Swift to Chase

by Laird Barron

  He was telling the truth as I understood it from my research of the legends. To witness the Hunt, to interfere with the Hunt, was to become prey. I’d wondered why the emissaries of the Horned One waited so long to come after me, especially considering the magnitude of my transgression. “Well, I reckon that was sporting of you. Twenty years. Plenty of time for Odysseus to screw his way home from the front.”

  “And you’re almost there too,” Graham said. “Crazy ass scene on the ice, huh? Sergio Leone meets John Landis and they do it up right with razors. Man, you were totally Eastwood, six-gun blazing. Wounded the Huntsman in a serious way. Didn’t kill the fucker, though. Don’t flatter yourself on that score. Might be able to smoke the hounds with regular bullets. That shit don’t work so well on the Huntsman. We’re of a higher order. Nah, when that storm hit, some sort of force went through me, electrified me. I tore free of the altar and jumped on the bastard’s back, stuck a hunting knife into his kidney. Still wouldn’t have worked except the forces of darkness were smiling on me. Grooved on my style. The Boss demoted him, awarded me the mantle and the blade, the hounds, and more bitches in Hell than you can shake a stick at. I’ve watched you for a while, bro. Watched you lose your woman, your career, your health. You’re an old, grizzled bull. No money, no family, no friends, no future. It’s culling time, baby.”

  “Shit, you’re doing me a favor! Thanks, pal!”

  “Come on, don’t be sarcastic. We’re still buds. This is going to be super-duper painful, but no reason to make it personal. Your hide will be but one more tossed atop a mountainous pile beside a chthonic lagoon of blood and the Horned One’s bone throne. The muster roll of the damned is endless and the next name awaits my attentions.”

  “Okay, nothing personal. Here’s the deal since I’m the one with the hand cannon. You hold still and I’ll blow your head off. Take my chances with whomever they send next. No hard feelings.” I debated whether to shoot him under the table or risk raising the gun to aim properly.

  Graham laughed. “Whoa, chief. This isn’t the place. All these hapless customers, the dishwasher, the fry cooks. That sexy waitress. If we turn this into the O-K Corral, the Boss himself will be on the case. The Horned One isn’t a kindly soul. He comes around, everybody gets it in the neck. Them’s the rules, I’m afraid.”

  A vision splashed across the home cinema of my imagination: every person in the diner strung from the rafters by their living guts, the hounds using the corpses for piñatas and the massive, shadowy bulk of the Horned God flickering fire in the parking lot as he gazed on in infernal joy. Like as not this image was projected by Graham. I glanced out the window and spotted one of the pack, a cadaverous brute in a threadbare parka and snow pants, pissing against the wheel of a semi. In another life he’d been Bukowski or Waits, or a serial killer who rode the rails and shanked fellow hobos, a strangler of coeds, a postman. I knew him for a split second, then not. Other hounds leaped from trailer to trailer, frolicking. Too dark to make out details except that the figures flitted and fluttered with the lithe, rubbery grace of acrobats.

  I said, “Tell me, Steve. What would’ve happened to you if I hadn’t interrupted the party? Where would you be tonight?”

  He shrugged and his movie star teeth dulled to a shade of rotten ivory. “Ah, those are the sort of questions I try to let lie. The Boss frowns on us worrying about stuff above our pay grade.”

  “Would you have become a hound?”

  “Sometimes a damned soul gets dragged over to join the Hunt. Only the few, the proud. It’s a rare honor.”

  Cold clamped on the back of my neck. “And the rest of the slobs who get taken? Where do they go after you’re done with them?”

  “Not a clue, amigo. Truly an ineffable mystery.” His grin brightened again, so white, so frigid. He put on the cowboy hat. I could see it clear, now — the logo was a red patch with a set of black antlers stitched in the foreground. Sign of the Horned God who was Graham’s master on the Other Side.

  Minerva’s snarls and growls escalated to full-throated barks as she bristled and lunged. She’d had her fill of Mr. Death and his shark smirk. One of the truckers set down his coffee cup, pointed a thick finger at me, and said, “Hey, asshole. Shut that dog up.”

  Graham’s eyes went dark, monitors tuned to deep space. A stain formed on the breast of his lily-white mackinaw. Blood dripped from his sleeve and the stink of carrion wafted from his mouth. He rose and turned and his shoulders seemed to broaden. I caught his profile reflected in the window and something was wrong with it, although I couldn’t tell what exactly. He said in a distorted, buzzing voice, “No, you shut your mouth. Or I’ll eat your tongue like a piece of Teriyaki.”

  The trucker paled and scrambled from his seat and fled the diner without a word. His buddy followed suit. They didn’t grab their coats or pay the tab, or anything. Other folks had twisted in their seats to view the commotion. None of them spoke either. The waitress stood with her ticket book outthrust like a crucifix.

  Graham said to them, “Hush, folks. Nothing to see here.” And everyone took the hint and went back to his or her business. He nodded and faced me, smile affixed, eyes sort of normal again. “I better get along, li’l doggie. Wanted to say hi. So hi and goodbye. Gonna keep trucking east? Wait, forget I asked. Don’t want to spoil the fun. See you soon, wherever that is.” Yeah, he grinned, but the wintry night was a heap warmer.

  “Wait,” I said. “You mentioned rules. Be nice to know what they are.”

  “Sure, there are lots of rules. However, you only need to worry about one of them. Run, motherfucker.”

  * * *

  So, how did I wind up on the road with the hounds of hell on my trail?

  I never fully recovered from the incident in ’92; not down deep, not in the way that counts. Nightmares plagued me. Oblique, horror-show recreations as seen through the obfuscating mist of a subconscious in denial. Neither I nor the shrink could make sense of them. He put me on pills and that didn’t help.

  I sold the team to a Japanese millionaire and moved to the suburbs of Anchorage with Sharon, took a series of crummy labor jobs and worked on the Great American horror novel in the evenings. She finished grad school and landed a position teaching elementary grade art. Ever fascinated with pulp classics, when the novel appeared to be a dead end I tried my hand at genre short fiction and immediately landed a few sales. By the early Aughts I was doing well enough to justify quitting the construction gig and staying home to work on stories full-time.

  These were supernatural horror stories, fueled by the nightmares I didn’t understand until it all came crashing in on me one afternoon during a game of winter golf with some buddies down at the beach. I keeled over on the frozen sand and was momentarily transported back to Norton Sound while my friends stood around wringing their hands. Normal folks don’t know what to do around a lunatic writhing on the ground and babbling in tongues.

  A week on the couch wrapped in an electric blanket and shaking with terror followed. I didn’t level with anyone — not the shrink, not Sharon or my parents, not my friends or writer colleagues. I read a piece on the Wild Hunt in an article concerning world mythology and it was like getting socked in the belly. I finally knew what had happened, if not why. All that was left was to brood.

  Life went on. We tried for children without success. I have a hunch Sharon left me because I was shooting blanks. Who the fuck knows, though. Much like the Wild Hunt, the Meaning of Life, and where matching socks vanish to, her motives remain a mystery. Things seemed cozy between us; she’d always been sympathetic of my tics and twitches and I’d tried to be a good and loving husband in return. Obviously, living with a half-crazed author took a greater toll than I’d estimated. Add screams in the night and generally paranoid behavior to the equation…

  One day she came home early, packed her bags, and headed for Italy with a music teacher from her school. Not a single tear in her eye when she said adios to me, either. That was the same week my longtim
e agent, a lewd, crude alcoholic expat Brit editor named Stanley Jones, was indicted on numerous federal charges including embezzlement, wire fraud, and illegal alien residence. He and his lover, the obscure English horror writer Samson Marks, absconded to South America with my life savings, as well as the nest eggs of several other authors. The scandal made all the industry trade rags, but the cops didn’t seem overly concerned with chasing the duo.

  I depended on those royalty checks as my physical condition was deteriorating. Cold weather made my bones ache. Some mornings my lumbar seized and it took twenty minutes to crawl out of bed. I hung on for a couple of years, but my situation declined. The publishing climate wasn’t friendly with the recession and such. Foreclosure notices soon arrived in the mailbox.

  Then, last week, while I was out on a nature hike, after all these bloody years, Graham reappeared to put my misery into perspective. We’ll get to that in a minute.

  You see, prior to this latter event, my colleague, the eminent crime novelist Jack Fort, theorized that Sharon didn’t run off to Italy because she was dissatisfied with the way things were going at home. Nor was it a coincidence that Jones robbed me blind and left me in the poorhouse (Jack also employed the crook as an agent and from what I gathered the loss of funds contributed to his own divorce). My friend became convinced dark forces had aligned against me in matters great and small. Figuring he might not dismiss me as a nutcase out of hand, I recounted my brush with the Hunt on the ice in ‘92, how that particular chicken had come home to roost. He wasn’t the least bit surprised. Unflappable Jeffrey Fort; the original drink-boiling-water-and-piss-ice-cubes guy.

  The other night when I called him we were both drunk. I spilled the story of how Graham had returned from the grave and wanted to mount my head on a trophy room wall in hell.

  Instead of expressing bewilderment or fear for my sanity, Jack said, “Right. I figured it was something like this. From grad school onward, Graham was headed for trouble, pure and simple. He was asshole buddies with exactly the wrong type of people. Occultism is nothing to fuck with. Anyway, you’re sure it’s the Wild Hunt?”

  I gave him the scoop: “Last Wednesday, I was hiking along Hatcher Pass to photograph the mountain for research. Heard a god-awful racket in a nearby canyon. Howling, psycho laughter, screams. Some kind of Viking horn. I knew what was happening before I saw the pack on the summit. Knew it in my bones — the legends vary, of course. Still, the basics are damned clear whether it’s the Norwegians, Germans, or Inuit. The pack wasn’t in full chase mode or that would’ve been curtains. They wanted to scare me; makes the kill sweeter. Anyway, I beat feet. Made it to the truck and burned rubber. Graham showed up at the house later in a greasy puff of smoke, chatted with me through the door. He said I had three days to get my shit in order and then he and his boys would be after me for real. Referred to himself as the Huntsman. So. It happened almost exactly like the legends.”

  Yeah, I knew all about the legends. I’d done my due diligence; you can bet on that. Granted, there were variations on the theme. Each culture has its peculiarities and each focuses on different aspects. Some versions of the Hunt mythology have Odin calling the tune and the exercise is one of exuberance and feral joy, a celebration of the primal. Odin’s pack travels a couple of feet off the ground. Any fool that stands in the way gets mowed like grass. See Odin coming, you grab dirt and pray the spectral procession passes overhead and keeps moving on the trail of its quarry.

  The gang from Alaska seemed darker, crueler, dirtier than the storybook versions; Graham and his troops reeked of sadism and madness. That eldritch psychosis leached from them into me, gathered in effluvial dankness in the back of my throat, lay on my tongue as a foul taint. The important details were plenty consistent — slavering hounds, feral Huntsman, a horned deity overseeing the chase, death and damnation to the prey.

  Jack remained quiet for a bit, except to cough a horrible phlegmy cough — it sounded wet and entrenched as bronchitis or pneumonia. Finally he said, “Well, head east. I might be able to help you. Graham and I knew each other pretty well once upon a time when he was still teaching and I got some ideas what he was up to after he left Boulder. He was an adventurer, but I doubt he spent all that time in the frozen north for the thrill. Nah, my bet is he was searching for the Hunt and it found him first. Poor silly bastard.”

  “Thanks, man. Although, I hate to bring this to your doorstep. Interfere in the Hunt and it’s you on the skinning board next.”

  “Shut up, kid. Tend your knitting and I’ll see to mine.”

  Big Jack Fort’s nonchalant reaction should’ve startled me, and under different circumstances I might’ve pondered how deep the tentacles of this particular conspiracy went. His advice appealed, though. Sure, the Huntsman wanted me to take to my heels; the chase gave him a boner. That said, I’d rather present a moving target than hang around the empty house waiting to get snuffed on the toilet or in my sleep. Graham’s flayed body glistening in the arctic twilight was branded into my psyche.

  “You better step lively,” Jack warned me in that gravelly voice of his that always sounded the same whether sober or stewed. A big dude, built square, the offspring of Raymond Burr and a grand piano. Likely he was sprawled across his couch in a tee shirt and boxers, bottle of Maker’s Mark in one paw. “Got complications on my end. Can’t talk about them right now. Just haul ass and get here.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that, nor the sound of his coughing. Despite a weakness for booze, Jack was one of the more stable guys in the business. However, he was a bit older than me and playing the role of estranged husband. Then there was the crap with Jones and dwindling book sales in general. I thought maybe he was cracking. I thought maybe we were both cracking.

  Later that night I loaded the truck with a few essentials, including my wedding album and a handful of paperbacks I’d acquired at various literary conventions, locked the house, and lit out.

  In the rearview mirror I saw Graham and three of his hounds as silhouettes on the garage roof, pinprick eyes blazing red as I drove away. It was, as the kids say, game on.

  * * *

  Rocketing through Indiana, “Slippery People” on the radio, darkness all around, darkness inside. The radio crackled and static erased the Talking Heads and Graham said to me, “Everybody on the lam from the Hunt feels sorry for himself. Thing of it is, amigo, you’re dialed to the wrong tune. You should ask yourself, How did I get here? What have I done?”

  The pack raced alongside the truck. Hounds and master shimmered like starlight against the velvet backdrop, twisted like funnels of smoke. The Huntsman blew me a kiss and I tromped the accelerator and they fell off the pace. One of the hounds leaped the embankment rail and loped after me, snout pressed to the centerline. It darted into the shadows an instant before being overtaken and smooshed by a tractor trailer.

  I pushed beyond exhaustion and well into the realm of zombification. The highway was a wormhole between dimensions and Graham occasionally whispered to me through the radio even though I’d hit the kill switch. And what he’d said really worked on me. What had I done to come to this pass? Maybe Sharon left me because I was a sonofabitch. Maybe Jones screwing me over was karma. The Wild Hunt might be a case of the universe getting Even-Steven (pardon the pun) with me. Thank the gods I didn’t have a bottle of liquor handy or else I’d have spent the remainder of the long night totally blitzed and sobbing like a baby over misdeeds real and imagined. Instead, I popped the blister on a packet of No-Doze and put the hammer down.

  * * *

  I parked and slept once in a turnout for a couple of hours during the middle of the day when traffic ran thickest. I risked no more than that. The Hunt had its rules regarding the taking of prey in front of too many witnesses, but I didn’t have the balls to challenge those traditions.

  The Chevy died outside Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Every gauge went crazy and plumes of steam boiled from the radiator. I got the rig towed to a salvage yard and transferred Mi
nerva and my meager belongings to a compact rental. We were back on the road before breakfast and late afternoon saw us aboard the ferry from Port Sanger, New York, to Lamprey Isle.

  What to say about LI West (as Jack Fort referred to it)? Nineteen miles north to south and about half that at its widest, the whole curved into a malformed crescent, the Man in the Moon’s visage peeled from Luna and partially submerged in the Atlantic. Its rocky shore was sculpted by the clash of wind and sea; a forest of pine, maple, and oak spanned the interior. Home of hoot owls and red squirrels; good deer hunting along the secret winding trails, I’d heard. Native burial mounds and mysterious megaliths, I’d also heard.

  The main population center, Lamprey Township (pop. 999), nestled in a cove on the southwestern tip of the island. Jack had mentioned that the town had been established as a fishing village in the early 19th Century; prior to that, smugglers and slavers made it their refuge from privateers and local authorities. A den of illicit gambling and sodomy, I’d heard. Allegedly, the name arose from a vicious species of eels that infested the local waters. Long as a man’s arm, the locals claimed.

  Lamprey Township was a fog-shrouded settlement hemmed by the cove and spearhead shoals, a picket of evergreens. A gloomy cathedral fortress reared atop a cliff streaked with seagull shit and pocked by cave entrances. Lovers Leap. In town, everybody wore flannel and rain slickers, boots and sock caps. A folding knife and mackinaw crowd. Everything was covered in salt rime, everything tasted of brine. Piloting the rental down Main Street between boardwalks, compartment of the car flushed with soft blue-red lights reflecting from the ocean, I thought this wouldn’t be such a bad place to die. Release my essential salts back into the primordial cradle.