Swift to Chase

by Laird Barron

  Jack’s cabin lay inland at the far end of a dirt spur. Built in the same era as the founding of Lamprey Township, he’d bought it from Katarina Veniti, a paranormal romance author who’d become jaded with all of the tourists and yuppies moving onto “her” island during the last recession. A stone and timber longhouse with ye old-fashioned shingles and moss on the roof surrounded by an acre of sloping yard overgrown with tall, dead grass. An oak had uprooted during a recent windstorm and toppled across the drive.

  Minerva and I hoofed it the last quarter of a mile. The faceless moon dripped and shone through scudding clouds and a vault of branches. The house sat in darkness except for a light shining from the kitchen window.

  “Welcome to Kat’s island,” Jack said, and coughed. He reclined in the shadows on a porch swing. Moonlight glinted from the bottle in his hand, the barrel of the pump-action shotgun across his knees. He wore a wool coat, dock-worker’s cap snug over his brow, wool pants, and lace-up hiking boots. When he stood to doff his sock hat and shake my hand, I realized his clothes hung loose as sails, that he was frail and shaky.

  “Jesus, man,” I said, shaken at the sight of him. He appeared more of an apparition than the bona fide spirit pursuing me. I understood why he didn’t mind the idea of the Hunt invading his happy home. The man was so emaciated he should’ve been hanging near the blackboard in science class; a hundred pounds lighter since I’d last seen him, easy. He’d shaved his head and beard to gray stubble; his pallid flesh was dry and hot, his eyes sparkled like bits of quartz. He stank of gun oil, smoke, and rotting fruit.

  “Yea. The big C. Doc hit me with the bad news this spring. Deathwatch around the Fort. I sent the pets to live with my sister.” He smiled and gestured at the woods. “Just you, me, and the trees. I got nothing better to do than help an old pal in his hour of need.” He led the way inside. The kitchen was cheerily lighted and we took residence at the dining table where he poured me a glass of whiskey and listened to my recap of the trip from Alaska.

  “I hope you’ve got a plan,” I said.

  “Besides blasting them with grandma’s twelve gauge?” He patted the stock of his shotgun where it lay on the table. “We’re going out like a pair of Vikings.”

  “I’d be more excited if you had a flamethrower, or some grenades.”

  “Me too. Me too. I got a few sticks of dynamite for fishing and plenty of ammo.”

  “Dynamite is good. This is going to be full on Hollywood. Fast cars, shirtless women, explosions…”

  “Man, I don’t even know if it’ll detonate. The shit’s been stashed in a leaky box in the cellar for a hundred years. Honestly, my estimation is, we’re hosed. Totally up shit creek. Our sole advantage is, prey doesn’t usually fight back. Graham’s powerful, he’s a spirit, or a monster, whatever. But he’s new on the job, right? That may be our ray of sunshine. That, and according to the literature, the Pack doesn’t fancy crossing large bodies of open water. These haunts prefer ice and snow.” Jack coughed into a handkerchief. Belly-ripping, Doc Holliday kind of coughing. He wiped his mouth and had a belt of whiskey. His cheeks were blotched. “Anyway, I brought you here for another reason. This house belonged to a sorcerer once upon a time. Type they used to burn at the stake. An unsavory guy named Ewers Welloc. The Wellocs own most of this island and there’s a hell of a story in that. For now, let me say Ewers was blackest in a family of black sheep. The villagers were scared shitless of him, were convinced he practiced necromancy and other dark arts on the property. Considering the stories Kat told me and some of the funky stuff I’ve found stashed around here, it’s hard to dismiss the villagers’ claims as superstition.”

  I could only wonder what he’d unearthed, or Kat before him. Jack bought the place for a dollar and suddenly that factoid assumed an ominous significance. “What were you guys up to? You, Kat, and Graham attended college together. Did you form a club?”

  “A witch coven. I kid, I kid. Wasn’t college… We met at the Sugar Tree Hill writers’ retreat. Five days of sun, fun, booze, and hand jobs. There were quite a few young authors there who went on to become quasi-prominent. Many a friendships and enmities are formed at Sugar Tree Hill. The three of us really clicked. Me and Kat were wild, man, wild. Nothing on Graham’s scale, though. He took it way farther. As you can see.”

  “Yeah.” I sipped my drink.

  “Me and Graham were pretty tight until he schlepped to Alaska and started in with the sled dogs. Communication tapered off and after a while we fell out of touch. I received a few letters. Guy had the world’s shittiest penmanship; would’ve taken a cryptologist to have deciphered them. I thought he suffered from cabin fever.”

  “Seemed okay to me,” I said. “Gregarious. Popular. Handsome. He was well-regarded.”

  “Yea, yea…The rot was on the inside,” Jack said and I almost spilled my glass. He didn’t notice. “As it happens, my hole card is an ace. Lamprey Isle was settled long before the whites landed. Maybe before the Mohawk, Mohican, Seneca. Nobody knows who these people were, but none of the records are flattering. This mystery tribe left megaliths and cairns on islands and along the coast. A few of those megaliths are in the woods around here. Legend has it that the tribe erected them for use in necromantic rituals. Summon, bind, banish. Like Robert Howard hypothesized in his Conan tales — if the demonic manifests on the mortal plane, it becomes subject to the laws of physics, and cold Hyperborean steel. Howard was on to something.”

  “Fairy rocks, huh?” I said. The whiskey was hitting me.

  “Got any problem believing in the Grim Reaper with a hunting knife and a pack of werewolves chasing you from one end of the continent to the other?”

  I tried again. “So. Fairy rocks.”

  “Fuckin’ A, boy-o. Fairy rocks. And double aught buckshot.”

  * * *

  We took shifts at watch until dawn. The Hunt didn’t arrive and so passed a peaceful evening. I slept for three hours; the most I’d had in a week. Jack fried bacon and eggs for breakfast and we drank a pot of black coffee. Afterward he gave me a tour of the house and the immediate grounds. Much of the house gathered dust, exuding the vibe particular to dwellings of bachelors and widowers. Since his wife flew the coop, Jack’s remit had contracted to kitchen, bath, and living room. Too close to a tomb for my liking.

  Tromping around the property with our breath streaming slantwise, he showed me a megalith hidden in the underbrush between a pair of sugar maples. Huge and misshapen beneath layers of slime and moss, the stone cast a shadow over us. It radiated the chill of an ice block. One of several in the vicinity, I soon learned.

  Jack wasn’t eager to hang around it. “There were lots of animal bones piled in the bushes. You’ll never catch any animals living here. Wasn’t the two decks of Camels I smoked every day since junior high that gave me cancer. It’s these damned things. Near as I can figure, they’re siphons. Let’s pray the effect is magnified upon extra-dimensional beings. Otherwise, Graham will eat our bullets and spit them back at us.”

  The megalith frightened me. I imagined it as a huge, predatory insect disguised as a stone, its ethereal rostrum stabbing an artery and sucking my life essence. I wondered if the stones were indigenous or if the ancient tribes had fashioned them somehow. I’d never know. “Graham’s an occultist. Think he’s dumb enough to walk into a trap?”

  “Graham ain’t Graham anymore. He’s the Huntsman.” Jack scanned the red-gold horizon and muttered dire predictions of another storm front descending from the west. “Trouble headed this way,” he said and hustled me back to the house. We locked and shuttered everything and took positions in the living room; Jack with his shotgun, me with my pistol and dog. Seated on the leather Italian sofa, bolstered by a pitcher of vodka and lemonade, we watched ancient episodes of The Rockford Files and Ironside and waited.

  Several minutes past 2 P.M. the air dimmed to velvety purple and the trees behind the house thrashed and rain spattered the windows. The power died. I whistled a few bars of the Twil
ight Zone theme, shifted the pistol into my shooting hand.

  He grinned and went to the window and stood there, a blue silhouette. The booze in my tumbler quivered and the horn bellowed, right on top of us. Glass exploded and I was bleeding from the head and the hand that I’d raised to protect my face. Wood splintered and doors caved in all over the house and the hounds rolled into the living room; long, sinuous figures of pure malevolence with ruby-bright eyes, bodies low to the floor and moving fast, teeth, tongues, appetite. I squinted and fired twice from the hip and a bounding figure jerked short. Minerva pounced, snarling and tearing in frenzy, her doggy mind reverting to the swamps and jungles and caves of her ancestors. Jack’s shotgun blazed a stroke of yellow flame and sheared the arm of a fiend who’d scuttled in close. Partially deafened and blinded, I couldn’t keep track of much after that. Squeezed the trigger four more times, popped the speed loader with six fresh slugs, kept firing at shadows that leaped and sprang. The Riders of the Apocalypse and Friends galloped through the house; our own private Armageddon. More glass whirled and bits of wood and shreds of drapery; a section of ceiling collapsed in a cascade of sparks and rapidly blooming white carnations of drywall dust. Now the gods could watch.

  Thunder of gunshots, Minerva growling, the damned, yodeling cries of the hounds, and crackling bones wound around my brain in a knotted spool. I got knocked down in the melee and watched Minerva swing past, lazily flying, paws limp, guts raveling behind her. I’d owned many dogs, Minerva was my first and only pet, my dearest friend. She was a mewling puppy once more, then inert bone and slack hide, and gone, gone, the last pinprick of my old life snuffed.

  Something was on fire. Oily black smoke seethed through a vertical impact crater where the far wall had stood. Clouds and smoke boiled there. A couple of fingers were missing from my left hand and blood pulsed forth; a shiny, crimson bouquet thickening into a lump, a wax sculpture from the house of horrors, an object example of Medieval torture. It didn’t hurt. Didn’t feel like anything. My jacket had been sliced, and the flesh beneath it so that my innards glistened in the cold air. That didn’t hurt either. Instead, I was buoyed by the sense of impending finality. This wouldn’t take much longer by the looks of it. I pulled the jacket closed as best I could and began the laborious process of standing. Almost done, almost home.

  Jack cursed through a mouthful of dirt. The Huntsman had entered the fray and caught his skull in one splayed hand and sawed through his throat with the jagged dagger hewn from Stone Age crystal. The Huntsman sawed with so much vigor that Jack’s limbs flopped crazily, a crash test dummy at the moment of impact. Graham let Jack’s carcass thump to the sodden carpet among the savaged bodies of the pack. He pointed at me, him playing the lead man of a rock band shouting out to his audience. Yeah, the gods were with us, and no doubt.

  “So, we meet again.” He licked his lips and wiped the Satan knife against his gory mackinaw. He approached, shuffling like a seal through the smoldering gloom, lighted by an inner radiance that bathed him in a weird, pale glow as cold and alien as the Aurora Borealis. The death-light of Hades, presumably. His eyes were hidden by the brim of his hat, but his smile curved, joyless and cruel.

  I made it to my feet and scrambled backward over the flaming wreckage of coffee tables and easy chairs, the upended couch, and into the hall. All but dead, but still fighting, an animal to the end. Blood came from me in ropes, in sheets. Graham followed, smiling, smiling. Doorframes buckled as his shoulders brushed them. He swiped the knife in a loose and easy diamond pattern. The knife hissed as it rehearsed my evisceration. I wasn’t worried about that. I was long past worry. Thoughts of vengeance dominated.

  “You killed my dog.” Blood bubbles plopped from my lips and that’s never good. Another dose of ferocious, joyful melancholy spurred me onward. I pitched the empty revolver at his head, watched the gun glance aside and spin away. My tears froze to salt on my cheeks. Arctic ice groaned beneath my boots as the sea swelled, yearned toward the moon. The sea drained the warmth from me, taking back what it had given in the beginning.

  “You killed your dog, mon frère. You did for our buddy Jack, too. Bringing me and my boys here like this. Don’t beat yourself up. It’s a volunteer army, right?”

  I turned away, sliding, overbalancing. My legs folded and I slumped before a fallen timber, its charred length licked by small flames. The blood from my ruined hand sizzled and spat. I rubbed my face against the floor, painting myself a war mask of gore and charcoal. By the time he’d crossed the gap between us and seized my hair to flip me onto my back, at the precise moment he sank the blade into my chest, the fuse on the glycerin-wet stick of dynamite was a nub disappearing into its burrow.

  Graham’s exultant expression changed. “Well, I forgot Jack was a fisherman,” he said. That fucking knife kept traveling, the irresistible force, and I embraced it, and him.

  The Eternal Footman clapped.

  * * *

  After an eon of vectoring through infinite night, the door to the tilt-a-whirl opened and I plummeted and hit the earth hard enough to raise dust. Mud instead. An angelic choir serenaded me from stage left, beyond a screen of tall trees and fog. Wagner as interpreted by Homer’s sirens. The voices rose and fell, sweetly demanding my blood, the heat of my bones. That sounded fine. I imagined the soft, red lips parted, imagined that they glowed as the Huntsman glowed, but as an expression of erotic passion rather than malice, and I longed to open a vein for them…

  I came to, paralyzed. Pieces of me lay scattered across the backyard. For the best that I couldn’t turn my neck to properly survey the damage.

  Graham sprawled across from me, face-down in the wet leaves. Wisps of smoke curled from him. He shuddered violently and lifted his head. Bones and joints snapped into place again. The left eye shimmered with reflections of fire. The right eye was black. Neither were human.

  He said, “Are you dead? Are you dead? Or are you playing possum? I think you’re mostly dead. It doesn’t matter. Hell is come as you are.” He shook himself and began to crawl in my direction, slithering with a horrible serpent-like elasticity.

  Mostly dead must’ve meant 99.9 percent dead, because I couldn’t even blink, much less raise a hand to forestall his taking my skull for the mantle, my soul to the bad place. A red haze obscured my vision and the world receded, receded. The sirens in the forest called again, louder yet. Graham hesitated, his glance drawn to the voices that came from many directions now and sang in many languages.

  Jack staggered from the smoking ruins of the house. He appeared to have been dunked in a vat of blood. He held his shotgun in a death grip. “The bell tolls for you, Stevie,” he said and blew off Graham’s left leg. He racked the slide and blasted Graham’s right leg to smithereens below the kneecap. Graham screamed and whipped around and tried to hamstring his tormentor. Not quite fast enough. Jack proved agile for an old guy with a slit throat.

  The siren choir screamed in pleasure. Blam! Blam! Graham’s hands went bye-bye. The next slug severed his spine, judging by the ragdoll effect. His body went limp and he screamed some more and I’m sure he would’ve happily leaped on Jack and eaten him alive if Jack hadn’t already dismembered him with that fancy shotgun work. Jack said something I didn’t catch. Might’ve uttered a curse in a foreign tongue, a Latin epithet. He stuck the barrel under Graham’s chin and took his head off with the last round.

  I cheered telepathically. Then I finished dying. The score as the curtains closed was so fucking beautiful.

  * * *

  This time I emerged from eternal night to Minerva kissing my face. I lay on my back in the kitchen. Gray daylight poured through a hole in the ceiling along with steady trickles of water from busted pipes.

  Jack slouched at the table, which was stacked with various odds and ends. His shoulders were wide and round as boulders and he’d gained back all the weight cancer had stolen; his old self, only far more so. He clutched a bottle of Old Crow and watched me intently. He said, “Stay away from the l
ight, kid. It’s fire and lava.”

  I spat clotted blood. Finally, I said, “He’s dead?”

  “Again.”

  “Singing…” I managed.

  “Oh, yeah. Don’t listen. That’s the vampire stones. They’re fat on Graham’s energy.”

  “How’d I get in here?”

  “I dragged you by your hair.”

  The world kept solidifying around me, and my senses along with it. Me, Minerva, and Jack being alive didn’t compute. Except, as the cobwebs cleared from my mind, it made a sinister kind of sense. I laid my hand on Minerva’s fur and noticed the red sparks in her eyes, how goddamned long and white her teeth were. “Oh, shit,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Jack said. He set aside the bottle and shrugged into the Huntsman’s impeccable snow-white mackinaw. Perfect fit. Next came the Huntsman’s hat. Different on Jack; broader and of a style I didn’t recognize. The red and black crest was gone. Real antlers in its stead. A shadow crossed his expression and the light in the room gathered in his eyes. “Get up,” he said. Thunder rumbled.

  And I did. Not a mark on me. I felt quite hale and hearty, in fact. Hideous strength coursed through my limbs. I thought of my philandering ex-wife, her music teacher beau, and hideous fantasies coursed through my mind. I must’ve retained a tiny fragment of humanity because I managed to look away from that vista of terrible and splendorous vengeance. For the moment, at least. I said, “Where now?”

  Jack leaned on a long, barbed spear that had replaced his emptied shotgun. “There’s this guy in Mexico I’d like to visit,” he said. He handed me the flint knife and the herald’s horn. “Do the honors, kid.”

  “Oh, Stanley. It’ll be good to see you again.” I pressed the horn to my lips and winded it, once. It tasted cold and sweet. The kitchen wall disintegrated and the shockwave traveled swiftly, rippling grass and causing birds to lift in panic from the trees. I imagined Stanley Jones, somewhere far to the south, seated on his veranda, tequila at hand, The Sun balanced on his rickety knee, ear cocked, straining to divine the origin of the dim bellow carried by the wind.