The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (40 page)

    Stevens glanced around, peering into the shadows of the trees. "I figured you didn't come for tea, fancy pants. What I want a know is what happens next."

    "You will dwell among my people, of course."

    "Where? You mean in the village?"

    "No, oh, no, no, not the village with y
our
kind, the cattle who breed our delicacies and delights. No, you shall dwell in the Dark with
us
. Where the rest of your friends from this lovely community were taken last night while you two cowered in the cave. You're a wily and resourceful fellow, Mr. Stevens, as are most of your doughty woodsmen kin. We can make use of you. Wonderful, wonderful use."

    "Goodbye, you sonofabitch," Stevens said, cocking the hammer.

    "Not quite," Dr. Kalamov said. "If we can't have you, we'll simply make do with your relatives. Your father still works for the post office in Seattle, does he not? And your sweet mother knits and has supper ready when he gets home to that cozy farmhouse you grew up in near Green Lake. Your little brother Buddy working on the railroad in Nevada. Your nephews Curtis and Kevin are riding the range in Wyoming. So many miles of fence to mend, so little time. Very dark on the prairie at night. Perhaps you would rather we visit them instead."

    Stevens lowered his rifle, then dropped it in the mud. He walked to the doctor and stood beside him, slumped and defeated. Dr. Kalamov patted his head. The doctor's hand was large enough to have encompassed it if he'd wished, and his nails were as long as darning needles. He flicked Stevens' ear and it peeled loose and plopped wetly in the bushes. Stevens clapped his hand over the hole and screamed and fell to his knees, blood streaming between his fingers. Dr. Kalamov smiled an avuncular smile and tousled the man's hair. He pushed a nail through the top of Stevens' skull and wiggled. Stevens fell silent, his face slack and dumb as Ma's had ever been.

    "Reckon I'll decline your offer," Miller said. He drew his pistol and weighed it in his hand. "Go ahead and terrorize my distant relations. Meanwhile, I think I'll blow my brains out and be shut of this whole mess."

    "Don't be hasty, young man," Dr. Kalamov said. "I've taken a shine to you. You're free to leave this mountain. There's a lockbox in the roots of that tree. The company payroll. Take it, take a new name. And when you're old, be certain to tell of the horrors that you've seen… horrors that will infest your dreams from today until the day you die. We'll always be near you, Mr. Miller." He doffed his hat and bowed. Then he grasped Stevens by the collar and bundled him under one arm and into the gathering gloom.

    The lockbox was where the man had promised and it contained a princely sum. Miller stuffed the money in a sack as the sun went down and darkness fell. When he'd finished packing the money he buried his head in his arms and groaned.

    "By the way, there are two minor conditions," Dr. Kalamov said, leering from behind a stump. The flesh of his face hung loose as if it were a badly slipping mask. His eyes were misaligned, his mouth a bleeding black slash that extended to his ears. He had no teeth. "You're a virile lad. Be certain to spawn oodles and oodles of babies-I must insist on that point. We'll be observing, so do your best, my boy. There is also the matter of your firstborn…"

    Miller had nearly pissed himself at Dr. Kalamov's reappearance. He forced his throat to work. "You're asking for my child."

    Dr. Kalamov chuckled and drummed his claws on the wood. "No, Mr. Miller. I jest. Although, those wicked old fairytales are jolly good fun, speaking such primordial truths as they do. Be well, be fruitful." He scuttled backward and then lifted vertically into the shadows, a spider ascending its thread, and was gone.

***

    Years later, Miller married a girl from California and settled in a small farming town. He worked as a gunsmith. His wife gave birth to a boy. After the baby arrived he'd often lie awake at night and listen to the house settle and the mice scratch in the cupboards. When the baby cried, Miller's wife would go into the nursery and soothe him with a lullaby. Miller strained to hear the words, for it was the deep silences that unnerved him and caused his heart to race.

    There was a willow tree in the yard. It cast a shadow through the window. As his wife crooned to the baby in the nursery, Miller watched the shadow branches ripple upon the dull white oval of wall. On the bad nights, the branches twitched and narrowed and writhed like tendrils worming their way through fissures in the plaster toward the bed and his sweating, paralyzed form.

    One morning he went to the shed and fetched an axe and chopped the tree down. The first tree he'd felled since his youth. The willow was very old and very large and the job lasted until lunchtime.

    The center was semi-rotten and hollow, and when the tree crashed to earth the bole partially split and gushed pulp. Something heavy and multisegmented shifted and retracted inside the trunk. Water gurgled from the wound with a wheeze that almost sounded like someone muttering his name. He dumped kerosene over everything and struck a match. The neighbors gathered and watched the blaze, and though they gossiped amongst themselves, no one said a word to him. There'd been rumors.

    His wife came to the door with the baby in her arms. Her expression was that of a person who'd witnessed a dark miracle and knew not how to reconcile the fear and wonder of the revelation.

    Miller stood in the billowing smoke, leaning on his axe, eyes reflecting the lights of hell.

MORE DARK

    On the afternoon train from Poughkeepsie to New York City for a thing at the Kremlin Bar-John and me and an empty seat that should've been Jack's, except Jack was dead going on three years, body or no body. Hudson out the right-hand window, shining like a scale. Winter light fading fast, blending the ice and snow and water into a steely red. More heavy weather coming, they said. A blizzard; the fifth in as many weeks. One body blow after another for the Northeast and no end in sight.

    We were sneaking shots of Glenfiddich from a flask. I watched a kid across the aisle watching me from beneath eyelids the tint of blue-black scarab beetle shells. He wore a set of headphones that merely dampened the Deftones screaming "Change." His eardrums were surely bleeding to match the trickle from his nose. He seemed content.

    Another slug of scotch and back to John with the flask.

    I thought of the revolver waiting for me in the dresser of my hotel room. I could hear it ticking. I dreamed about that fucking gun all of the time. It loomed as large as a planet-killing asteroid in my mind. It shined with silvery fire against satin nothingness, slowly turning in place, a symbolic prop from a lost Hitchcock film, the answer to the meaning of my life. The ultimate negation. A Rossi.38 Special bought on the cheap at a pawnshop on 4th Avenue, now snug in a sock drawer. One bullet in the chamber, fated to nest in my heart or brain.

    My wife of a decade had mysteriously (or not so mysteriously if one asked her friends) walked out six weeks ago, suitcase in one hand, ticket to the Bahamas in the other. My marching orders were to be gone by the time she got back with a new tan. Yeah, I wasn't taking the divorce well. Nor the fiasco with the novel, nor a dozen impending deadlines, chief among them a story I owed S.T. for
Dark Membrane II
, an anthology in homage to the works of H. P. Lovecraft. This last item I hoped to resolve prior to dissipating into the ether, but at the moment it wasn't looking favorable. Still, when marooned in the desert and down to crawling inch by bloody inch, that's what one does. Crawl, and again.

    John said, "I saw
him
, once. The Author Formerly known As… A while back, when the gang was in Glasgow for Worldcon. Me, Jack, Jody, Paul, Livia, Wilum, Ellen, Canadian Simon and English Simon, Gary Mac, Ian, Richard G, both Nicks-Berkeley Nick and New York Nick. Some others…all of us wandering from pub to pub after dark. Hal still lived in Scotland, so he showed us around, although he was drunk, as usual, and I figured we'd find the con hotel again by morning,
if
we were lucky. A crowd busted out of a club and this chick, in a leather jacket with her hair shaved to about half an inch of fuzz and dyed pink, almost knocked me over as she elbowed by like a striker for the Blackheath Football Club. Hal stared at her as she stomped away, then leaned over to me and whispered gravely, 'Whoa, lad, that'd be like fookin' a coconut, wouldn't it?' " John was a tall, burly fellow of Scotch-Irish descent; an adjunct professor at SUNY New Paltz. He wore glasses, tweeds, and a tie whether he was lecturing or mowing the lawn. Honestly, he usually appeared as if he'd
just
mowed a lawn, such was his habitual dishevelment. Nonetheless, his charisma was undeniable. The more his beard grayed and his hair thinned, the more irresistible the world at large found him, especially the ladies. Like Machiavelli, he was becoming dangerous in middle age and I hoped he used his powers for good rather than evil.

    As John spoke, he cradled the marionettes, Poe and As You Know Bob, in his lap. Poe dressed in black, naturally, and had a pencil mustache and overlarge, soulful eyes, all the better to reflect sardonic ennui. As You Know Bob was clad in a silvery coverall and collar-a spacesuit sans helmet. Bob's shaggy hair and beard were white, its eyes a cornflower blue that bespoke earnestness and honesty, if not wisdom. The puppets were on loan from Clara, John's twelve year old daughter. She intended to become a world class puppeteer, just like John Malkovich in
Being John Malkovich.
Disturbing, but admirable.

    Let's be crystal clear. I hate puppets. Hate them. They descend from a demonic line parallel to mimes and clowns and are wholly of the devil, especially the lifelike variety. The uncanny valley is not one I've ever enjoyed strolling through. John wasn't particularly keen on puppets either. However, as a prolific author with a constant itinerary of speaking engagements he'd twigged to their utility as icebreakers at readings and lectures where the audience was often mixed-the little bastards were perfect to talk down to the kiddies (
As you know, Bob, this novel is the eleventh in the saga of non-Euclidian horrors invading Earth from the X-Space
!) while keeping the high schoolers and adults reasonably amused throughout the expositional phase.

    John brought his marionettes because we were going to witness (and witness is the best way to describe it) a public reading by the reclusive horror author formerly known as Tom L, or simply L to his small, yet fervent cult of devotees. L featured puppets and marionettes in his tales, alluding to humanity's suffering at the whim of the gods, and owned an exquisite selection of the things, each handcrafted by master designer W. Lindblad, a native Texan bookseller renowned for his macabre dolls and enormous collection of rare and banned volumes of perverse occult lore. Also renowned for being a career felon, but that didn't usually come up until whoever mentioned his name was as drunk as were getting at the moment.

    I assumed John hoped for an autograph, maybe a few words of kinship from L. I wasn't quite clear. Nor did I understand his obsessive fascination with the guy. L was a skilled, if obscure, author of weird tales, operating within the precincts of such classical masters as Lovecraft and Robert Aickman, tempering these influences with his own brand of dread and showmanship, much of it fueled by a loathing of corporate life, and, if one took him at his word, life itself. He'd written dozens of horror and dark fantasy tales over the years, the bulk of them collected in a tome entitled
Enemy of Man
. The book had sold well enough to warrant several foreign editions and garnered almost every award in the field. It was, as the
Washington Post
proclaimed, an instant classic.

    I owned a cheap paperback reprint of the original immaculate hardcover, albeit mine contained lengthy story notes and a preface by the author. My impression of L's work was lukewarm as I found his glib poohpoohing of the master Robert Aickman as a formative influence of his disingenuous considering their artistic similarities, and L's reduction of human characters to ciphers a trifle off-putting. L the author was vastly more interested in the machinations of malign forces against humanity than the individuals involved in said struggle. Nonetheless, his skill with allegory, simile, atmosphere and setting was impeccable and his style unique despite its debt to classical literary ancestry. His gloom and groan regarding the Infernal Bureaucracy wasn't my cup of tea, yet it possessed a certain resonance among the self loathing, chronically inebriated, perpetually persecuted set. However, there was the man himself, and it was L the man that turned me cold.

    L dwelt in a moribund American Heartland city (although independent confirmation of his residence and bona fides were lacking) that had been abandoned by most of the citizenry and at least half the rats. Afflicted by a severe mood disorder, he maintained few contacts among the professional writing community, albeit his associates were erudite men, scholars and theorists such as himself. Perhaps this hermit-philosopher persona is what eventually cemented his status as a quasi-guru whose fictive meditations upon cosmic horror and Man's minuteness in the universe gradually shifted to relentless proselytizing of antinatalist propaganda in the form of email interviews, random tracts produced on basement presses, and one full-blown trade paperback essay entitled
Horror of Being,
or
HoB
as his acolytes dubbed it. That book was published to much clamor amongst his fans and a tentative round of golf claps by the critics who weren't certain which way to jump when it came to analyzing L's eerily lucid lunacy. Nobody enjoyed receiving death threats or dead rats in the post. On the other hand, endorsing such maxims as "The kindest and most noble act any sapient being may commit is to never procreate" and "Consciousness is an abomination" wasn't too spiffy on a journalist's credentials.