Occultation and Other Stories Read online

  Occultation

  and other stories

  Laird Barron

  Night Shade Books

  San Francisco

  Other books by Laird Barron:

  The Imago Sequence and Other Stories

  The Croning (forthcoming)

  Occultation © 2010 by Laird Barron

  This edition of Occultation © 2010 by Night Shade Books

  Introduction © 2010 by Michael Shea

  Jacket art by Matthew Jaffe

  Jacket design by Claudia Noble

  Interior layout and design by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  “The Forest,” first published in Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Ellen Datlow, Tor Books, 2007.

  “Occultation,” first published as “The Occultation” in Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness, edited by Mike Allen, Norilana Books, 2008.

  “The Lagerstätte,” first published in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow, Del Rey Books, 2008.

  “Mysterium Tremendum” is original to this volume.

  “Catch Hell,” first published in Lovecraft Unbound, edited by Ellen Datlow, Dark Horse Comics, 2009.

  “Strappado,” first published in Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Solaris Books, 2009.

  “The Broadsword,” first published in Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, edited by S. T. Joshi, PS Publishing, 2010.

  “--30--” is original to this volume.

  “Six Six Six” is original to this volume.

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-192-8

  Printed in Canada

  Night Shade Books

  Please visit us on the web at

  http://www.nightshadebooks.com

  Acknowledgments:

  My agents, Brendan Deneen and Colleen Lindsay.

  Barbara Baar; Andrew Migliore; JD Busch; Dexter Morgan; Jeff Ford; Charles Tan; Chris Perridas; Tom Tyson; John, Fiona, and David Langan; Stewart O’Nan; Paul Witcover; Terry Weyna; John Pelan; Sarah Langan; Gavin Grant; Wilum Pugmire; Richard Gavin; Ian Rogers; Steve Berman; Simon Strantzas; Marc Laidlaw; Norm Partridge; Lee Thomas; Gene O’Neill; Livia Llewellyn; Nick Kaufmann; Nick Gevers; Paul Tremblay; Rick Bowes; Jack Haringa; John Skipp; Cody Goodfellow; Kelly Link; Lucius Shepard; Elizabeth Hand; ST Joshi; Jerad Walters; Nick Mamatas; David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer; Mike Allen; Vera Nazarian; Peter Crowther; Ann VanderMeer; Jeff VanderMeer; Gordon Van Gelder; Ellen Datlow.

  Thank you to my stalwart companions Athena, Horatio, Ulysses, and Persephone: ever loyal, ever true.

  Thanks to the readers: you’re what it’s all about.

  Thank you to Jeremy Lassen, Jason Williams, John Joseph Adams, Ross Lockhart, Marty Halpern, Claudia Noble, Matthew Jaffe, and all the gang at Night Shade Books.

  Special thanks to Michael and Linda Shea, two of the kindest hearts

  I know.

  Extra special thanks to my wife Erin. None of this would be possible without you, dear.

  For Jody Rose. A rock in the storm

  Introduction by

  Michael Shea

  Laird Barron’s carnivorous cosmos… Or perhaps it’s more a conspiracy his cosmos draws you into than a digesting maw.

  And rather than being absorbed as a nutrient, you may be absorbed into an older and more potent Form—your limbs and neck may grow rubbery and rather more elongate, and your new tree-toad fingers might enable you to crawl across ceilings, thence to peer down on old, still-mortal friends and acquaintances, studying them from many angles with your new stalked eyes.

  Barron’s cosmos is an omni-morph that can dragoon you whenever/wherever it wants into its swarming, pullulating fabric. This, of course, is a simple Axiom of the reality we all share, every second of our lives, with our Universe: in that great Starry Engine, we all end as mulch, and then, as Other Things….

  But, wonderfully, this radiant, hair-raising Truth is the very engine of Barron’s imagination.

  As often with craftsmen who are blazing the path of a new form, his imagery flows like music. (Like Jack Vance’s, his prose too is a pumpin’ Baroque, though of a more democratic shade.) And what a pleasure it is, the easily unspooling sensory mosaic of Barron’s prose! It limns and kindles equally his characters’ thoughts in their stream, and the stream of their actions evoked to our eyes. He moves ghostly from the innards of his characters out into their cosmoi, with a largesse of language where there’s yet not a single wasted syllable.

  Here’s Partridge, automotive passenger in the opening scene of “The Forest.” To his dreaming mind’s eye, a phantasmic woman, who was just now offering Partridge a large tarantula,

  “…offered him a black phone. The woman said ‘Come say goodbye and good luck! Come quick!’ Except the woman did not speak. Toshi’s breathless voice bled through the receiver. The woman in the cold white mask brightened then dimmed like a dying coal or a piece of metal coiling into itself.

  Partridge opened his eyes and rested his brow against window glass. He was alone with the driver. The bus trawled through a night forest. Black trees dripped with fog. The narrow black road crumbled from decades of neglect. Sometimes poor houses and fences stood among the weeds and the ferns and mutely suggested many more were lost in the dark….”

  Beautiful! What a sure touch! And we may seize entirely at random amidst Barron’s pages, and display this faceted fullness in every paragraph.

  Barron’s verbal surfaces are like anaconda-skins. Jeweled they are, with bright crystals of sense and sensation, and his sinuous narrative line slides a smooth constrictor’s grip around the rapt reader’s sensibilities.

  Meanwhile, on the macro level of his stories’ structures, Barron weaves his fabric by means of a kind of assonance or resonance, a powerfully reverberant imagery.

  For instance, we enter “The Lagerstätte” through the mind of a suicidal woman newly widowed and orphaned of her child. Her errant dreams, cancered with loss, lead her into a kind of Necro-Mundus that is haunted, even paved with the self-slain. We move with her through death after death of her own, and also—via her empathic heart—through the death- after-death of her suicidal encounter-group friends—all dying and dying with a dying fall. It’s a metaphysical assonance, if you will, the echo of an archetypal human fate, image after image of self-slaughter in surreal reverberation. The Jackpot of Barron’s work—and every single story of his I’ve read is a jackpot—is the durably architected visions he constructs. In this tale he has built before our eyes a Lagerstätte. A kind of Burgess Shale wherein self-killed women agelessly sink or hurtle to their deaths, stratum on eon-sunk stratum of their dying falls….

  This reverberatory technique is wonderfully various: the approaching horror strikes a note now here, now there—a face, an utterance, a slant of light, a half-glimpsed shape evoking a half-obliterated memory…. Barron’s polyhedral style is perfect for haunting places. The narrative eye, as jeweled as a bug’s, draws utterance from everything, both above and below. In “The Broadsword,” our Protag’s very Past becomes transformed. Oviposited in his youth by the Other-Worldly, his Age is gravid with those Aliens’ growth. Half of his Past is revised before his staring eyes and quaking heart, half his years respooled onto a transcosmic spindle of alien consciousness.

  This is a marvelous Haunted House story without any build-up or ground-laying. We sip Barron’s sentences, and the apparitions come prickling up right through our scalps. The Protag’s Alien-infested Past twines its luridly beautiful branchings through the big old hulk of the Hotel Broadsword, and Other Worlds hiss and mutter at the tenants from its closets and corners and ceilings, and fina
lly….

  That big old hotel is a kind of epitome of what every one of these stories, in its essence, does. Our earthly architecture is full of coigns and corners, crevices and crevasses, where the Cosmos peeks through. Consider our title story, “Occultation.” Our Protags, back in their desert motel after partying in a roadside bar, have done some fucking, and now lie smoking cigarettes. And up in one corner of the ceiling, notice…is it a stain, or a shadow, or a shape…? Hypotheses lead to divagations… lead to more haunting hypotheses… lead to fear, and at length, to an actual attempt to turn on the light… which doesn’t work. Though a desert tortoise the size of an automobile appears outside soon after, it is not that which brings… death?

  Or consider “Strappado,” where a small swarm of sophisticated Internationals—on plump expense accounts of various provenance—get whispered word of a creative presence in the neighborhood (a slummish exurb not far downcoast from Mumbai)—a Name for creative anarchy, a Dark Genius, avant de l’avant-garde. The rumor of his doings carries a cachet of thrilling scandal, and now these chance-met lucky few can be in his next film…. Barrels of bones figure in our denouement and, for the living, nightmare metamorphoses of their former selves.

  Simply put, the Universe aggressively surrounds Barron’s characters. They may be touring or picnicking or camping or fucking or just fucking around…whatever their fears and their lusts and their searching, all their energies are like little wriggling lures to the Benthic, the Hadal giants hanging near them on every side.

  But understand. This Occultation, this ground-breaking book, is not a feast of mere annihilations. These fates are—every one of them—Transformations. And to be transformed, to be Remade, is not a passive exercise. It is an excruciating eclosion, a branching, fracturing emergence into a much bigger, hungrier universe. I think only Laird Barron could convincingly create a scene in which his Protag porks Satan Himself, grows gravid with, and then delivers to our staring eyes the seething offspring of that unholy coitus.

  I won’t even glance at the other wonders collected in Occultation. If you haven’t heard me yet, you won’t. The best way to sum up this fresh, abounding talent is to note that Barron has that key spark of the greatest horrific writers—a truly metaphysical heart. He has knelt in the Chapel where we all worship, or fail to—has knelt in the Chapel, and truly heard the echoes of its vastness….

  —Michael Shea, author of

  The Autopsy & Other Tales, September 2009

  The Forest

  After the drive had grown long and monotonous, Partridge shut his eyes and the woman was waiting. She wore a cold white mask similar to the mask Bengali woodcutters donned when they ventured into the mangrove forests along the coast. The tigers of the forest were stealthy. The tigers hated to be watched; they preferred to sneak up on prey from behind, so natives wore the masks on the backs of their heads as they gathered wood. Sometimes this kept the tigers from dragging them away.

  The woman in the cold white mask reached into a wooden box. She lifted a tarantula from the box and held it to her breast like a black carnation. The contrast was as magnificent as a stark Monet if Monet had painted watercolors of emaciated patricians and their pet spiders.

  Partridge sat on his high, wooden chair and whimpered in animal terror. In the daydream, he was always very young and powerless. The woman tilted her head. She came near and extended the tarantula in her long, gray hand. “For you,” she said. Sometimes she carried herself more like Father and said in a voice of gravel, “Here is the end of fear.” Sometimes the tarantula was a hissing cockroach of prehistoric girth, or a horned beetle. Sometimes it was a strange, dark flower. Sometimes it was an embryo uncurling to form a miniature adult human that grinned a monkey’s hateful grin.

  The woman offered him a black phone. The woman said, “Come say goodbye and good luck. Come quick!” Except the woman did not speak. Toshi’s breathless voice bled through the receiver. The woman in the cold white mask brightened then dimmed like a dying coal or a piece of metal coiling into itself.

  Partridge opened his eyes and rested his brow against window glass. He was alone with the driver. The bus trawled through a night forest. Black trees dripped with fog. The narrow black road crumbled from decades of neglect. Sometimes poor houses and fences stood among the weeds and the ferns and mutely suggested many more were lost in the dark. Wilderness had arisen to reclaim its possessions.

  Royals hunted in woods like these. He snapped on the overhead lamp and then opened his briefcase. Stags, wild boar, witches. Convicts. The briefcase was nearly empty. He had tossed in some traveler’s checks, a paperback novel and his address book. No cell phone, although he left a note for his lawyer and a recorded message at Kyla’s place in Malibu warning them it might be a few days, perhaps a week, that there probably was not even phone service where he was going. Carry on, carry on. He had hopped a redeye jet to Boston and once there eschewed the convenience of renting a car or hiring a chauffeur and limo. He chose instead the relative anonymity of mass transit. The appeal of traveling incognito overwhelmed his normally staid sensibilities. Here was the first adventure he had undertaken in ages. The solitude presented an opportunity to compose his thoughts—his excuses, more likely.

  He’d cheerfully abandoned the usual host of unresolved items and potential brushfires that went with the territory—a possible trip to the Andes if a certain Famous Director’s film got green-lighted and if the Famous Director’s drunken assertion to assorted executive producers and hangers-on over barbecued ribs and flaming daiquiris at the Monarch Grille that Richard Jefferson Partridge was the only man for the job meant a blessed thing. There were several smaller opportunities, namely an L.A. documentary about a powerhouse high school basketball team that recently graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, unless the documentary guy, a Cannes Film Festival sweetheart, decided to try to bring down the governor of California instead, as he had threatened to do time and again, a pet crusade of his with the elections coming that fall, and then the director would surely use his politically savvy compatriot, the cinematographer from France. He’d also been approached regarding a proposed documentary about prisoners and guards at San Quentin. Certainly there were other, lesser engagements he’d lost track of, these doubtless scribbled on memo pads in his home office.

  He knew he should hire a reliable secretary. He promised himself to do just that every year. It was hard. He missed Jean. She’d had a lazy eye and a droll wit; made bad coffee and kept sand-filled frogs and fake petunias on her desk. Jean left him for Universal Studios and then slammed into a reef in Maui learning to surf with her new boss. The idea of writing the want-ad, of sorting the applications and conducting the interviews and finally letting the new person, the stranger, sit where Jean had sat and handle his papers, summoned a mosquito’s thrum in the bones behind Partridge’s ear.

  These details would surely keep despite what hysterics might come in the meanwhile. Better, much better, not to endure the buzzing and whining and the imprecations and demands that he return at once on pain of immediate career death, over a dicey relay. He had not packed a camera, either. He was on vacation. His mind would store what his eye could catch and that was all.

  The light was poor. Partridge held the address book close to his face. He had scribbled the directions from margin to margin and drawn a crude map with arrows and lopsided boxes and jotted the initials of the principles: Dr. Toshi Ryoko; Dr. Howard Campbell; Beasley; and Nadine. Of course, Nadine—she snapped her fingers and here he came at a loyal trot. There were no mileposts on the road to confirm the impression that his destination was near. The weight in his belly sufficed. It was a fat stone grown from a pebble.

  Partridge’s instincts did not fail him. A few minutes before dawn, the forest receded and they entered Warrenburgh. Warrenburgh was a loveless hamlet of crabbed New England shop fronts and angular plank and shingle houses with tall, thin doors and oily windows. Streetlights glowed along Main Street with black gaps like a broken pea
rl necklace. The street itself was buckled and rutted by poorly tarred cracks that caused sections to cohere uneasily as interleaved ice floes. The sea loomed near and heavy and palpable beneath a layer of rolling gloom.

  Partridge did not like what little he glimpsed of the surroundings. Long ago, his friend Toshi had resided in New Mexico and Southern California, did his best work in Polynesia and the jungles of Central America. The doctor was a creature of warmth and light. Rolling Stone had characterized him as “a rock star among zoologists” and as the “Jacques Cousteau of the jungle,” the kind of man who hired mercenaries to guard him, performers to entertain his sun drenched villa, and filmmakers to document his exploits. This temperate landscape, so cool and provincial, so removed from Partridge’s experience of all things Toshi, seemed to herald a host of unwelcome revelations.

  Beasley, longstanding attendant of the eccentric researcher, waited at the station. “Rich! At least you don’t look like the big asshole Variety says you are.” He nodded soberly and scooped Partridge up for a brief hug in his powerful arms. This was like being embraced by an earth mover. Beasley had played Australian rules football for a while after he left the Army and before he came to work for Toshi. His nose was squashed and his ears were cauliflowers. He was magnetic and striking as any character actor, nonetheless. “Hey, let me get that.” He set Partridge aside and grabbed the luggage the driver had dragged from the innards of the bus. He hoisted the suitcases into the bed of a ’56 Ford farm truck. The truck was museum quality. It was fire engine red with a dinky American flag on the antenna.