The Croning (22 page)
“Hi, Bronson. Fancy bumping into you here.”
Bronson Ford laughed. He tossed the stub of his joint into a ceramic pot that allegedly originated in Tibet and hopped to his feet and approached Don with a queer, hitching stride that was nonetheless rapid. He tapped the glass of the exhibit. “It is real.” His voice was strange; pitched like an old man’s and rusty from disuse. “Those men, those government men… You shouldn’t talk to people like them.” He grinned at Don and his teeth were crumbling and black. “My kin will get them soon. Never fear.”
Don said, “You got any more grass?” After Bronson Ford produced another joint and lighted it and they’d each toked heavily, Don wiped his eyes, fascinated at the odd blurriness of the lighting and the background textures while the boy, or whatever he was, became sharper and more in-focus.
An ineffable
something
about the boy disturbed him on a more immediate and much deeper level. Don couldn’t recall ever attributing the word evil to a casual acquaintance, but that appellation fit. It was evil that animated Bronson Ford’s smirk, the light glittering in his eyes, the hateful merriment of his tone. As this sank in, Don noted how lonely and isolated the gallery was; the two of them might as well have hunkered on tree stumps around a fire in the wilderness.
Bronson Ford regarded the caveman exhibit and his expression shone with the light of unholy joy. “
They
took his skin and wore it for a while. It’s not real skin. More of a hide. Yes. They made a suit from his hide the way my own people skinned lions once upon a time. The way my people wore lion hides as capes, took the claws and fangs for jewelry. Yes, yes.”
“They.”
“Them, they. The Children of Old Leech.”
“The children of what? What tribe were they?” At that moment, trying to regain mental equilibrium and regain some control of the conversation, he felt akin to a swimmer who finally glances back toward a distant shore and realizes the tide has carried him into cold, bottomless water.
It’s the dope, screwing with your mind. You’re going to wake up in the morning and discover this whole evening was a trip on the magic bus
.
“Don’t you know? Isn’t it why you came? This is for the special people.”
“No, kid, I really don’t know. Who are these children?”
“Friends of Mum and Dad.” Bronson Ford crow-hopped to the next case and pressed a button. The curtain parted and a dim track light flickered on. “A sea cave in the Shetlands, spring of 1969.”
“Bronson, you’re freaking me out, man,” Don said, and meant it. The object in the case might’ve been a behemoth of a quadruped in its life; a bear, a small elephant, a giraffe. He couldn’t get an intellectual fix because his perception of the object shifted with quicksilver fluidity—ten or eleven feet on the vertical axis, three feet wide, multi-limbed, elongated neck, the powerful torso of a large land animal, a cranium of prodigious girth. Another skin, or in this case a pelt, also stretched on wires. Its fur was black against bone-white flesh. A bear, miraculously skinned as the Cro-Magnon had been skinned, nothing particularly special about taxidermy or the furrier trades…He sweated and the animal skin gathered height, loomed over him. “Why does the skull…” He couldn’t, wouldn’t take it a syllable farther.
“It doesn’t come from the Shetlands. I’m not from Ethiopa.” Bronson Ford wore a dreamy, maniacal expression; the smile of an elderly sadist trapped in a child’s body. “The suit just got left there in that wet old cave when
They
returned to the dark.”
“Another bloody fake,” Don said. His stomach heaved and he covered his mouth. His boozing on the Yukon, all the partying he’d done during the drive and here at the mansion was coming home to roost. His gorge settled and he repeated, “Bloody fake,” in case it might make him feel better. “Where are you from, really?”
“Russia. The mountain on the plain. Coldest fucking place you’ve ever seen.”
“No shit?”
Bronson Ford rolled up his sleeve, revealing a classy stainless steel wristwatch. Also, a livid white scar that arrowed from his wrist along the ulna toward his elbow; a raised zipper seam. “Oops, it’s past my bedtime.” The boy saluted with three fingers and sidled away, slipping through the blood-red door and leaving Don alone with the horrors of the gallery.
Not horrors, damn it. Sideshow fakes.
He only lasted a few seconds before the nausea threatened, and he fled. Frick and Frack were waiting on the other side of the door. He caught them with their backs turned, one peering north, the other south. A sack dangled from Mr. Dart’s fist. Mr. Frack brandished a syringe.
Don pin-wheeled his arms for balance in silent terror and at the last moment managed to stop short, recover and pull the door shut again, and as he did, he glimpsed Connor Wolverton ascending the stairs, smoking a pipe and waving at the agents. Don locked the door and his stomach finally won the battle and he vomited onto the carpet. Heart convulsing, he sucked air and listened for the thud of fists on paneling that would indicate his hunters were alert to his presence; but nothing of the sort occurred. The gallery was a velvety tomb.
He tried to regain his composure with some sensible and rational self pep talk. The very notion that the two men were plotting to kidnap him was preposterous; surely his perceptions were askew. It beggared belief that such an event could even conceivably involve a nobody such as himself, and in the middle of a mansion crawling with guests.
Right, right—bag and a needle and two creepy strangers who seemed to get their jollies menacing you earlier. Better find a service door, my friend
.
His thoughts jumped to Michelle. Oh, no! What if they were after her too? There’d be another door in the back, surely. The light in the gallery changed subtly and he whirled and saw someone approaching him from between the exhibit cases. The individual moved with alarming speed, bent low to the floor, but straightening as he or she drew nearer. Unfolding…
“I guess you’d best come with me,” Bronson Ford said. It sounded like Bronson Ford, at least. The voice quavered on the edge of diabolical laughter. The figure was too tall—it loomed over Don. He yelled, albeit a cry that was silenced in an instant. This figure reached for him with a splayed hand both spindly and large. All Don could smell as it snuffed his consciousness was the whiff of his own puke.
8.
He was shambling along a hallway and the realization he couldn’t remember
getting
there was jarring as a broken reel in a film.
There’d been a surreal conversation with Bronson Ford about art, or anthropology, and prior to that, an even more fanciful exchange with the two feds who’d seemed intent on convincing him his granddad was a super-villain, Michelle was a double agent, and that the moon landings were faked and half the aristocracy of Olympia participated in Black Mass or worse. A wave of dizziness and disorientation swept over him, and for a few seconds he swooned, nearly overcome by the sensation he’d wandered these gloomy halls for an eternity. He also recalled fragments of voices, the rustle of fabric, of being smothered, and then these impressions were swallowed by the mists of amnesia.
The other guests had retired and the houselights were dim. He groped his way back to the guestroom, praying Michelle awaited him there. The interior was mostly dark except for a pocket of light in the living room. He found Michelle curled on the couch near the mammoth rattan floor lamp very similar to one back in San Francisco they’d bought at a bazaar in Hong Kong nearly a decade ago when their relationship was in the final legs of a second honeymoon phase. He’d attended a geophysics conference, and she, being on sabbatical to write a book about multiculturalism, traveled with him for research purposes. They skipped the conference and spent a week sightseeing, losing themselves amongst the mazes, and gambling and partying at the nightclubs where Mandarin-speaking locals whined American pop classics in passable English.
There were a few tense moments upon returning safely stateside when it seemed possible a brand-new baby might be on the way—but one wasn’t; thank God for a weak sperm count for once and crisis averted! The twins, God bless ’em, were plenty. These many years later, neither of Don nor Michelle was sufficiently comfortable to examine his or her feelings in light of current events and the benefit of hindsight.
Michelle had been crying; her blotchy face shone pale as an egg. For a queasy moment seeing her camped beneath the tall lamp as if posed by a photographer, memories of the Hong Kong excursion and the resultant baby scare caused Don’s pulse rate to accelerate again, precipitated the looming disorientation and sickness.
“Honey, sorry it’s so late. Whatsa matter?” he said. “Sweetie…”
She had wrapped herself in a raggedy quilt her grandmother sewed at parochial school. She pulled the quilt tight under her chin and stared at him. “Tell me a secret. One only you and I know.”
Don sat on the edge of the couch. He awkwardly took her hand; it was cold. “Honey, what are you doing out here?” It occurred to him that this might be a ploy to deflect his natural peevishness at being abandoned earlier during the reception. He squashed that line of conjecture and put on a brave smile.
She left her hand in his, limp as a dead fish. She stared at him with that queer, drugged expression and said nothing.
“Okay. What kind of secret?”
“Anything,” she said. “As long as it’s ours.”
“Um. That was kind of bitchy abandoning me to the wolves, this evening. Er, I guess that’s no secret since everybody saw the dust cloud, right?”
She stared at him and he guessed then that she too had been drinking and more heavily than he first presumed.
Don swallowed and forced a smile. “I can’t match my socks and, uh, I wear ’em inside out. Oh, oh, and I forget to change ’em more often than two or three times a month. How’s that?”
She squeezed his hand and seemed relieved. “It’s you.”
“Yeah, babe. Hope to God you weren’t expecting Don Juan.” He stroked her wrist.
She nodded. Her expression slackened, became heavy with exhaustion. Don coaxed her from the couch, and together they swayed and stumbled into the bedroom.
Don clicked off the light and was instantly weightless upon the king-sized bed, cocooned by the blankets and the swaddling darkness and had almost fallen into the well of sleep when Michelle mumbled at him across the swells and swales, the inland sea. “Huh, whazzat?” he said.
“I thought you came in earlier,” she said, her voice muffled by a pillow. “A while ago. I was reading and…I went to sleep and something woke me.”
“Yeh? What did.”
“You.”
“Oh.” Don lay face down, engrossed by intestinal gurgles, the womb-noises of his guts rebelling at their contents. “I did? When?”
Michelle remained silent. Then, even as Don decided she’d fallen asleep, she said dreamily, “I dunno. Earlier. I opened my eyes and there you were, watching me sleep. You used to do that, ‘member?”
“Sure do, mm-hm.”
“Why would you be standing in the closet? Just standing there between my dresses. Couldn’t figure that out.”
“Honey?” Don rolled over. “This is crazy, I know. Do you happen to know a physicist named Nelson Cooye? These two weirdoes claimed you’re an evil, evil woman. A mistress of skullduggery. Our taxes in action, eh?” He reached toward her, but she was too far away across the water and he fell back. He stared into the gloom and listened to her breathe and after a bit she began to snore.
He dreamed of walking naked across a savanna toward a stand of Eucalyptus trees. Agents Frick and Frack stood to his left in the tall grass. The men were naked but for loincloths and sunglasses. Both were shouting at him; their voices didn’t carry and he walked onward.
A piece of the earth rose between the trees and pushed one over with a series of low cracks. The thing was a sloth, or an elephant. It watched him and as he approached, legs propelling him against his yammering instinct, he soon saw that it was neither of those animals. Then he was in its shadow.
In the morning he recalled a fragment of his vision with a small scream. Five seconds later it had evaporated from his mind and was lost.
Bluebeard’s Husband
(Now)
1.
T
hough his days were busy after Michelle departed, Don initiated further measures to minimize the solitude of the empty house. He invited Argyle Arden and Turk Standish for a barbeque over the weekend, and inveigled Harris Camby, the former Pierce County Sheriff, to attend as well—promising ale and horseshoes. Harris was a formidable presence in the pits; even when the sheriff was dead-drunk none of his friends or colleagues could hope to match his prowess.
Saturday proved lovely; a bright, warm afternoon hinted at the possibility of a prolonged summer. Don grilled ribs and served steins of Irish stout to his friends. As midday slowly ceded to a soft, hazy twilight, he lounged on the porch with Argyle. Harris and his grandson Lewis were methodically drubbing Turk and Argyle’s companion for the day, a preppy grad student named Hank. Hank, a beefy kid in a heavy Norwegian sweater and fancy slacks, sweated and scowled, apparently displeased at Harris’s wry commentary regarding the boy’s game, and possibly even more so with Turk’s complacency about being thoroughly shelled. His face flushed red as a fired brick and he drank too many rum and Cokes for Don’s comfort.
The conversation meandered, being of no consequence beyond a pleasant diversion, when Argyle took his pipe stem from between his teeth and said, “Has Michelle gotten anywhere with her survey?” He meant, of course, the genealogical research and translations she’d chipped away at for decades. It had once been a hobby, a method of easing her tensions and frustrations during the inevitable setbacks and disappointments in discovering the Lost Tribe.
“I gather yes. She’s in there, going great guns.”
Argyle chuckled. “She’s a terrier with a bone. Always been that way when it comes to her passions.”
