X's for Eyes

by Laird Barron

  Copyright © 2015 by Laird Barron

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

  Bizarro Pulp Press books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

  Bizarro Pulp Press, a JournalStone imprint

  www.BizarroPulpPress.com

  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-942712-84-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  JournalStone rev. date: November 9, 2015

  Cover Art: Matthew Revert

  www.matthewrevert.com

  Interior Formatting: Lori Michelle

  www.theauthorsalley.com

  PRAISE FOR X’S FOR EYES

  “[X’s for Eyes is] so ripe with cosmic horror allusion and riffs that it qualifies as post-modern, but so charged with narrative drive that one can only hold on for dear life and hope to escape with their mind intact.”

  —Jeremy Robert Johnson, author of Skullcrack City

  “This has the narrative velocity of the best thirties pulp, the grim countenance and surly demeanor of the deadliest noir, and a premise the X-Files would wish for.”

  —Stephen Graham Jones, author of After the People Lights Have Gone Off

  PART I:

  WE SMOKE THE NORTHERN LIGHTS

  THE WHITE DEVIL

  The boy awakened in the night, although he had cultivated sufficient wariness to not move a muscle beneath the leopard- and yak-hide blankets. He scanned the dim sleeping cell without turning his head. A torch sizzled in its sconce high in the corner. Hoarfrost rimed the threshold of the doorway. Wind tore at the shuttered window as snow seeped in and dusted the sill.

  A stranger sat at the foot of the bed. Killing cold did not appear to discomfort him. He wore a Brooks Brothers suit with a red carnation pinned to the left breast pocket. His short black hair gleamed like polished metal. Some might have considered him queerly handsome or supremely repellant, depending. He said, “My name is Tom. Hello, son.” Blandly unctuous, his skin and eyes and voice were odd. A plastic figurine, animated and life-sized, might have looked and sounded as Tom did. “Sifu has terrorized you well. Your problem is the same problem inherent to all primates, which is, you are a primate.”

  “Are you a friend of Sifu?” The boy was afraid. Ruthless discipline disguised his fear. He pretended to be unaffected by the presence of a fellow westerner decked out for a garden party. Only assassin monks and child students were permitted inside the temple, for it was built atop a remote peak of the inner Himalayas, hundreds of miles from civilization and its devils, white and otherwise.

  “I’m Tom. Sifu Kung Fan is among the vilest, evilest wretches who has ever walked this planet. Of course he is a dear friend.”

  “Tom who, if you please?”

  “Tom Mandibole.”

  “Good to meet you, Mr. Mandibole. What brings you to these parts?”

  “I was once an anthropologist in service of a sultan. My master is bedridden, so to speak. He seeks diversion in the momentous and insignificant alike. Sadly, the Sultan marooned me here on this lee shore. Like him, I take my pleasures, great and small, as the opportunity arises.”

  “I am sure you’re a valuable servant. There must have been a misunderstanding.”

  “No, my boy. He stranded me because it amuses him to do so. The universe and its design is often one of arbitrary horror. Let none of this disturb you overmuch. You won’t remember our conversation.”

  The boy considered his options, and decided to say nothing.

  Tom Mandibole smiled and his mouth articulated stiffly. “I noticed your light as I walked by. A flame in the darkness is alluring.”

  “This seems far from beaten paths.”

  “I am abroad in the night with my servants. We come to smoke the northern lights, to rape the Wendigo, to melt igloos with streams of hot, bloody piss. To see and see.”

  “Oh. You’re a bit east.”

  “As I said, I was walking past on my way to another place. Much colder, much darker, this other place. Although, I have seen colder and darker yet.”

  “The North Pole is swell. I’ve snowshoed the Kuskokwim Delta.”

  “Would you care to guess what I am, son?”

  The boy shook his head.

  Tom Mandibole’s mouth contracted and he spoke without moving his lips. “I am the bane of your existence and I am going to tell you something. You will not remember, but it will embed itself like a dreadful seed in your young, impressionable mind. Now listen carefully.” He uttered a few words, then slowly lowered himself into a Cossack dancer’s squat. The stranger melted into the pool of red-tinged shadows that spread across the floor.

  The boy shivered. Under the hides, he gripped the hilt of his kukri that, according to Sifu Kung Fan, had claimed the heads of two-score men, and stared at the ceiling until his eyelids grew heavy. He slept, and in the morning, as Tom Mandibole promised, remembered nothing of the visit.

  RENDEZVOUS AT WOOLFOLK BLUFF

  The Tooms brothers returned home to the Mid-Hudson Valley in June of 1956 after another grueling winter at the Mountain Leopard Temple. A winter of calisthenics undertaken near, and sometimes over, bottomless chasms; instruction in advanced poisoning methods that included being poisoned; pillow talk, and master-level subterfuge occasionally incorporating assassination attempts upon students. Joyously free from the Himalayas for summer vacation, Macbeth and Drederick resolved to relish their R&R to the fullest.

  The brothers dressed in casual suits, jackets, and ties, and hopped into Dad’s cherry 1939 Chrysler fliptop for a cruise. Mac had heisted one and a half bottles of Glenrothes 18 from the pantry. Dred swiped a carton of Old Gold and Dad’s third or fourth favorite deer hunting rifle. Berrien Lochinvar, the grizzled Legionnaire and lately butler, didn’t bother to ask why or where. He waved forlornly from the mansion steps as the boys roared down the private drive and into a pink and gold MGM sunset. There might or might not be hell to pay later, depending upon the mood of Mr. and Mrs. Tooms when they returned from vacationing in Monaco. It was no coincidence the elder Toomses’ vacation overlapped the boys’ own.

  The lads made a whistle-stop in Phoenicia to snag a couple of working girls at Greasy Dick’s soda shop—Betsy & Vera. The girls’ dates were raw-boned farmhands in the mood to blow their paychecks. Mac scoffed as he waved a fistful of Grants. The men riled at this most unwelcome intrusion by wet-behind-the-ears fancy pants brats. Dred showed them the rifle. The farmhands blustered and puffed their chests. He blasted out Dick’s neon shingle. The men cooled it.

  Mac goosed the Chrysler and drank from a bottle all the way to Woolfolk Bluff. Liquor didn’t have much effect on his capabilities. It only made him more determined. He got them there in one piece and they paired off and shagged. Prior, during, and after, the foursome smoked a hell of a lot of the Old Gold and drank up all the booze.

  “Jeezum crow.” Blonde Betsy fastened her skirt. “How old are you, kid?” She squinted at Dred as if apprehending him for the first time. “Say, are you even twelve?”

  “And a half.” Dred reposed in the altogether, watching smoke from his mouth bump against the ceiling of stars. He was of average height, sturdy, with th
icker, curlier hair than his brother. “Mac is fourteen.”

  “And a half,” Mac said. A bit taller than Dred, slightly more kempt, and much denser and stronger than he appeared at first glance. He pointed the rifle at Orion’s Belt and squeezed off a round. Missed, or too early to tell. “Is this buyer’s remorse, ladies?”

  “Yep, we’re going to hell for sure,” said Vera, the brunette.

  “Oh, you were hellbound way before you met us,” Dred said. “And for lots worse I’d wager. Those farm boys all have the syphilis.”

  “Fleas too.” Betsy scratched at herself.

  Vera said to Mac, “How come you kids got a funny Limey way a talkin’? Shagging? Who says shagging?”

  Betsy said to Dred, “Yeah! And how come your accents keep changin’?”

  “Our mother is Egyptian,” Mac said. “She was educated at Oxford. I suppose her accent rubbed off.”

  “Your mama is a colored girl?” Vera raised her eyebrows.

  “Mother is Mother.” Mac said it cold and sober.

  A meteor streaked across the sky. And another. The third object described a fiery red arc through the lower heavens and crashed down across the valley behind a ridge. BOOOM! The granddaddy of all thunderbolts thrummed in the earth. A reddish flash lit up the horizon. Trees shook in the grip of a concussion. To their credit, neither of the working girls screamed, although they clung to one another, perfect little mouths O-d in fear.

  Dred tipped a salute at Mac. “Nice shootin’, Tex.”

  Mac checked his watch. “Saved by the meteorite.”

  The boys dressed in a hurry. Mac tossed Vera the keys and told her to leave the car at Nelson’s Garage in Phoenicia. He scratched their current coordinates on a paper scrap and gave her a number and instructions to buzz his dear pal, Arthur Navarro. Promised her fifty bucks if she came through. As the ladies of the night roared off in the Chrysler, Dred said, “Reckless trusting those girls with that much power, brother. Dad loves that car. I was conceived in the backseat.”

  Mac removed his glasses to wipe them. His eyes were red and watery. He shrugged and started walking.

  “Hey! How did ya know?” Dred called.

  “Arthur told me to hang around the bluff tonight,” Mac said, as he disappeared over the rim. “We better make tracks. Fireworks like these, somebody will be on the way.”

  “Who will be on the way? The Army? The heat? Granddad?”

  “Pick one and it isn’t anybody we want to see.”

  Dred waved his arms in frustration. “I thought we’d driven all the way out here for a nice relaxing Friday night of debauchery. Meanwhile, you were hiding an ulterior motive up your sleeve.” No response was forthcoming. He sighed and went after his big brother.

  YOU’RE NO DOC SAVAGE!

  The descent required a bit of free-climbing, and the boys were still half-crocked. Luckily, in addition to mandatory climbing lessons at Mountain Leopard Temple, they’d vacationed in the Swiss Alps every year since being weaned from their nursemaid’s teat and were, as a consequence, expert mountaineers. The boys made it down with style after some minor scrapes due to poor light, and double-timed across a grassy field and up the far ridge.

  “Mac, are we having an adventure? Is someone going to shoot at me? Am I going to be kidnapped again? Locked in a trunk and dropped into the sea? Experimented on with growth hormones? Chased by a lunatic in a mechanical werewolf getup? It sure feels like we’re having an adventure.”

  “Yep, we’re having an adventure,” Mac said.

  Amid a stand of pine and sycamore, some branches yet smoldering with licks of greenish flame, lay a shallow, smoke-filled depression. A metallic plate shone at the center of the crater—the outer curve of a partially buried space object.

  “Well, that’s sure as heck not a weather balloon,” Dred said. “Since NACA is three years south of launching anything besides planes and rockets into low Earth orbit, the only question is, whose satellite? Ours or theirs?”

  “It’s not a satellite either.”

  “Ya don’t say. Wait a—Holy Toledo! Is it alien? I’m gonna win a Nobel!”

  “The Nobel doesn’t award a prize for Acute Idiocy. Little green men don’t exist, sorry to disappoint.”

  “The book ain’t closed on extraterrestrial life.”

  “Say ain’t again and I’ll smack your mouth. It’s ours, Dred. Sword Enterprises is way past satellites. You’d know this if you ever bothered to read an R&D report.”

  “Sorry, I’m busy crafting my body into the ultimate fighting and fornicating machine. NACA would love the scoop about Nancy is what I do know.”

  “Trust that a select government subcommittee is well aware. Who do you think coughs up a third of our research capital? When Granddad says foreign investors, he means a farm in Langley.” Mac lighted a cigarette and braced his boot upon a rock. Red-lit smoke boiled in his glasses. “Our X-R program developed a long-range probe in ‘52. NCY-93. You’re looking at Nancy, kid. Experimental phase, last I heard.”

  “Apparently, Granddad got her working.” Granddad was better known by the world as Danzig Tooms, patriarch of the Eastern Toomses, and the reclusive industrialist who owned majority shares of multinational conglomerate, Sword Enterprises. He also directed R&D for space technologies.

  “Hmm. My compass is dizzy.”

  “Mine too.” Dred’s mini-compass attached to his Swiss Army knife via a keychain. The needle revolved crazily. “Peculiar, eh? I’d expect it to point at the metal, if anywhere. Chunk this big has to be a false magnetic north.”

  “Yes. Peculiar.” Mac laid two fingers against his own wrist and waited. “Elevated pulse. Hairs are standing on end. Possible auditory hallucinations—could be my brother’s yammering. The object is generating a powerful electromagnetic field. Let’s hope it’s non-ionizing.”

  “Hallucinations? I’m not getting hallucinations. At least, I hope not. Maybe I am. Did ya hear somethin’? Pine needles are exploding. Seems normal, though. I mean, the trees are on fire, right?”

  “I doubt you’d be able to tell the difference after that much scotch. C’mon, the breeze is shifting. Don’t fancy a dose of radiation before breakfast.”

  They moved upwind of the wreckage and sheltered beneath an overhang of dead pine roots. Dred didn’t pester his brother with questions about the probe or Sword Enterprises’ top secret space program, referred to by insiders as Extraterrestrial Reconnaissance, or X-R. Mac refused to speak when he didn’t want to, and, at the moment, his pinched lips and narrowed eyes indicated he surely didn’t want to. Big brother wore that expression when struggling with angles, calculations, and worry. Nobody worried more intensely than Mac, except for Dad, possibly. Dred smoked and tried to figure the dimensions of the probe based on the length of the crash path and how much of the vehicle was exposed.

  Eventually, Arthur “Milo” Navarro came along and rescued them from a fatal case of contemplating their navels. The Navarros weren’t wealthy like the Toomses; Arthur’s father, Luis, chaired the Engineering Corp of Sword Enterprises, and so were imbued with a significant measure of means and privilege, nonetheless. Arthur had graduated Graves College with honors. He intended to take a year away from his studies, travel Europe, and intern with the fellows at the Norwegian Academy of Science before plowing forward with his doctorate. His eighteenth birthday landed in August and the Tooms brothers promised him a shindig prior to the commencement of his overseas adventures.

  Mac summoned him whenever he needed a big brain, or godly muscle. Arthur could easily have been the brightest kid in New York State. Few outside his circle of friends and associates were the wiser—he resembled a Sherman tank in his customary uniform of Carhartt dungarees (shirtless), and engineer boots. Low-browed, thick of jaw and neck, and grimly reticent, he played the part of a lug to perfection. Few ever got close enough to realize they’d crossed paths with a boy genius rather than a simple bruiser. Slow to anger, the surest way to kindle his ire was to yell, “You’re no Doc S
avage!” He’d collected every magazine and every comic, and recorded every radio show featuring the pulp hero. He’d even attempted to concoct a bronzing solution. Nobody with an iota of common sense mentioned the fiasco.

  “Hail the crash site! A goodtime gal reported a pair of ne’er-do-wells in need of assistance.” Arthur lumbered into the clearing. He was attended by two of his five younger brothers, Ronaldo and Gerard, and their manservant Kasper, an allegedly reformed Waffen-SS commando. The party members wore reflective hazmat suits and carried toolboxes. Arthur unpacked a Geiger-counter and performed a laborious circuit of the immediate vicinity. He removed his helmet and examined the exposed patch of hull. “We’re clean.” He gave orders to his companions. Kasper and the two boys started in with picks and steadily peeled away dirt to expose a broader plane of smooth, scorched metal.

  Mac and Dred climbed down to join the fun.

  “What do you think?” Mac asked. A relatively tall and sturdy young man, he was a peewee juxtaposed against Arthur Navarro.

  “I think we need to be gone before trouble arrives,” Arthur said.

  Dred sighed in exasperation. “For Pete’s sake, who are we expecting?”

  “Maybe the Army,” Mac said.

  “I thought ya didn’t know!”

  “I don’t. I’m making an educated guess.”

  “Not sure it’s the military. Not sure of a blessed thing, honestly.” Arthur popped the lid on a toolbox. He selected an industrial-sized hand drill. “I monitored the channels all night. The probe is designed to evade radar detection. Didn’t hear a peep from the Army or the Air Force, which means the stealth system functioned like a champ. There’s action, though. Twenty minutes ago, Ronaldo caught chatter on the emergency band.”

  He nodded at his sibling who smiled gamely through streams of sweat. “I thought Labrador had twigged to the deal, at first. The boys at Zircon have stolen loads of our tech and brain-drained enough of our researchers, seems a fair bet they’ve got the codes to track this pretty baby.” He finished locking down a drill bit the length of his arm and squeezed the trigger. The motor shrieked. “Zircon hadn’t the foggiest. The installation Ron eavesdropped on didn’t spot the probe—Zircon intercepted a backchannel message from someone who did. Complete unknowns. A rival corporation, the CIA, hillbillies with a ham radio, anybody’s guess.”