The Croning (24 page)

Had he protested? He didn’t think so. Something else happened then—he became leaden and sleepy and Michelle soothed him and stroked his hair and he drifted away. In the morning it faded into a dream, could truly have been a dream for all he knew. Another of those unsettling occurrences he almost forgot, almost buried for good, until nights like this poked him in the tender spot that never quite healed.

4.

“I’m surprised Winnie let you come,” Don said when Kurt arrived later that morning to begin their Great Reconstruction of the house. They’d decided to start with the attic. He documented their progress in a blank journal while Kurt wrapped objects in newspaper and then stuffed them into boxes. It was slow, dirty work.

“Oh, she didn’t
let
me—she basically threw me out of the house.” Kurt clapped his work gloves and dust smoked in the bluish light. He patted his stomach. “Morning sickness, bloating, I dunno. She’s bitchy. Frankly, I’m happy as hell to get away.”

“Um,” Don said, trying to remember what Michelle’s mood had been like during her early pregnancy, chagrined to realize he couldn’t. “I know how it is.” He tapped the list with his pen:
a rusty bicycle; moth-eaten corduroy children’s clothes; eight boxes of crumbling Christmas tree ornaments; five boxes of water-stained children’s books; four boxes of marbles, jacks, playing cards, chess boards, wooden blocks, jigsaw puzzles, etc; two boxes of homemade candles and soap, mostly melted; five boxes of penny dreadfuls and counting; two boxes of phonograph platters; a Philco radio from the early ’30s
; and they weren’t even warmed up. He still ached all over from dozing in the chair.

Moth-eaten canvases lay stacked like animal skins upon a crumbling easel deeper in the blue shadows; more of the bizarre grotesqueries he’d encountered in the past. This particular stack was of a highly stylized technique, a combination of oil and charcoal, unsigned and incredibly weathered to the point of ruin. That made him glad for each of nine or ten paintings he skimmed through dealt from individualized perspectives with a train of child-figures moving in a column across a plain toward a cavern in a mountainside. The plain was marked by a scatter of henges and megaliths. A muddy inscription near the bottom of one canvas read,
Fathers and mothers come as slaves and depart as kin. The children slake Old Leech. They entertain him with their screams
.

The name
Old Leech
struck a chord in his subconscious. He covered the pile with a drop-cloth, determined to burn the whole mess later. “Oh, hey, don’t touch those,” he said as Kurt rummaged in the cabinet of the dolls.

Kurt turned a rag doll over in his hands; a horrid thing of matted yarn, floppy, segmented limbs and coveralls wrinkled with age and mildew. Its eyes had fallen out. “Eh? This thing is heavier than it looks. Swear to Christ it’s full of wet sand.”

“Would you—? Your mother’s got her mind set. She’ll cook my goose for sure if we mess with them. We’ll come back to it later.”

“I doubt it,” Kurt said. He laughed and tossed the doll aside. He looked around. “We’ve been at this for three hours. No end in sight. This must be what Purgatory is like.”

“Sisyphus and son.”

Kurt moved to the Westinghouse projector and the film canisters. “Ever watch any of these?” He picked up a couple of the canisters and gestured. “I mean, wow. Some of these babies are old as the hills.” He began stacking them inside a box, pausing to name the titles of those that bore one. Most of the labels had faded to white. There were several dozen canisters, approximately a quarter of which contained Michelle’s personal collection from various travels abroad.

“There’s not much to them,” Don said after a period of cataloging the boxes, labeling with a magic marker, and stacking them. In truth, he’d only glanced at a few of the films, and those at metaphorical gunpoint, usually in the company of Michelle’s anthropologist friends following one of her trips; a gaggle of bluff academics in Hawaiian flower print shirts and Bermuda shorts, or in the case of the more staid variety (like Don himself), cheap suits they wore to every occasion, including the grocery store for cigarettes; everybody sipping gin and tonic and laughing uproariously at the in-jokes while Michelle put on her dry-as-bones dead-pan narration and Don melted into the background, content to weather the tedium by passing among them with the drink tray.

“What?”

“Bird watching, picnics, travelogue rubbish. Nothing interesting.” Don winced at the paucity of creativity in his fabrication. He couldn’t fathom his embarrassment. Michelle wasn’t particularly enamored of his rock collection or his treatises on glaciations, was she?

“Bird watching?” Kurt frowned. “This must be from one of Mom’s trips. Yeah, right here—
Papua, New Guinea. Crng (Lynn. V) 10/83
. What’s on it?”

“You’ve seen your mother’s slides. This is probably the same, but longer.”

“Ugh. The bloody slideshows; how soon we forget.” Kurt chucked the canister in with its mates. A couple minutes later, he whistled to Don. “Hey, Pop. Check this out.” He waved an envelope of photographs he’d discovered in one of Michelle’s waterproof belt pouches; the kind she carried when afoot in jungles and deserts. The pouch had been mixed up with the film canisters. “I was doing a wee bit of snooping when we were over last week. Win is so taken by Mom’s adventurous ways and I showed her some of the stuff she’d left here. Anyway, I came across these. See, these were taken in the ’30s or ’40s judging by the car there, and the house…”

Don accepted the photos; less than a dozen low quality black and white shots of the house with a Model T parked in the yard, and the barn a gray rectangle in the background. Other photographs featured pastorals: the field; the hill and stream; one from atop an elevated vantage in the valley. The last four were murky, overexposed—the dim interior of a forest revealed as an indistinct gallery of ghostly trunks; a pile of misshapen stones backlit by sunset; and two more of a person standing near the stones, facing the photographer, arms spread in a vee, a dark, indistinct object dangling from his or her left hand—a satchel, a sack, something lumpy. These last were shot in darkness at the edge of a bonfire. The figure was terribly out of focus; a blurry white cloud mottled in splotches of black.

“Aren’t these odd,” Don said, eyes widening as he realized the person was in the buff. Only flesh gave forth such a diffuse, moist glimmer. He checked the reverse; someone had written in faded ink:
Crng Patricia W. 10/30/1937
. He intensely disliked these pictures, and could tell Kurt felt the same. He slipped them into the envelope and put the envelope into his pocket for future perusal.

“Those rocks are familiar,” Kurt said, oddly excited. “When I was a kid. Holly and I got turned around in the woods. That’s where I saw them. In the woods.”

As Don recalled, those two had done more than gotten turned around: they’d been lost for nearly eight hours, wandering circles in the densely wooded hills where one hollow and briar patch soon resembled another. Luckily, they’d happened upon the creek and followed it home at roughly the time Don had gotten dressed to come hunting for them. They were ragged and dirty and traumatized, but essentially unscathed. The incident had become something of a family legend, although none of them spoke of it in recent years; a childhood experience Holly had grown resentful of and preferred to ignore—and pointedly suggested that others do the same.

“Pop, what about this? I found it last time I was here, took it home. Like I said—I was snooping. Occupational hazard.”

“Eh, what do you have?” Don adjust his glasses as Kurt reached into his jacket and produced a book and handed it over.

“It’s…actually, I’m not sure. Got me thinking, though.”

The book proved to be an almanac of some manner, quite slender, its black cover embossed with a cryptic broken ring in crimson bronze. Don loathed and dreaded it on sight, was instantly repulsed such that he took an involuntary backward step and nearly fell. He’d seen this symbol. Lord knew where, for the details remained obscured in the muck and mire of his porous recollection, yet branded with a white hot current into his gray matter and muscle memory.

You’ve most definitely seen it, chum. Here? No, not here. Not here— elsewhere, in a book, at a gallery, a film…
He doubted the memory spawned from any of the schlock cinema he’d so loved; this was too raw, too visceral.

It wasn’t pleasant to contemplate the mysterious circumstances of his prior encounter with the broken ring, the skeleton of a demon Ouroboros. Grappling with the fact his brain increasingly resembled Swiss cheese each passing day hurt like hell; grasping the notion that this rune had meant something once, probably during his adventurous youth, and that it had frightened him,
cowed
him, was worse. Don Miller didn’t consider himself as a particularly brave man in his dotage; nonetheless, he’d possessed more than his share of grit in the old days. If this mounting sensation of terror had taken root back then, dear lord, what could it mean?

He clenched his teeth and opened the book. The title page said
Morderor de Calginis
with a notation this was the fifth printing, 1959, and authored by Divers Hands. The pages were thin and pulpy and contained endless tiny monospaced font paragraphs detailing queer and unusual locations across Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. In the appendices were numerous occult diagrams and hand-scrawled maps.
The Black Guide
, was the rough translation from Latin. He rolled it on his tongue and it tasted bitterly familiar as an epithet.
The Black Guide
.

Abruptly, and with the galvanizing force of an electrical current zapping him, a piece of memory returned. Michelle bought the almanac at a shop in Enumclaw, tickled by its novelty. The family was on vacation for the summer. He couldn’t remember if they’d actually tried to track down any of the listed sites. It seemed probable, but the specific details evaporated as he strained to dredge them. There was more to dig up, more to unearth. He snapped the almanac shut and tossed it aside. He wiped his hands on his pants, rubbing at an invisible taint that had already seeped into his blood, already spread a chill through him.

“Pop, what’s the matter?”

“Hmm? Nothing, Son. Too much blood to the ol’ brainpan. Stuffy, isn’t it?”

“There’s some really nutty entries in there. I read part of one on the Valley; typeset about split my skull, though. Gonna need glasses as thick as yours. Some of it is explicit and kinda hokey. Other parts, not so much. Raised the hair on my neck. The Waddell Valley chapter mentioned a house and a rock, but only in passing. The Sanguine Stone. Have to look up the name of the house; something to do with children. Damndest thing, too. It’s supposed to be within a few miles of here.”

“The other shoe droppeth. Your motives become clear. Helping me clean, the camping trip…”

“C’mon, Pop. Don’t be like that.”

“Children, huh?”

“Yeah,” Kurt said and rubbed his chin. “House of the children of old leaves…Nah, that’s not it, but close. Damndest thing, though. I swear to shit it’s impossible to locate entries in there after you close the thing. Like they move around.”

“Uh, well, some of the worst typesetting I’ve ever seen. Should use a magnifying glass when you read it.”

Kurt said, “Right. I’m hungry as a bear. When do we eat?”

Don fixed ham sandwiches while Kurt lugged the boxes downstairs and out to the barn. They rested on the porch and smoked cigarettes. Late afternoon had already come sweeping down from the Black Hills and the breeze was chilly. He cast sidelong glances at his son. Conversation was always difficult, points of commonality sparse and shallow. He considered relating his previous night’s adventures and couldn’t summon the energy to bear the incredulous response, the lecture about living so far removed from civilization that loneliness had surely begun to play tricks on his mind.

“Mom call you yet?”

“No,” Don said too quickly, eager for any bridge. “She gets involved in sightseeing, or what have you, and forgets, I think. I might not hear from her until she flies back.”

“Jesus, Dad. Next thing you know it’ll be separate beds.”

“Well, she does snore…”

Kurt took a deep pull from his bottle of beer. His eyes were slits, focused on the field, the flattening grass, dry as baked straw. Don realized Kurt had drunk the six-pack with mechanical efficiency.

Don also stared into the field. He remembered Kurt in kindergarten, their first summer here; he’d raced into the field, charged headlong into a hole hidden by that tall grass. Minutely serrated edges of grass blades dug a trench across the last three fingers of his left hand as he tried to brace against pitching on his face. Kurt had staggered back to Don and Michelle, blood leaking from his fist. They drove to the clinic, the one that used to be on Prine Road but had been bulldozed and replaced by a mini-mart liquor store. Kurt got stitched by Doc Green, two or three dozen and he didn’t shed a tear. He observed the operation with the innocent fascination peculiar to most children of that age. Don noticed Kurt make a fist now as he stared bleakly at the undulating grass. “Okay, then. Ready for round two?”

They cleaned up in silence and went back to work.

That evening, they ate hamburgers for supper and watched John Wayne in
The Fighting Seabees
until nearly one in the morning. The television was a beast; a home entertainment center in a long box, an oversized coffin, complete with a Philco radio and record player. He and Michelle picked it out from the Sears catalogue in 1971 and they’d recently gotten an adapter when the FCC decreed all old sets had to be digitally compliant. A couple of burly Italian gentlemen had originally brought the set in a van and spent the better part of two hours maneuvering it through the house and into the parlor on a dolly. Afterward, Michelle made a pitcher of ice tea and little cocktail sandwiches and they all sat around and watched
Leave It To Beaver
. Don had spent many a sleepless night sacked out at the foot of that behemoth. He drank a cup of tea and soaked his aching feet in a pan of water with mineral salts and fell instantly asleep.