The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All Read online

  Laird Barron

  The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

  ***

  Over the course of two award-winning collections and a critically acclaimed novel, The Croning, Laird Barron has arisen as one of the strongest and most original literary voices in modern horror and the dark fantastic. Melding supernatural horror with hardboiled noir, espionage, and a scientific backbone, Barron's stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year's best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards.

  Barron returns with his third collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. Collecting interlinking tales of sublime cosmic horror, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All delivers enough spine-chilling horror to satisfy even the most jaded reader.

  ***

  COPYRIGHT

  "Blackwood's Baby," first published in Ghosts by Gaslight: Stories of Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense, edited by Jack Dann and Nick Gevers, Harper Voyager, 2011.

  "The Redfield Girls," first published in Haunted Legends, edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas, Tor, 2010.

  "Hand of Glory," first published in The Book of Cthulhu II, edited by Ross E. Lockhart, Night Shade Books, 2012.

  "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven," first published in Supernatural Noir, edited by Ellen Datlow, Dark Horse Books, 2011.

  "The Siphon," first published in Blood and Other Cravings, edited by Ellen Datlow, Tor, 2011.

  "Jaws of Saturn" is original to this volume.

  "Vastation," first published in Cthulhu's Reign, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, DAW Books, 2010.

  "The Men from Porlock," first published in The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart, Night Shade Books, 2011.

  "More Dark," first published in The Revelator, edited by Matthew Cheney and Eric Schaller, 2012.

  DEDICATION

  For Jessica

  INTRODUCTION

  by Norman Partridge

  LAIRD BARRON.

  If you've an imaginative turn of mind, the name itself conjures images. A man alone. In a castle… or perhaps a manor house. A solitary gent with a few years on him; a man who's carved his place in the world.

  Of course, we're talking Scotland. Yes. The man lives in a stone manor on the moors. There he sits, staring at a crackling fire in a huge fireplace. His hunting dogs wait at heel, ready for the bones the master has stripped bare during a long evening meal. The animals are wise enough to hold their place until the word is given. Of course it will be (and soon), for the man loves his dogs as he loves little else.

  But something more than love fires this man's engine. Just look above the carved mantle, at the claymore mounted on a pair of hooks that might just as easily be found in an abattoir. There's a spatter of tarnish on the weapon's hilt, but none at all on the blade. And so the claymore speaks of stories that will not cross the man's lips this night… or any night.

  Laird Barron.

  It's a name that conjures images, if you've an imaginative turn of mind.

  That's no surprise-if you know the words of the man who owns it.

  If you know the work he has set down on the page.

  ***

  I first read Laird's work in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cruising the Internet at dialup speed, I'd found that folks were talking about his stories on several message boards. The word around the campfire was that Laird was pretty damned good. In fact, several people in the business were pointing to him as The Next Big Thing.

  Often, that kind of attention turns out to be a curse. Sure, it garners a bucketful of buzz, but it definitely sets the bar high when it comes to expectations. So while a young writer's opportunities may increase exponentially with spotlight attention, there's a price to pay if he doesn't live up to the hype. In a way, it's kind of like being the poor sap who caught the brass ring in the Aztec empire. You know, the one who gets everything he wants, only to be trotted to the top of a pyramid a year later, where his heart is carved bloody and beating from the rat-trap bones of his chest.

  Of course, that didn't happen with Laird.

  He was nobody's one-hit wonder.

  He proved that with each new story he published.

  But an image like the one I just boiled up? It's a little hard to let go. So let's play picture if you will for just a minute. Say Laird slipped through an eldritch wormhole in space and time, and found himself being dragged by several Aztec warriors to the top of a pyramid for a dose of sacrificial dagger and heart excision action.

  Let me size up that situation.

  Let me put it simply.

  I just can't picture Laird Barron going gently into that good night.

  I'd pay green money to see those Aztecs try to do their stuff, though. Especially if that wormhole and pyramid came complete with a requisite number of slithering things.

  Now, that'd be something to see.

  Or read about-in a Laird Barron story.

  ***

  When I think of Laird's work, I always circle back to the first piece that caught my attention. Originally published in F&SF, "Old Virginia" was a knockout, pure and simple. A piece of situational suspense set in a contained environment-not unlike The Thing, really, when you looked at the story in those terms-but Barron brought so much more to this particular tale that it was scary. It's a concise marvel, complete with sharp characterization, enough dread and darkness to fill up a novel, and just enough sense of the coming reveal to convince the reader he's forever playing catch-up.

  Anyway, I finished the story and immediately read it again, intent on discovering just how Laird managed all that in a scant eighteen pages. I still don't think I've figured out the answer to that one, though I've read the story several times since.

  But one thing I have figured out: "Old Virginia" always ends up near the top of the list when I think about the best stories I've read in the last ten years.

  It's that good.

  And so is Mr. Barron.

  ***

  Of course, Laird has come a long way since then. His Night Shade collections, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories and Occultation and Other Stories, earned him a pair of Shirley Jackson awards. His recent novel, The Croning, has earned rave reviews. It's my bet that next year you're going to see the latter on several Best Novel award ballots in the field of the fantastic.

  Turns out there's another Laird Barron novel, The Light is the Darkness, that I've somehow missed. But finding out that I've got an unread Barron book in my future is kind of like coming up against a king-sized Yuggothian fungi and discovering that you've got one more very serious bullet in your clip.

  One more thing: On my bookshelf, you can find Laird between Neal Barrett, Jr. and Ambrose Bierce.

  That's a pretty fine place to be.

  ***

  The man himself?

  I know what I've read online and in interviews. Laird's a native Alaskan. He came up tough and has often said that he survived his youth. He's worked in construction and as a commercial fisherman. He raced sled dogs in three Iditarods. If you read Laird's blog, you'll find he occasional recounts these experiences with an honesty that's both self-aware and (in today's world) astonishingly rare. His truths are often unvarnished. Or, as my old man used to say: "He doesn't gild the lily."

  Like most writers, Laird is a creature of his experiences and influences. In the larger scheme of things (and in the territory of Alaska) his experiences may not be unique, but when it comes to writers of the fantastic they're pretty close to it. To stretch the point enough to put it in Lovecraftese: "The grist for Mr. Barron's mill is of a
singular variety." But like the best writers, Laird has discovered ways to twist his influences and reinvent them, and (ultimately) make them his own.

  I'll go out on a limb and say that Laird has an appreciation for the sardonic, too. You'll see that when you read his story "Vastation." You may also discover it in distant corners of the Internet, where Laird sometimes shows up as The Man with the Lee Van Cleef Icon. And you'll find it, too, in a series of posts done last year by Laird's friends: "The Secret Life of Laird Barron."

  Google that.

  You'll find out that you can have a pretty good time, laughing in the dark.

  ***

  But let's stick with Laird's influences for a moment… and the fuel that drives his creative engine. Here's a taste of an interview I conducted with Mr. Barron for my blog:

  PARTRIDGE: The first time I read Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," I was on a backpacking trip in Northern California with nothing around but redwoods. It was an unsettling experience, to say the least. You're from Alaska, and you certainly dipped deep into the dark fiction well while living in a remote environment. Do you think that gave you a different view as a reader, and how did it mold you as a writer?

  BARRON: I was born and raised in Alaska, a number of those years spent in wilderness camp as my family migrated with the snow. We raised huskies for travel and freighting purposes, as well as racing in mid-distance competitions and the Iditarod. Money was tight, but books we had and I read voraciously, often by kerosene lamplight. The Arctic isolation, the vast, brooding environment, contributes to a dark psychology that might dilute with time and distance, but never truly dissipates from the spirit. I've siphoned and filtered that energy, channeled it into the atmospherics of the stories I write.

  ***

  As you're about to see, those atmospherics come through loud and clear in Laird's fiction. Sometimes. At other times, they're transmitted as little more than a whisper… the kind of whisper that can cold-cock you as surely as a slaughterhouse hammer.

  Again, you'll find several examples in the stories ahead. It's not my intention to steal thunder from these tales. But here's one example that's a favorite of mine, cribbed from my aforementioned blog interview with Laird:

  BARRON: Touching again on the geographical influence of Alaska, I'll give you a less abstract example of how the primordial energy of that area affects people from varied backgrounds. In the winter of 1993 I was racing a team of huskies across the imposing hills between the ghost town of Iditarod and the village of Shageluk. It was near sunset, thirty or forty below Fahrenheit, lonely wilderness in all directions, and the team trudged along due to poor trail conditions. I was tired, all attention focused upon directing the dogs and keeping the sled from crashing as we negotiated the treacherous grades.

  Periodically, I noted old, old pylons made of sawn logs erected off the beaten path. Markers. Initially, I didn't have much reaction, but as darkness drew down around us, the dogs' ears pricked up and a general sensation of nervousness radiated from the team. Within a few minutes I was very much overcome by a sense of dread, a profound and palpable impression of being watched by an inimical presence. Later, I queried several of the villagers about the markers (which indicated trails to hunting and burial areas) and they told me that the region was absolutely unsafe to travel after dark due to aggressive spirits. In the years since, former racers, some of them hard-bitten ex-military men, trappers and hunters, have expressed identical experiences of the approach to Shageluk.

  As I learned, it's simply something almost every racer goes through if they find themselves in that stretch around dusk. Not a damned thing happened, but I haven't shaken the creepiness of those vibes in the seventeen years and it inspires me whenever I contemplate the antagonism between man and wild, the modern and the ancient, or what is known versus what is hidden.

  ***

  That's a key, right there. Let's turn it in the lock.

  What is known versus what is hidden.

  In many ways, that's Laird Barron's stock-in-trade. Shivers born of something just out of sight. Terrors kindled by insensible fears suddenly made sensible by a universe that's as crazy as its inhabitants. Lovecraftian gods and monsters going nose-to-nose with men cursed by the particular horrors of their kind-blood born of wants and needs, scars born of life and experience, hearts that carry a certain measure of darkness. And every man jack among them is about to take a world-class beating from the universe, because everyone here pays a price.

  So, earthy cosmic horror? You bet. It's here. Laird Barron's bringing it. In "Blackwood's Baby," a story that opens with sentences that ram at you like measuring jabs. In the quiet depths of a dark lake with "The Redfield Girls." In "The Siphon," a perfect madhouse of a story. And in the tale I'd pick as my personal favorite of this particular compilation: "The Men from Porlock." Lock 'n' load, because that one mates Lovecraft with the best of Sam Peckinpah. It's The Wild Bunch versus The Old Ones, and it's a magnificently brutal tale that would make HPL cry for his momma.

  No doubt.

  But the trailers are over. Time for the main feature to begin. You can come along for the ride. To paraphrase Laird: "You get to be part of the legend."

  All you have to do is step right up.

  All you have to do is turn the page.

  -Norman Partridge

  Lafayette, California

  October 6, 2012

  BLACKWOOD'S BABY

  Late afternoon sun baked the clay and plaster buildings of the town.

  Its dirt streets lay empty, packed as hard as iron. The boarding house sweltered. Luke Honey sat in a chair in the shadows across from the window. Nothing stirred except flies buzzing on the window ledge. The window was a gap bracketed by warped shutters and it opened into a portal view of the blazing white stone wall of the cantina across the alley. Since the fistfight, he wasn't welcome in the cantina although he'd seen the other three men he'd fought there each afternoon, drunk and laughing. The scabs on his knuckles were nearly healed. Every two days, one of the stock boys brought him a bottle.

  Today, Luke Honey was drinking good strong Irish whiskey. His hands were clammy and his shirt stuck to his back and armpits. A cockroach scuttled into the long shadow of the bottle and waited. An overhead fan hung motionless. Clerk Galtero leaned on the counter and read a newspaper gone brittle as ancient papyrus, its fiber sucked dry by the heat; a glass of cloudy water pinned the corner. Clerk Galtero's bald skull shone in the gloom and his mustache drooped, sweat dripping from the tips and onto the paper. The clerk was from Barcelona and Luke Honey heard the fellow had served in the French Foreign Legion on the Macedonian Front during the Great War, and that he'd been clipped in the arm and that was why it curled tight and useless against his ribs.

  A boy entered the house. He was black and covered with the yellow dust that settled upon everything in this place. He wore a uniform of some kind, and a cap with a narrow brim, and no shoes. Luke Honey guessed his age at eleven or twelve, although his face was worn, the flesh creased around his mouth, and his eyes suggested sullen apathy born of wisdom. Here, on the edge of a wasteland, even the children appeared weathered and aged. Perhaps that was how Luke Honey himself appeared now that he'd lived on the plains and in the jungles for seven years. Perhaps the land had chiseled and filed him down too. He didn't know because he seldom glanced at the mirror anymore. On the other hand, there were some, such as a Boer and another renowned hunter from Canada Luke Honey had accompanied on many safaris, who seemed stronger, more vibrant with each passing season, as if the dust and the heat, the cloying jungle rot and the blood they spilled fed them, bred into them a savage vitality.

  The boy handed him a telegram in a stiff white envelope with fingerprints all over it. Luke Honey gave him a fifty cent piece and the boy left. Luke Honey tossed the envelope on the table. He struck a match with his thumbnail and lighted a cigarette. The light coming through the window began to thicken. Orange shadows tinged black slid across the wall of the cantina. He
poured a glass of whiskey and drank it in a gulp. He poured another and set it aside. The cockroach fled under the edge of the table.

  Two women descended the stairs. White women, perhaps English, certainly foreign travelers. They wore heavy, Victorian dresses, equally staid bonnets, and sheer veils. The younger of the pair inclined her head toward Luke Honey as she passed. Her lips were thinned in disapproval. She and her companion opened the door and walked though its rectangle of shimmering brilliance into the furnace. The door swung shut.

  Clerk Galtero folded the newspaper and placed it under the counter. He tipped his glass toward Luke Honey in a sardonic toast. "The ladies complained about you. You make noise in your room at night, the younger one says. You cry out, like a man in delirium. The walls are thin and she cannot sleep, so she complains to me."

  "Oh. Is the other one deaf, then?" Luke Honey smoked his cigarette with the corner of his mouth. He sliced open the envelope with a pocket knife and unfolded the telegram and read its contents. The letter was an invitation from one Mr. Liam Welloc Esquire to partake in an annual private hunt in Washington State. The hunt occurred on remote ancestral property, its guests designated by some arcane combination of pedigree and longstanding association with the host, or by virtue of notoriety in hunting circles. The telegram chilled the sweat trickling down his face. Luke Honey was not a particularly superstitious man; nonetheless, this missive called with an eerie intimacy and struck a chord deep within him, awakened an instinctive dread that fate beckoned across the years, the bloody plains and darkened seas, to claim him.