Swift to Chase

by Laird Barron

  By the beam of a heavy-duty flashlight, the men stretch the tarp as a windbreak. They shore and buffer the enclosure with hastily gathered alder branches and rocks. In the end, we cuddle into a hole and pull the lid over ourselves. I’m wedged between Parker and Moses. A rock digs into my spine. It is cold, concentrated cold, and numbs me with dreadful immediacy. The canvas molds over my face in a death mask, tightening, then slackening with the gusts. The wind roars in the absolute blackness. Farther off, a fluting note as ice shears free of its mooring and is dashed upon the rocks.

  Tomorrow we’ll find a better shelter, build a fire if we can, if we survive the night. I shiver uncontrollably. I am a particle adrift in a gulf. The horizontal fall is endless—

  —“What’s going on with you?” Conway says. He’s got my cock in his hand, but not much is happening. “You’re different these days.” A not good kind of different, apparently, because his voice is too flat to mean anything else.

  I’m on my back on the bed, staring at the wall, at the Wawal tapestry of a stigmatic Christ that I appropriated from the estate of a wealthy geezer in Maryland. The image doesn’t thrill me, nothing does. I am bereft and confused. I am still falling; have been since the night I went to Gander’s house. When was that anyway? Before or after the year in Alaska? Before or after the crash?

  “Sam?”

  I turn my head and look him in the eye. He’s whole, handsome. I understand what he wants and choose to play dumb, which is a mistake. Despite his Ivy League degree Conway’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he’s far from dull. He’s intuitive as the devil. Sometimes we’re so synched it’s as if he’s in my head. Cue the persistent whisper in the back of my mind: I came here to the coldest place I could find because it slows everything. The cold. There is no way to explain my experience in Alaska to Conway any more than I could to the investigators or the shrink. Not in a truthful fashion. To the cops and officials, I gave lies. With my beloved, I let my smile be the lie. Only, he isn’t having it.

  “Sam. Where are the others?”

  I wish I knew. Except, I do know—

  —The storm lasts thirty-nine hours, then there’s a lull. Maddox crawls forth, reborn from the stone womb into a new Ice Age. The sun is a crimson blob low on the horizon, Polyphemus glaring through a hole in the clouds. The other two men follow him, creaking and cracking as they move. They are stick men, dry as tinder. It is so cold spit freezes on my lips. It is so cold my tongue is a clammy lump, separate from the rest of my flesh. Thirst gouges my throat. The others stand over me, black silhouettes seething. Maddox and Parker yank me from the hole like I’m a sack of feathers. Parker hands me a snowshoe to use as a crutch. I’m wobbly and in a lot of pain. On my feet and under my own power, however.

  Moses says, “There’s gonna be another blow.” He’s covered in a glittery coat of hoarfrost. He resembles a ghost. We all do. I’m thinking we’re very close to it now. The abyss that men tumble into when they shuffle off the mortal coil is right here, always present in places such as this one. The bones of the earth are all around us.

  We need a shelter, a fire, and water. Moses chops ice with a hatchet and stows it in a bag. We move against the flank of the mountains, searching for a cave or an abandoned cabin, any kind of habitation. The wind picks up again–

  –There’s a scene in Ardor that transcends the smut and the schlock. It is the scene wherein dutiful Renfield and the Count repose after a murderous orgy. The count reveals that his body is an illusion, a projection of pure darkness given fleshly form. He isn’t a sentient creature, merely the imitation of one, the echo of one. The consumption of blood is a metaphor, larger than sex, more terrible than repression. There’s a hole no man can fill, says the count. No amount of love or hate or heat poured into the pit. No amount of light. I am the voice of the abyss.

  The idea of Dracula as genius loci is, well, genius. Vampires as black holes, the dull and ravenous points of a behemoth’s fangs. Out of place for a smut flick, I admit, yet brilliant. Too bad it didn’t clue me in to my imminent peril. By a trick of the camera, Dracula implodes in slow motion, a star collapsing into itself, and for a moment the bed is rent with a slash of radioactive blackness and bits of ash.

  Then the film skips and it’s back to fucking and sucking–

  –I emerge from the bathroom and find Conway naked atop the covers. He’s peering through a magnifying glass at the papers from the antique valise Professor Gander gave me.

  Valise and contents are dated at approximately ninety years old. The leather is wrinkled, the documents crinkled and yellow as the piss I just took. These items, the curious circumstances of its last owner’s flight from civilization, are supposed to convince me. Silly, wicked Gander. The only thing that convinces me is money.

  Conway frowns. “Who wrote this? The fellow’s penmanship was atrocious. From this passage all I can make out is, “My wound won’t close.”

  I don’t get a chance to answer because the next slide clicks into place and I’m shot forward in time and back to Alaska. Nobody knows the trouble I see, except my comrades and none of them can do shit about it either.

  Smyth emerges from the storm to deliver us from our predicament. His skull is stove in, as if by a hammer blow, so I can make out the ossified coils of his forebrain and I’m trying to remember if Dr. Seward trepanned Renfield in an attempt to save his life. Smyth’s appearance is more monstrous than any master makeup artist could hope to devise. He is an upright cadaver manipulated by strings of icy vapor.

  His song is irresistible, although he explains it’s not his, that he’s merely a vessel. He speaks of cabbages and kings and how a combination of saline and cold will send a death spike into the depths of the sea, killing everything it touches. He describes a crack that runs through the dark of space and how it bends the light, how it wears faces and how it wails. How it drinks heat. He is a madman. I’ve never seen a tongue so long or black.

  Eventually, he lights a wooden pipe and passes it around the circle. Claims the hash is from a batch made by monks in 1756, so it’s the good stuff. Calls it crypt dust, or something like that. Insists we fortify ourselves for the walk, and nobody argues. I don’t taste much of anything, don’t feel much of anything, and decide it’s probably leaves and twigs. I change my tune a few minutes later when the sun begins to contract and expand like an iris.

  He leads us to a palace he’s carved from ice and rock. Nothing lives anywhere around his home. The desiccated carcasses of bats lie strewn everywhere. Hundreds of them. A carpet of shrunken heads and brittle matchstick bones. Rocks for furniture, icicle stalactites for chandeliers, an irregular pit in the tilted floor. The pit is approximately four feet in diameter. It wheezes a foul, volcanic draft.

  Smyth says coming down from the experience of starring in Ardor was nearly the death of him. In a fit of despair, he went to his dressing room and drank a fifth of bourbon and shot himself in the head. He wore hats everywhere after that incident.

  I came here to the coldest place I could find because it slows everything. The cold. It keeps me. While he’s talking, we’re in a state of exultant exhaustion. We’ve taken a hit of the dragon and the world has the substance of a dream.

  Parker asks about the hole.

  “That’s the crack that runs through everything,” Smyth says. “I dug it myself.” The sonofabitch doesn’t even need to move fast, we’re all dumb and stuck in our tracks as cows lowing on the ramp to the killing floor. He uses the hatchet that Moses brought along, two or three licks apiece. I’m lucky, it’s only my thigh, and Parker’s kind of lucky too.

  The bodies of the unfortunate slough into the pit that’s awaited us a million years—

  —My parents are old as the dust that blows across Texas where they’ve retreated to for those golden years. I haven’t spoken to them since Vietnam got cooking. Dad didn’t take to his son turning out gay, honorable combat service or not, and Mom, well, as her husband went, so did she.

  It’s be
en a few months and I’ve slowed down on the pills and the booze and am sufficiently restored to humanity to report my true findings, the findings I haven’t told anyone, not Professor Gander, not the cops, not Conway.

  Molly Lindstrom’s parents remind me of mine, except a bunch richer. Their house is in a gated neighborhood amid carefully manicured forestland outside of Seattle. Burt Lindstrom made his dough in the engineering division of a certain well-known aerospace company. His is a precise and austere mind. Wouldn’t know it from the décor. Antique hunting rifles, swords, and moose-heads on the walls and nothing to do with aviation or aviators. He favors red and black checked plaids, denim pants, and logging boots. Makes Lee Marvin seem soft and cuddly in comparison. His wife, Margaret, a former bathing beauty, has gone thick in the middle. She’s in a dress, a blue one. Her eyes are cruel as a bird’s.

  Their guard, a goon named Larry, stands at the window. He’s peering through binoculars back the way I drove in. “Brown sedan, last year’s model. Just pulled a U-turn outside the gate. Two guys.” He keeps on scanning with the binoculars. His lips move silently. He’s got a gun slung under his ugly tweed jacket.

  I’d seen the car on the highway, trying to blend with traffic and not quite making it.

  “That’ll be the feds,” Mr. Lindstrom says to the goon while he stares at the brand-spanking new scars on my cheeks where the frostbite laid its brand. “Got you on a short leash, huh? They reckon you kilt that man of theirs. Left him on the ice. I gotta buck says you did. Kind of hombre you are.”

  Parker’s white smile flickers in my mind. “I didn’t kill him,” I say with real weariness. It’s the hundredth-and first time I’ve said the words.

  “And I don’t give a shit,” says Mr. Lindstrom.

  “A drink?” Mrs. Lindstrom is already gliding toward the liquor cabinet. She’s got the grace of a magician’s assistant. Lickety-split, hubby and I are each clutching a scotch and soda in front of the hearth. There’s a fire in there. I’m sweating in the nice suit Conway made me wear, but frozen at the core. After Alaska, nothing will ever warm me up again.

  She says to him, sweet as pie, “Civility, Burt. We agreed how you’d be.” Those eyes again. I wouldn’t want to be trapped on a lee shore with her and no supplies.

  He smiles like you do when you get punched in the balls. “Sure, hon. How’s the booze, Cope? Fix you another?”

  “No, sir. I’m fine.” I’m not fine. I’m minus a leg and I use a cane and I’ve gone from recreational drinker to hardened drunk.

  “Gander says you have something for us. You met Smyth.” Mr. Lindstrom’s mouth twists and he visibly restrains himself, turns away and says to the goon, “Get some air, Larry.” The goon makes himself scarce.

  Mrs. Lindstrom moves close to me. I doubt there’s much contact between her and the husband, and she’s starved. She smells bitter, like winter flowers. “He told you about my daughter?”

  I nod and sip scotch.

  “You anglin’ for more cash?” He gives a snort of contempt. “I’ll write you a damned check on the spot. Out with it, man!”

  “Easy, dear, easy,” she says to her husband. Then to me, “We saw the film, Mr. Cope. There isn’t anything you can say that will shock us. All we want is a little peace. Her marker is over an empty plot. I can’t bear it anymore.”

  He drains his glass, seems poised to chuck it at the fire. “She had a bit part. Basically an extra, for Chrissake. Bride of Dracula Number Three. So what? Those rat bastard producers seduced her. Smyth sold her a bill of goods how he was gonna make her the next Monroe. Molly was a good girl. She mixed with bad people.” He runs out of steam and stares dumbly into the distance.

  “No argument here,” I say. Bride of Dracula Number Three took it in the ass on screen, and did some other naughty stuff too. Not mine to judge. I steel myself. “Molly’s dead, ma’am. She died ten years ago in Los Angeles. Remember when Mr. Lindstrom flew to LA to help the private dick he’d hired to search? Well, he and this lowlife named Brent Williams found her all right, shacked up with a hood from the projects, strung out on heroin and hooking for rent money. Ardor ruined her. Ruined her in every way you can imagine. There was an argument. Your husband killed her and the pimp in a twenty-dollar-a-night motel room. It was an accident, everything simply got out of hand. The dick got rid of the bodies himself.” I stare at her, try to project compassion at her blank, shocked face. “It was you who hired me, isn’t that right, ma’am? Your husband signed the check, but it was you, because you couldn’t have known, and he went along, played the part of the grieving dad. And I guess maybe you are grieving, Mr. Lindstrom. Maybe you’re sorry for what you’ve done.”

  Nobody says anything for a bit. Then Mrs. Lindstrom bursts into tears and flees the room, face buried in her hands.

  “You bastard,” Mr. Lindstrom says and shakes his head the way a confused bear might. “You come in here and make my wife cry? Bad mistake, son.” He takes a knife from his pocket. A big one with a fixed blade that would’ve done nicely as a bayonet.

  The guard confiscated my piece when I came onto the property. That’s why I’m standing next to a pair of crossed cavalry sabers. I hope against hope they’re sharp—

  —Smyth wrote this in one of his abandoned journals: As a boy I started with bugs and small animals. I accidentally clipped the end of my index finger off at age sixteen while stacking chairs in the school gymnasium. It completely repaired itself within two and half years. Spontaneous regeneration. This was long before I discovered the Bluefield papers. Bluefield was a crank living in the wrong century. Still, his instincts were true. After my last film with Lewton I visited Borneo on holiday and trekked into the brush, learning the old ways. I ate a fresh human heart. The hetman of a friendly tribe told me I’d inherit the strength and the vigor of the fallen warrior. It tasted sweet. There’s no returning from that. Sadly, it’s only part of the secret. The keyhole you peer through. The dark mystery itself is unapproachable. —

  —Parker is still ticking, still got some fight in him. He’s missing some pieces, so not that much fight. He says to me in a tired voice, “I suppose the fact your grandfather was a gangster makes us meeting like this sort of poetic.”

  “You say poetic, I say pathetic. Wait a second. You’re a cop?” I mug at him, best as I am able. He smiles weakly. I’m groggy. Haven’t had a sip of water in hours. Two days since I last ate. The tips of my fingers and toes are numb and my heart knocks too fast. I’m bruised, possibly concussed. My back is sprained, and worst of all, my left thigh has suffered a severe laceration. None of this bodes well.

  Beyond this litany of woes looms a bigger problem.

  The others have bled out on the ice floor of the crystal cave. All that life coagulated into a crimson slick. The enormous cascade of blood is too hot to completely freeze. It oozes toward the hole in the floor. The pit that has awaited us for a million years.

  Parker and I cling to a rough section a few feet upslope. We’ve linked arms and combined our waning strength. The ice is damp and slippery. Inch by inch our purchase loosens and we slide toward doom.

  The man who once played Renfield on the silver screen throws back the hood of his bearskin parka and laughs. His hands are bare to the elements, fingernails blackened or gone. I try not to consider what he’s done, what he’s going to do.

  He says, “The tragedy is that the Renfield figure wants what the master already has. Immortality. After all my searching, all my supplication, all my obeisance, I have found only a slower way of dying.”

  The walls of ice molt crimson. They seep and drip.

  My grip fails. Parker groans and slides past me, down the bloody ice chute into the shaft that probably goes straight past Hell to China. The groan is merely a sound he’s making. It doesn’t touch his eyes. I’ll never get to ask him if he’d gone undercover to bust me or to get a line on Smyth, that alleged murderer of starlets.

  A moment later I’m gone too and Smyth whistles to mock my departure—r />
  —And then I die—

  —Maybe an eon passed in the void. How would I know? Mostly I spent the time falling like a stone into an abyss. There were interludes when I segued from falling into walking through a vast maze, a hedgerow of obsidian. The sky was also obsidian splintered by jags of white light. The light was so dim and so far away it might’ve been the inverse of itself. Figures moved in the distance. Moses and Maddox. I couldn’t quite catch them to see for certain. Parker paced me by trudging backwards. A bit green around the gills and sickly pale. Breathing, though. I cried out to him and he smiled and drifted away.

  Sometimes Smyth’s disembodied voice echoed along the twists and turns. “I didn’t travel into the wilderness to find the dark. I brought the dark with me. The seed is inside everybody, waiting for a chance.”

  Another occasion he said, “I went out there to be alone. You got what you wanted, you stupid twit?”

  I realized I was probably talking to myself and in those moments of clarity the maze disintegrated and I’d be lying in that grave on the ice between my comrades, or plummeting from the sky in the plane, or kissing Conway at the Phoenix Theatre, or transfixed in a study while Ardor squelched and squealed on the wall and stodgy guests gawked at my apparition.

  In every case the snow returns, and covers me—

  —I wake in the summer to a good morning blowjob, but the ruined nerves in my remaining leg kill me and the vertigo unmans me and I scream and Conway has to hold me down until I stop. I lie there in a sweat and tell him the fog has lifted. I remember everything in Technicolor.

  He cautions that I can’t trust my recollections, claims I returned to Seattle a night before I ever left and then blinks and says he didn’t say anything that crazy. He leaves red marker messages on the mirror: Where’s her body, Sam? I confront him and he kisses my ear and says I didn’t get eaten by the Ouroboros and shit out into an alternate universe. Take your meds and do your physical therapy, Sam. Where’s her body, Sam? Where’s Parker’s body? Where are they, Sam?