by Laird Barron
“Life is one freaky coincidence, ain’t it though?” She stares into the woods. Her expression is mysterious. “Julie Vellum died last week. Ticker finally crapped out.”
“Julie Vellum…” He scans his notes. “Right. She cashed in big time. Author of how many bestselling New Age tracts? Friend of yours?”
“Nah, I despised the bitch. She’s the last, that’s all. Well, there’s that guy who did psychedelic music for a while. He’s in prison for aggravated homicide. Got involved with a cult and did in some college kids over in Greece. Can’t really count him, huh? I’m getting sentimental in my dotage. Lonely.”
“Lavender McGee. He’s not in prison. They transferred him to an institution for the criminally insane. He gets day passes if you can believe it.”
“The fuck is this world coming to? What is it you wanna ask me?”
“I have one question for you.”
“Just one?” Her smile is amused, but sharp. It has been honed by a grief that has persisted for more than the latter half of her long life.
“Just one.” He takes the small recorder from his shirt pocket, clicks a button, and sets it on the table between them. “More than one, of course. But this one is the biggie. Are you ready?”
“Sure, yeah. I’m ready.”
“Mrs. Goldwood, why are you alive?”
Wind moves the trees behind the house. A flurry of red and brown leaves funnel across the yard, smack against the cute skirting. A black cloud covers the sun and hangs there. The temperature plummets. Gravel crunches in the lane.
The dog growls, and is on its feet, head low, mouth open to bare many, many teeth. The fur on its back is standing in a ridge. It is Cerberus’s very own pup.
“Oh, motherfucker,” says Jessica Mace Goldwood. She’s got the revolver in her hand, hammer cocked. Her eyes blaze with a gunfighter’s fire as she half crouches, elbows in tight, knees wide. “It’s never over with these sonsofbitches.”
“What’s happening?” The journalist has ducked for cover, hands upraised in the universal sign of surrender. “Jesus H., lady! Don’t shoot me!” He glances over his shoulder and sees a man in the uniform of a popular parcel delivery service slamming the door of a van and roaring away in a cloud of smoking rubber.
“Aw, don’t fret. Me and Atticus just don’t appreciate those delivery guys comin’ around,” she says. The pit bull snarls and throws himself down at her feet. She uncocks the revolver and tucks it into the waistband of her track pants. “So, young man. Where were we?”
He wipes his face and composes himself. In a hoarse voice he says, “I guess what happened in Alaska doesn’t let go.”
“Huh? Don’t be silly—I smoked that psycho. Nah, I hate visitors. You’re kinda cute, so I made an exception. Besides, you’re gonna pay me for this story, kiddo.”
He tries for a sip of lemonade and ice rattles in the empty glass. His hand trembles. She pats his arm and takes the glass inside for a refill. Atticus follows on her heel. The journalist draws a breath to steady himself. He switches off the recorder. A ray of sun burns through the clouds and spotlights him while the rest of the world blurs into an impressionistic watercolor. A snowflake drifts down from outer space and freezes to his cheek.
She returns with a fresh glass of lemonade to find the journalist slumped in the lawn chair. Someone has placed an ancient state trooper’s hat on his head and tilted it so that the man’s face is partially covered. The crown of the hat is matted with dried gore that has, with the passing decades, indelibly stained the fabric. A smooth, vertical slice begins at the hollow of his throat and continues to belt level. His intestines are piled beneath his trendy hiking shoes. His ears lie upon the table. Steam rises from the corpse.
Atticus growls at the odors of shit and blood.
Jessica gazes at him in amazement. “Goddamnit, dog. Now you growl. Thanks a heap.” She notices a wet crimson thumbprint on the recorder. She sighs and lights another cigarette and presses PLAY. Comes the static-inflected sound of wind rushing across ice, of snow shushing against tin, of arctic darkness and slow, sliding fog. Fire crackles in the background. These sounds have crept across the span of forty years.
A voice, garbled and muted by interference, whispers, “Jessica, we need to know. Why are you alive?” Snow and wind fill a long gap. Then, “Did you cut your own throat? Did you? Are you dead, Jessica? Are you dead, or are you playing? How much longer do you think you have?” Nothing but static after that, and the tape ends.
Intuition tells her that the journalist didn’t file a plan with his network, that he rolled into the boondocks alone, that when he doesn’t arrive at the office on Monday morning it will be a fulfillment of the same pattern he’s followed countless times previously. The universe won’t skip a beat. A man such as he has enemies waiting in the woodwork, ready to wrap him in a carpet and take him far away. It will be a minor unsolved mystery that his colleagues have awaited since his first jaunt into a war torn region in the Middle East.
She can’t decide whether to call the cops or hide the body, roll the rental car into a ditch somewhere and torch it. Why, yes, Officer, the young fellow was here for a while the other day. Missing? Oh, dear, that’s terrible…
“Jack?” she says to the hissing leaves. Her hand is at her neck, caressing the scar that defines her existence. “Nate? Are you out there?”
The sun sets and night is with her again.
Three years, six months, and fifteen days before Dolly Sammerdyke is eviscerated and dropped down a mineshaft, where her bones rest to this very day, she tells her brother Tom she’s moving from Fairbanks to Eagle Talon. She’s got an in with a woman who keeps the books at a shipping company and there’s an opening for an onsite clerk. Tom doesn’t like it. He lived in the village during a stretch in the 1980s when his luck was running bad.
“Listen, kid. It’s a bum deal.”
“Not as if I have a better option,” she says.
“Bad place, sis.”
“Yeah? What’s bad about it? The people?”
“Bad people, sure. Bad neighborhood, bad history. Only one place to live in Eagle Talon. Six-floor apartment building. Ginormus old tenement. Dark, drafty, creepy as shit. It’s a culture thing. People there are weird and clannish. You’ll hate it.”
“I’ll call you every week.”
Dolly calls Tom every week until her death. He doesn’t miss her calls at first because he’s landed a gig as a luthier in Nashville and his new girlfriend, an aspiring country and western musician, commands all of his attention these days.
Did the Final Girl do it? Was it this person or that? You can only laugh at the preposterousness of such conceits. You can only weep. As the omniscient narrator of some antique fairy tale once declaimed: Fool! Rub your eyes and look again!
You will never die—nothing does.
From the journal of Nathan E. Custer as transcribed from the original text by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Anchorage:
I’ve never told anyone the whole truth about Moose Valley, or this recurring dream I’ve suffered in the following years. Probably not a dream; more of a vision. Nonetheless, for clarity’s sake, we’ll go with it being a dream. The dream has two parts. The first part is true to life, a memory of events with the tedious details edited from the narrative.
In the true to life part of the dream, Michael Allen and I are playing dominoes in the dim kitchen of my old place in Moose Valley. I’d seen him standing in the yard, a ghostly shape in the darkness, and had invited him to come out of the weather without thinking to ask why he was lurking.
It’s fall of ’93, around four in the morning. He’s winning, he always wins at these games—pool, checkers, cards, dominoes—although everybody likes him anyway.
Allen has only been in town for a few months. An ex-Army guy, so he’s capable, with an easy smile and a wry wit. Long hair, but kempt. Keeps to himself for the most part in a one-room cottage by the river. He’s passionate about Golden Age comic books and the
poetry of James Dickey. I was in the cottage for maybe five minutes once. Dude kept it to a minimum and neat as you please. Gun oil scent, although no guns in view. Yeah.
He pockets my last eleven dollars with a shrug and an apologetic grin. Says, Thanks for the game, and pulls on his orange sock cap and stands. I turn away to grab a beer from the icebox, hair of the dog that bit me, and the bullet passes through my skull above my ear and I’m on the floor, facedown. He squeezes the trigger again and I hear the hammer snap, a dud in the chamber. Or he hadn’t reloaded from slaughtering the Haden family across the street. We’ll never know. Anyway, I’m unblinking, unresponsive, paralyzed, so he leaves me for dead. The front door slams and sunlight creeps across the tiles and makes the spreading blood shiny.
The second part of the dream is a fantasy cobbled and spliced from real events. I have a disembodied view of everything that happens next.
Allen slips down to the launch and steals a rubber raft. He lets the flow carry him downstream. He’s packed sandwiches and beer, and has a small picnic. God, it’s a beautiful day. The mountain peaks are white with fresh snow, but the lower elevations are yet green and gold. The air is brisk, only hinting at the bitter chill to come. A beaver circles the raft, occasionally slapping the water with its tail. The crack is like a gunshot. Allen chuckles and scans the eggshell-blue sky from behind a pair of tinted aviator glasses.
The current gradually picks up as it approaches a stretch of falls and rapids. A black dot detaches from the sun and drops toward the earth. Allen unlimbers the 30.06 bolt action rifle he’s stowed under a blanket. His balance is uncertain and the first round pings harmlessly through the fuselage of the police chopper. He ejects the shell and sights again, cool as the ice on the mountains, and this will be a kill shot. The SWAT sniper is a hair quicker and Allen is knocked from the raft. He plunges into the water and sinks instantly. The raft zips over the falls and is demolished.
A sad, tragic case closes.
The fact is, Allen survives for a few minutes. He is a tough, passionless piece of work, a few cells short of Homo sapiens status, and that helps him experience a brutal and agonizing last few moments on the mortal plane. He is sucked into a vortex and wedged under and between some rocks where he eventually suffocates and drowns. This is a remote and dangerous area. The cops never recover the body.
Small fish nibble away his fingers, then his face, then the rest of it.
Once November
E. Catherine Tobler
Ghosts appear most often between October and February.
Only one woman was claimed within these months, and she at the beginning of November. She never appears in November—no one can say why—nor why those who always accompany her are pulled from their own months to join her. None, in point of fact, have appeared on the days they were taken; for this I cannot blame them—would you revisit the day you were murdered?
It is now January. It was once November.
Polly kisses what little remains of my mouth, her own soft and fragrant. In the right air, she still smells like her soap, like you’ve run your hand up the length of a bristling branch of rosemary and have burst enough leaves to get their oil on you. You would think she’d stink of wine or gin, but these scents are long fled. Some things vanish, some yet remain.
Elizabeth, whose gray eyes have rested long upon me, looks away. Her mouth settles into its disfigured slant. She is upset that he loved me best, that he ruined me most, that he abandoned her mid-cut and later unleashed his anger on Catherine. Catherine whom he wrote about, Catherine whom he ate. Elizabeth is forever unfinished, nearly perfect in her coat, rose and maiden hair fern still firmly pinned. Blood yet saturates the silk handkerchief ’round her neck.
The sliver of mirror is sharp in my hand as Polly offers it to me. It is still her prized possession; Elizabeth never wants to see it or herself within. Dark Annie was slow to come around but when she looked to see what he had made of her, she wept. I look into the mirror and cannot breathe—
(of course ye canna breathe, ye glock, ye are long-since in lavender, aren’t ye? There is no breath to be had under this dirt)
—for all the glory his shiv has made of my face, my body. An awful sound pours from me, the mewling of some alley cat looking for something it will never find, and Polly pats my shoulder.
“Will be fine and dross,” she tells me.
With her missing teeth, the words slur in her mouth. She doesn’t know or care that these words are wrong. One cannot be both—but then how else can we be dead and yet alive, walking these streets without care, ever looking for the fall of his shadow, the bite of his blade?
Polly’s hands remain unmarred; she slides one down the length of my hair, a tangle of colors, wet with blood. He loved me best and so does Polly, wanting to take care of me the way she can’t her five chavies. Were they little, I asked her once. She could not answer, only stroked the slit he had carved in her tongue and rocked back and forth, back and forth. I lean into her hand now and she calms.
“Such a good ladybird,” she whispers. “Keeper of me own name. Would that he had loved me so well.”
Polly was first, but first was not best. Last was best. Elizabeth never let me forget.
Ghosts may be seen wandering the entire Chapel—they do not gravitate to the places of their deaths or their lives. I cannot blame them for this peculiarity, either, for who would want to revisit happier days to look upon the stones where their life’s blood spilled? These streets have changed, the worst slums cleared away, yet lookers come even so. I came. I wanted an experience, didn’t I? I wanted to see the place she died; I wanted to see if the crack remained in the window glass.
Annie loves roses. Her gaze often lingers on the rose Elizabeth wears. It remains red, as fresh as the night he pinned it on her, the maiden hair fern like a cloud of angel wings around it. Annie has tried on occasion to claim the rose for her own, but it will not come unpinned from Elizabeth’s coat no matter how she pulls. Elizabeth laughs now, but the first time, they ended in a dewskitch, Elizabeth shrieking that Annie was a roller as she smashed her fist over and over into Annie’s face. It didn’t leave a mark on her. We were dead. What else could be done to us?
We spend the day walking. The quartet behind me grumbles, more loudly depending on the shadowed streets we cross. We are deeply sensitive to the places we died, the places we lived. The latter is less familiar—death ever closer than life now—but we remember them even so. The four others find more comfort indoors than out whereas I take comfort under open sky—
(no ceilings, ye wee toffer—far too long have ye gazed upon such, spread wide upon your back)
The place I died is also the place I lived, if two floors down. This is what pulls me now, though never in a straight line. If the streets have changed, new vendors and shop fronts, my memory still takes the paths it knew, be it through those vendors or walls. We have no worry of such things. Stone and glass do not forestall.
The others do not want to go, but I am going and Polly insists they follow. If they don’t, the ache of separation will only be worse. The knowledge that one of their own is roaming untethered is so painful as to be almost unbearable.
This is how we came together, five pieces of a whole, following a transcendent ache until we reached its end. Where did it flow and ebb—where was its pull strongest? I did not understand it until I was faced with the four of them. I follow a similar ache now, but it makes no sense—there are no others.
“Do ye feel that, then?”
It’s Catherine who asks. She pulls herself past Elizabeth, Annie, and Polly, to curl around the wreck of my shoulders as I stand staring. I can almost hear the drip of her blood, can feel its warmth around my feet as it pools. We should be bled dry by now, bodies drained to husks, but no. Our blood still runs the cobbles of these streets, the tatters of our flesh.
Outside the building where I once lived stands a woman. She is Polly’s age at most, time gently lining her face the way it never woul
d mine. She is now the age of all them who had gone before—but for me. I was youngest, made prettiest for always.
Elizabeth sobs; it is a strange sound, sudden and unexpected and she tries to break free from our group, but Annie holds her firm. Elizabeth crushes herself into Annie, buries her face; the rose at Elizabeth’s breast shatters fresh scent through our huddle.
Ghosts are best seen when you stand still. If you move they flicker like a lamp when the gas is turned down. Flicker, flicker, gone.
They still call this the worst street in London, and people are fools for coming. Without revolver or knife, visitors are sure to find a poor end in this alleyway. They warn of coming here. They always have, they almost always certainly will. You don’t want to see the ghost of a dead girl, you don’t want to hear the cries of “murder!” in the depth of night.
Oh—But you do.
’Tis only a room, let to someone else who never knew the horrors it contained.
This is the lie I tell myself as I move across the cobbled street, toward the building that has gone blue in the gloaming light—
(they know, because there’s push to be made, living in the room where the young dollymop was nobbled—dismembered—oh girl, did he drink ye? They say he couldn’t help himself, having tasted Catherine. How long did your heart’s blood mark his mouth after he kissed that warm flesh? No one would believe the truth—he never buried you under floorboards. The thought of concealing your beauty was intolerable.)
