the cross one more goddamned bloody step. The marbles were going into the bag and I was headed home, exactly like any selfish, self-indulgent fifth grade snot was wont to do when confronted with one losing throw too many.

  I'd almost decided to ask the woman screeching into her phone for a cigarette despite the fact I wasn't a smoker when John and Michael burst through the doors yelling and flailing their arms. I couldn't understand a word-a string of guttural yips and clicks and snarls. They were men with hyena heads.

  That did the trick. I leaned over the rail and vomited up the dark heart of the cosmos.

  ***

  Michael went his way, barking at slow-cruising taxis that refused to stop while John and I hustled and caught the last train out of the city. Our car was empty. A throng of night-shift workers pressed on at one lonely stop, seemed to take our measure and with exchanges of warning looks moved on to the next car. Same deal with the squad of off-duty Army grunts a few minutes later.

  John and I didn't say much. His face resembled forty miles of bad road, as a country philosopher might say; hair disheveled and matted, eyes bulbous and streaked red, nose a bloody carnation; the genteel professor's bark stripped to reveal a carving: the primitive beast in the mouth of his cave. His puppets were in worse shape. Or puppet. He'd come from the Kremlin with Poe dangling from his fist, As You Know Bob conspicuously absent. Missing in action, as it were.

  The train jarred as it traveled the rails, and my teeth clicked and the lights threatened to extinguish every few seconds, and Poe's wooden body lay flopped negligently across the worn spot on John's knee. The puppet's head knocked rhythmically against the metal seat divider. Something in John's demeanor made me loath to broach the subject, and thus I satisfied my deepening curiosity with those sidelong glances we men often shoot at daring cleavage or the dude standing at the next urinal, but it was Poe that attracted my attention. Poe's visage had warped the way wood and plastic do when exposed to melting heat. One eye was lost in slag; the other had crept toward the hairline. No longer fashionably soulful, that eye-now an oblong black marble, or an overlarge pit of a rotten piece of fruit.

  I recalled Mandibole's loving and loveless description of bloody seeds and thought that yes, blood doth turn black. Poe's eye was the seed of corruption coagulated in a membrane of evil. It wasn't watching me, though my poor abused mind would've easily swallowed the premise like I'd swallowed so much scotch. Poe wasn't watching anything; whatever energy might've been imprinted upon it from kindliness and love, was gone. My recognition that the little puppet had been perverted into a dead, alien husk, and that neither Clara's doting joy nor John's paternal benevolence had done fuckall to prevent such an ominous transmogrification, caused my rebellious innards to gurgle and shift. I dared not dwell on As You Know Bob's fate.

  That steady tap-tappity-tapping of Poe's skull against metal was too much in the end. I said, "Did you get his autograph?"

  "L doesn'
t sign autographs anymore."

  "Doesn't speak, doesn't sign books, what does he do?" I said, trying for a laugh, a smirk, anything remotely human, and while I waited a string of ghostly lights of an electrical substation floated past the window, trailing into oblivion.

  John smiled, a wide, carnivorous yawn of jaws and teeth. "It was… good. He wants what's best. What's best. We're coming out of the cave. Got to, can't go on like this. Got to come out of the dark."

  In my years with John, drunk, sober, and realms between those antipodes, his tone was a new one, his slur a thing unfamiliar as something dredged onto the beach from the deep sea. Tonight had been a night of such unwelcome curiosities, and considering my circumstances, perhaps a punctuating spike in the bizarre was appropriate, my karma if karma existed, if the universe kept tabs in its own insensate fashion, mindless as gravity.

  We disembarked at the final station and slouched past dim and silent kiosks through frosty glass doors into a gathering storm. John paused at a trash bin and whispered to Poe, then he sneered and dropped the puppet into the trash and walked on without a backward glance. I called out a feeble goodbye that John returned with a perfunctory wave, then he was in his car, its door thunking shut. I started my own rental and drove to the hotel near the Newburgh Airport where the night man had on a soccer game and was relaxing with a big stack of Jack Chick pamphlets. I bought a soda from the machine in the hall because my tongue was swollen and leathery.

  Man, it was a real let down.

  I peeled some bills off the dwindling roll and left them on the coffee table for the maid, hoping she'd get them after the cops and the medics were done. I sat on the edge of the unmussed bed in that sterile, neatas-a-pin, one-hundred-and-twenty-dollar-a-night hotel room. It began to snow and flakes piled against the window. The television was broadcasting nonsense; chains of American flags, sun and moon sliding atop one another to make black rings, my wife's face in the faces of enemies and strangers, a Nazi aiming his rifle at another man's back, tribal hunters racing across a moor, snarls done in red ocher, Sufis keening in a temple, my wife again and again, and Mandibole cutting through it all, speaking in tongues except for one clear strain in the cacophony: clear as a bell Michael intoning through the creature's mouth that nothing was ever easy, not this easy, and that nothing was ever clean, this wouldn't be clean, the Eternal Footman had the check ready, no shirking the bill, no escape. This couldn't end like this because nothing ever really ended, matter simply deformed, that's what the Purple People Eaters wanted to tell us, why they'd sent a representative across the spoiled Milky Way to spread the word.