The Imago Sequence

by Laird Barron

  My skin prickled at the matter-of-fact tone Butler affected. I said, "I don't get this, Professor. If you don't hold with demons and all that bunkum, what the hell are you worshipping?"

  "Supplicating, dear boy. I didn't suggest we are alone in the cosmos. Certain monstrous examples of cryptogenetics serve the function of godhead well enough. That scholars invent fanciful titles and paint even more fanciful pictures does not diminish the essential reality of these organisms, only obscures it."

  My suspicions about Butler's character were sharpening with the ebb and pulse of fire light. He lay coiled in his nest, a diamondback ready to strike. Not wanting an answer, I said, "Exactly what did you do to acquire this . . .knowledge?"

  "I established communion with a primordial intelligence, a cyclopean plexus rooted below these hills and valleys. An unclassified mycoflora that might or might not be of terrestrial origin. There are rites to effect this dialogue. A variety of osmosis ancient as the sediment men first crawled from. Older! Most awful, I assure you."

  "Christ, you've got holes in your brain from smoking way too much of the black O." I stood, covering my emotions with a grimace. "Next thing you'll tell me is Oberon came prancing from under his hill to sprinkle that magic fairy shit on you."

  "You are the detective. Don't blame me if this little investigation uncovers things that discomfit your world view."

  "Enough. Tell it to Charlie Darwin when you meet in hell. You want me to nail Hicks, stow the campfire tales and come across with his location."

  "Rueben's visited infrequently since late spring. Most recently, three days ago. He promised to take me with him soon, to gaze once more upon the FatherMother. Obviously I don't wish to make that pilgrimage. I'd rather die a nice peaceful death—being lit on fire, boiled in oil, staked to an ant hill. That sort of thing."

  "Is he aware of my presence in Purdon?"

  "Of course. He expected you weeks ago. I do believe he mentioned some casual harm to your person, opportunity permitting. Rest assured it never occurred to him that I might betray his interests, that I would dare. Frankly, I doubt he considers you a real threat—not here in his demesne. Delusion is part and parcel with his condition."

  "Where is he right now?"

  "Out and about. Satiating his appetites. Perhaps wallowing in the Presence. His ambit is wide and unpredictable. He may pop in tomorrow. He may appear in six months. Time means less and less to him. Time is a ring, and in the House of Belphegor that ring contracts like a muscle."

  "The house?"

  Butler's lips twitched at the corners. He said, "A cell in a black honeycomb. Rueben's father stumbled upon it during his missionary days. He had no idea what it was. The chamber existed before the continents split and the ice came over the world. The people that built it, long dust. I can give directions, but I humbly suggest you wait here for your nemesis. Safer."

  "No harm in looking," I said.

  "Oh, no, Mr. Koenig. There's more harm than you could ever dream."

  "Enlighten me anyhow."

  Butler seemed to have expected nothing less. Joyful as a sadist, he drew me a map.

  12.

  The cave wasn't far from camp.

  Long-suffering Hung Chan and his younger brother Ha agreed to accompany me to the general area after a harangue from Butler and the exchange of American currency.

  We essayed a thirty-minute hike through scrub and streams, then up a steep knoll littered with brush and treacherous rocks. Invisible from a distance, a limestone cliff face split vertically, formed a narrow gash about the height of the average man. The Chan brothers informed me through violent gestures and Pidgin English they'd await my return at the nearby riverbank. They retreated, snarling to themselves in their foreign dialect.

  I crouched behind some rocks and cooled my heels for a lengthy spell. Nothing and more nothing. When I couldn't justify delaying any longer, I approached cautiously, in case Hicks was lying in ambush, rifle sights trained on the rugged slope. Immediately I noticed bizarre symbols scratched into the occasional boulder. Seasonal erosion had obliterated all save the deepest marks and these meant little to me, though it wasn't difficult to imagine they held some pagan significance. Also, whole skeletons of small animals—birds and squirrels—hung from low branches. Dozens of them, scattered like broken teeth across the hillside.

  According to my pocket watch and the dull slant of sun through the clouds, I had nearly two hours of light. I'd creep close, have a peek and scurry back to the mining camp in time for supper. No way did I intend to navigate these backwoods after dark and risk breaking a leg, or worse. I was a city boy at heart.

  I scrambled from boulder to boulder, pausing to see if anyone would emerge to take a pot shot. When I reached the summit I was sweating and my nerves twanged like violin strings.

  The stench of spoiled meat, of curdled offal, emanated from the fissure; a slaughterhouse gone to the maggots. The vile odor stung my eyes, scourged deep into my throat. I knotted a balaclava from a handkerchief I'd appropriated from the Bumblebee Ranch, covered my mouth and nose.

  A baby? I cocked my ears and didn't breathe until the throb of my pulse filled the universe. No baby. The soft moan of wind sucked through a chimney of granite.

  I waited for my vision to clear and passed through the opening, pistol drawn

  13.

  so beautiful.

  I

  14.

  stare at a wedge of darkening sky between the pines.

  My cheeks burn, scorched with salt. I've been lying here in the shallows of a pebbly stream. I clutch the solid weight of my pistol in a death grip. The Chan brothers loom, hardly inscrutable. They are pale as flour. Their lips move silently. Their hands are on me. They drag me.

  I keep staring at the sky, enjoy the vibration of my tongue as I hum. Tralalala.

  The brothers release my arms, slowly edge away like automata over the crushed twigs. Their eyes are holes. Their mouths. I'm crouched, unsteady. My gun. Click. Click. Empty. But my knife my Jim Bowie special is here somewhere is in my hand. Ssaa! The brothers Chan are phantoms, loping. Deer. Mirages. My knife. Quivers in a tree trunk.

  Why am I so happy. Why must I cover myself in the leaves and dirt.

  Rain patters upon my roof.

  15.

  Time is a ring. Time is a muscle. It contracts.

  16.

  colloidal iris

  17.

  the pillar of faces

  18.

  migrant spores

  19.

  maggots

  20.

  glows my ecstasy in a sea of suns

  21.

  galactic parallax

  22.

  I had been eating leaves. Or at least there were leaves crammed in my mouth. Sunlight dribbled through the gleaming branches. I vomited leaves. I found a trickle of water, snuffled no prouder than a hog.

  Everything was small and bright. Steam seeped from my muddy clothes. My shirt was starched with ejaculate, matted to my belly as second skin. I knelt in the damp needles and studied my filthy hands. My hands were shiny as metal on a casket.

  Butler chortled from a spider-cocoon in the green limbs, "Now you're seasoned for his palette. Best run, Pinkerton. You've been in the sauce. Chewed up and shat out. And if you live, in twenty years you'll be another walking Mouth." He faded into the woodwork.

  I made a meticulous job of scrubbing the grime and blood from my hands. I washed my face in the ice water, hesitated at the sticky bur of my mustache and hair, finally dunked my head under. The shock brought comprehension crashing down around my ears.

  I remembered crossing over a threshold.

  Inside, the cave is larger than I'd supposed, and humid.

  Water gurgling in rock. Musty roots the girth of sequoias.

  Gargantuan statues embedded in wattles of amber.

  The cave mouth a seam of brightness that rotates until it is a blurry hatch in the ceiling.

  My boots losing contact with the gr
ound, as if I were weightless.

  Floating away from the light, towards a moist chasm, purple warmth.

  Darkness blooms, vast and sweet.

  Gibberish, after.

  I walked back to Forty-Mile Camp, my thoughts pleasantly disjointed.

  23.

  Labor ground to a halt when I stumbled into their midst. None spoke. No one tried to stop me from hunching over a kettle and slopping fistfuls of boiled rice, gorging like a beast. Nor when I hefted a rusty spade and padded into Butler's hut to pay my respects. Not even when I emerged, winded, and tore through the crates of supplies and helped myself to several sticks of dynamite with all the trimmings.

  I smiled hugely at them, couldn't think of anything to say.

  They stood in a half-moon, stoic as carvings. I wandered off into the hills.

  24.

  The explosion was gratifying.

  Dust billowed, a hammerhead cloud that soon collapsed under its own ambition. I thought of big sticks and bigger nests full of angry hornets. I wasn't even afraid, really.

  Some open, others close.

  25.

  After I pounded on the door for ten minutes, a girl named Evelyn came out and found me on the front porch of the whorehouse, slumped across the swing and muttering nonsense. Dawn was breaking and the stars were so pretty.

  I asked for Violet. Evelyn said she'd lit a shuck from the Bumblebee Ranch for parts unknown.

  Octavia took in my frightful appearance and started snapping orders. She and a couple of the girls lugged me to a room and shoved me in a scalding bath. I didn't protest; somebody slapped a bottle of whiskey in my hand and lost the cork. Somebody else must've taken one look at the needle work on my arm and decided to snag some morphine from Doc Campion's bag of black magic. They shot me to the moon and reality melted into a slag of velvet and honey. I tumbled off the wagon and got crushed under its wheels.

  "You going home one of these days?" Octavia squeezed water from a sponge over my shoulders. "Back to the Old States?" She smelled nice. Everything smelled of roses and lavender; nice.

  I didn't know what day this was. Shadows clouded the teak panels. This place was firecracker hot back in the '50s. What a hoot it must've been while the West was yet wild. My lips were swollen. I was coming down hard, a piece of rock plunging from the sky. I said, "Uh, huh. You?" It occurred to me that I was fixating again, probably worse than when I originally acquired my dope habits. Every time my eyes dilated I was thrust into a Darwinian phantasm. A fugue state wherein the chain of humanity shuttered rapidly from the first incomprehensible amphibian creature to slop ashore, through myriad semi-erect sapiens slouching across chaotically shifting landscapes, unto the frantic masses in coats and dresses teeming about the stone and glass of Earth's megalopolises. I had vertigo.

  "Any day now."

  My ears still rang, might always.

  Fading to a speck—the hilltop, decapitated in a thunderclap and a belch of dust. Boulders reduced to shattered bits, whizzing around me, a miracle I wasn't pulverized. Was that me, pitching like Samson before the Philistine army? More unreal with each drip of scented wax. My eyes were wet. I turned my head so Octavia wouldn't notice.

  "Tommy Mullen came around today. You're still lookin' for Tommy. Right?"

  "You see him?"

  "Naw. Kavanaugh was talkin' to Dalton Beaumont, mentioned he saw Tommy on the street. Fella waved to him and went into an alley. Didn't come out again. Could be he's scared you'll get a bead on him."

  "Could be."

  Octavia said, "Glynna heard tell Langston Butler passed on. Died in his sleep. Guess the yellow boys held a ceremony. Reverend Fuller's talkin' 'bout ridin' to Forty-Mile, see that the Professor gets himself a Christian burial." She became quiet, kneading my neck with steely fingers. Then, "I'm powerful sad. The Professor was a decent man. You know he was the sawbones for three, four years? He did for the young 'uns as got themselves with child. Gentle as a father. Campion came along and the Professor fell to the coolie mud. Shame."

  My smile was lye-hot and humorless. "He didn't limit his moonlighting to abortions. Butler did for the babies too, didn't he? The ones that were born here at the Ranch."

  Octavia didn't answer.

  All those whores' babies tossed into a pitchy shaft, tiny wails smothered in the great chthonian depths. I laughed, hollow. "The accidents. Don't see many orphanages this far north."

  Octavia said, "How do you mean to settle your tab, by the by?" She was getting colder by the second. She must've gone through my empty wallet.

  "For services rendered? Good question, lady."

  "You gave your whole poke to Violet?" Her disbelief was tinged with scorn. "That's plain loco, mister. Why?"

  The room was fuzzy. "I don't suppose I'll be needing it, where I'm going. I did an impetuous deed, Octavia. Can't take back the bet once it's on the table." Where was I going? Into a box into the ground, if I was lucky. The alternative was just too unhappy. I listened for the ticktock of transmogrifying cells that would indicate my descent into the realm of superhuman. Damnation; the bottle was dry. I dropped it into the sudsy water, watched it sink. Glowed there between my black and blue thighs.

  "Musta been a heap of coin. You love her, or somethin'?"

  I frowned. "Another excellent question. No, I reckon I don't love her. She's just too good for the likes of you, is all. Hate to see her spoil."

  Octavia left without even a kiss goodbye.

  26.

  At least my clothes were washed and pressed and laid out properly.

  I dressed with the ponderous calculation of a man on his way to a funeral. I cleaned my pistol, inspected the cylinder reflexively—it's easy to tell how many bullets are loaded by the weight of the weapon in your hand.

  The whores had shaved me and I cut a respectable figure except for the bruises and the sagging flesh under my eyes. My legs were unsteady. I went by the back stairs, unwilling to list through the parlor where the piano crashed and the shouts of evening debauchery swelled to a frenzied peak.

  It was raining again; be snowing in another week or so. The mud-caked boardwalks stretched emptily before unlit shop windows. I shuffled, easily confused by the darkness and the rushing wind.

  The hotel waited, tomb-dark and utterly desolate.

  Like a man mounting the scaffold, I climbed the three flights of squeaking stairs to my room, turned the key in the lock after the fourth or fifth try, and knew what was what as I stepped through and long before anything began to happen.

  The room stank like an abattoir. I lighted a lamp on the dresser and its frail luminance caught the edge of spikes and loops on the bathroom door. This scrawl read, BELPHEGORBELPHEGORBELPHEGOR.

  The mirror shuddered. A mass of shadows unfolded in the corner, became a tower. Hicks whispered from a place behind and above my left shoulder, "Hello again, Pinky."

  "Hello yourself." I turned and fired and somewhere between the yellow flash and the new hole in the ceiling He snatched my wrist and the pistol went caroming across the floor. I dangled; my trigger finger was broken and my elbow dislocated, but I didn't feel a thing yet.

  Hicks smiled almost kindly. He said, "I told you, Pinky. Close one hole, another opens." His face split at the seams, a terrible flower bending toward my light, my heat.

  PROBOSCIS

  1.

  After the debacle in British Columbia, we decided to crash the Bluegrass festival. Not we—Cruz. Everybody else just shrugged and said yeah, whatever you say, dude. Like always. Cruz was the alpha-alpha of our motley pack.

  We followed the handmade signs onto a dirt road and ended up in a muddy pasture with maybe a thousand other cars and beat-to-hell tourist buses. It was a regular extravaganza—pavilions, a massive stage, floodlights. A bit farther out, they'd built a bonfire, and Dead-Heads were writhing with pagan exuberance among the cinder-streaked shadows. The brisk air swirled heavy scents of marijuana and clove, of electricity and sex.

  The amplified ukulele music wa
s giving me a migraine. Too many people smashed together, limbs flailing in paroxysms. Too much white light followed by too much darkness. I'd gone a couple beers over my limit because my face was Novocain-numb and I found myself dancing with some sloe-eyed coed who'd fixed her hair in corn rows. Her shirt said MILK.

  She was perhaps a bit prettier than the starlet I'd ruined my marriage with way back in the days of yore, but resembled her in a few details. What were the odds? I didn't even attempt to calculate. A drunken man cheek to cheek with a strange woman under the harvest moon was a tricky proposition.

  "Lookin' for somebody, or just rubberneckin'?" The girl had to shout over the hi-fi jug band. Her breath was peppermint and whiskey.

  "I lost my friends," I shouted back. A sea of bobbing heads beneath a gulf of night sky and none of them belonged to anyone I knew. Six of us had piled out of two cars and now I was alone. Last of the Mohicans.

  The girl grinned and patted my cheek. "You ain't got no friends, Ray-bo."

  I tried to ask how she came up with that, but she was squirming and pointing over my shoulder.

  "My gawd, look at all those stars, will ya?"

  Sure enough the stars were on parade; cold, cruel radiation bleeding across improbable distances. I was more interested in the bikers lurking near the stage and the beer garden. Creepy and mean, spoiling for trouble. I guessed Cruz and Hart would be nearby, copping the vibe, as it were.

  The girl asked me what I did and I said I was an actor between jobs. Anything she'd seen? No, probably not. Then I asked her and she said something I didn't quite catch. It was either etymologist or entomologist. There was another thing, impossible to hear. She looked so serious I asked her to repeat it.