The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

Miller awoke to Calhoun begging for help.

Calhoun cried from the direction of the tower. He called them by name in a tone of anguish and his voice carried. He began screaming the screams of a man partially buried alive or hung in barbed wire or swollen with mustard gas. Miller lay in the shadows, watching the dying light of the fires shiver across the wall of the cave. Calhoun kept screaming and they all pretended not to hear him.



* * *



Still later and after night settled in as tight as a blindfold, Stevens shook Miller. “Somethin’s wrong.”

“Oh, jumpin’ Jaysus,” Ruark said and moments later lighted the firepot. Miller would’ve cursed the old man for revealing their position, except he saw the cause of alarm—Horn was gone, spirited away from under their noses. Drips and drabs of blood smeared into the tunnel, into the blackness. “Them sonsabitches snatched Thad!”

As if in response to the light, a faint, ghostly moan echoed up the passage from great subterranean depths. Help me, boys. Help me. At least that’s what it sounded like to Miller. The distance and acoustics could’ve made wind whistling through chimneys of rock resemble almost anything.

“Lordy, Lordy,” Bane said. He was a frightful sight; gore limed his beard and jacket. He might’ve been a talking corpse. “That’s the boy.”

“Ain’t him,” Stevens said.

“The kid is done for,” Miller said. His eyes watered and he struggled to keep his voice even. “Whoever’s hooting down that tunnel is no friend of ours.”

“They’s right, Moses,” Ruark said. “This an ol’ Injun trick. Make a noise of a wounded friend an draw ya in.” He ran his thumb across his throat with an exaggerated flourish. “Ya should know it, hoss. That boy is daid.”

“Lookit all the blood,” Stevens said.

Bane shoved a plug of tobacco into his mouth and chewed with his eyes closed. His flesh was papery and his eyelids fluttered the way a man’s do when he’s caught in a terrible dream. He resembled the photographs of dead outlaws in open coffins displayed on frontier boardwalks. He spat. “Yeh, an’ lookit me. Still kickin’.”

Help me. Help me. The four of them froze like woodland animals, heads inclined toward the dim cries, the cold, cold draft.

“Ain’t him,” Stevens repeated, but mostly to himself.

Bane stood. He leaned against the wall, the barrel of his Rigby nosing the sand. He nodded to Ruark. “You comin’?”

Ruark spat. He lifted the firepot and led the way.

Bane said, “Alrightee, boys. Take care.” He tapped his hat and limped after his comrade. Their shadows swayed and jostled, and their light grew smaller and seeped into the mountain and was gone.

The others sat in the dark for a long time, listening. Miller heard faint laughter, a snatch of Bane singing “John Brown’s Body,” and then only the fluting of the wind in the rocks.

“Oh, hell,” Stevens said when the silence between them had gone on for an age. “You was in the war.”

“You weren’t?”

“Uh-uh. My father worked for the post office. He fixed my card so’s I wouldn’t get conscripted.”

“Wish I’d thought of that,” Miller said.

“You seen the worst of it. Any chance we kin get out a this with our skins?”

“Nope.”

There was another long pause. Stevens said, “Want a smoke?” He lighted two Old Mills and passed one to Miller. They smoked and listened, but there was nothing to hear except for the wind, the rustle of branches outside. Stevens said, “He weren’t dragged. The kid crawled away.”

“How do you figure? He was pretty much dead.”

“Pretty much ain’t the same thing, now is it? I heard ’em talkin’ to him, whisperin’ from the dark. Only heard bits. Didn’t need more…they told him to come ahead. An’ he did.”

“Must’ve been persuasive,” Miller said. “And you didn’t raise the alarm.”

“Hard to explain. Snake-bit, frozen stiff. It was like my body fell asleep yet I could hear what was goin’ on. I was piss-scared.”

Miller smoked his cigarette. “I don’t blame you,” he said.

“I got my senses back after a piece. Kid was long gone by then. Whoever they are, he went with ’em.”

“And now Moses and Ruark are with them too.”

“I didn’t tell the whole truth about what we saw in the tunnel.”

“Is that so.”

“Didn’t seem much point carryin’ on. Not far along the trail it opens into a cavern. Dunno how big; our light couldn’t touch but the edges of the walls and the ceilin’. There were drops into plain ol’ nothin’ an’ more passages twistin’ every which way. But we stopped only a few steps into the cavern. A pillar rose high as the light could reach. Broad at the base like a pyramid and made of rocks all slippery an’ shiny from drippin’ water. Except, the rocks weren’t just rocks. There were skeletons cemented in between. Prolly hundreds an’ hundreds. Small things. There was a hole at eye level. Smooth as the bore of my gun and about the size of my fist. Pure black, solid, glistenin’ black that threw the light from our torch back at us. We didn’t peep too close on account of the skeletons before we turned tail and ran. Saw one thing as we turned to haul our asses…That hole had widened enough I could a jumped in and stood tall. It made a sound that traveled from somewhere farther and deeper than I want a think about. Not the kind a sound you hear, but the kind you feel in your bones. Felt kinda bad and good at once. I could tell Ruark liked it. Oh, he was afraid, but compelled, I guess you’d say.”

“Well,” Miller said after consideration, “I can see why you might’ve kept that to yourself.”

“Yeh. I wish them ol’ coons had stayed back. Maybe we could a blasted our way out with their guns and ours.”

Miller didn’t think so. “Maybe. Catch some shut eye. Sunup in a couple hours.”

Stevens rolled over and set his hat over his face and didn’t move again. Miller watched the stars fade.



* * *



They left the cave at dawn and descended the hill into the ruins of the village. Ashes turned in the breeze. The tower stood, although scorched and blackened. Its double doors were sprung, wood smoldering, hinges melted. Smoke curled from the gap. Many of the surrounding houses had burned to their foundations. Gray dust lay over everything. Corpses were stacked near the longhouse and covered with a canvas tarp to keep the birds away. Judging from height and width of the collection, at least fifteen bodies were piled beneath the tarp awaiting burial. Twenty-five to thirty men and women combed the charred wreckage. Their hands and faces were filthy with the gray dust. Some stared hatefully at the pair, but none spoke, none raised a hand.

Miller and Stevens trudged through the village and onward, following the river south as it wended through the valley. With every step, Miller’s shoulders tightened as he awaited the inevitable musket ball to shear his spine. Early in the afternoon, they climbed a bluff and rested for the first time.

After Stevens caught his breath, he said, “I don’t understand. Why they’d let us live?” He removed his hat and peered through the trees, searching for signs of pursuit.

“Did they?” Miller said. He didn’t look the way they’d come, instead studying the forest depths before them, tasting the damp and the rot and the cold. He thought of his dream of flying into the depths of space, of the terrible darkness between the stars and what ruled there. “We’ve got nowhere to hide. I had to guess, I’d guess they’re saving us for something very special.”

So, they continued on and arrived at the outskirts of Slango as the peaks darkened to purple. Nothing remained of the encampment except for abandoned logs and mucky, flattened areas, and a muddle of footprints and drag marks. Every man, woman, and mule was gone. Every piece of equipment likewise vanished. The railroad tracks had been torn up. In a few months forest would reclaim all but the shorn slopes, erasing any evidence Slango Camp ever stood there.

“Shit,” Stevens said without much emotion. He hung his hat on a branch and wiped his face with a bandanna.

“Hello, lads,” A man said, stepping from behind a tree. He was wide and portly and wore a stovepipe hat and an immaculate silk suit. His handlebar mustache was luxuriously waxed and he carried a blackthorn cane in his left hand. A dying ray of sun glowed upon the white, white skin of his face and neck. “I am Dr. Boris Kalamov. You have caused me a tremendous amount of trouble.” He gestured at the surroundings. “This is not our way. We prefer peaceful coexistence, to remain unseen and unheard, suckling like a hagfish, our hosts none the wiser, albeit dimly cognizant through the persistent legends and campfire tales which please us and nourish us as much as blood and bone. To act with such dramatic flourish goes against our code, our very nature. Alas, certain of my brethren were taken by a vengeful mood what with you torching the village of our servants.” He tisked and wagged a finger that seemed to possess too many joints.

Miller didn’t even bother to lift his rifle. He was focused upon the nightmare taking shape in his mind. “How now, Doctor?”

Stevens was more optimistic, or just doggedly belligerent. He jacked a round into the chamber of his Winchester and sighted the man’s chest.

Dr. Kalamov smiled and his mouth dripped black. “You arrived at a poor time, friends. The black of the sun, the villagers’ holiest of holy days when they venerate the Great Dark and we who call it home. Their quaint and superstitious ceremony at the dolmen cut short because of your trespass. Such an interruption merits pain and suffering. O’ Men from Porlock, it shan’t end well for you.”

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 your 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 f*cking 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.

John continued: “We stumbled back to the hotel eventually, although I don’t recall how we got there, and sat around the lounge comforting Paul about a terrible Strange Vistas shellacking of his novel. Somebody on staff had it in for him, no two ways about it. Once HBO bought it for a series, the asshats sweetened right up about his new books and SV begged him on bended knee for an interview. How convenient, eh?”

“Screw SV and that knob job who runs feature reviews,” I said and grabbed the flask for another swig. I’d always had the luck of the Irish when it came to press, but Strange Vistas was notorious for the suspect quality of its reviews department, mainly because it was helmed by a blithering idiot who desperately wanted to be his generation’s John Clute, and was instead doomed to a life of disappointment and neglect, which while typical and deserved fare for much of the Brit Lit scene, no doubt stung like a motherf*cker. Among the ezine’s handful of reputable freelance contributors dwelt a rotten core of ankle biters who would savage a book like a terrier shaking a rat on the principle that bile drove traffic and brought some, yea any, attention to themselves that would be otherwise lacking if dependent upon their own merits. Look at me! For the love of God! reviewers. Fortunately, no one actually read the rag but friends, family, proofreaders, chronic masturbators, and the aggrieved authors themselves.

“Holy shit, don’t utter such heresy near me!” John made a sign in the air. “The woods have eyes, the fields ears. That effing bastard Niall-whatever who edits the thing will have me killed or blackballed, whichever is worse.”

“Niall is so famous and respected he needs no surname. He has never heard of you.”

“You’ll be singing a different tune if he gets a hold of your next book, you ham-fisted hack. I don’t know why he called you ham-fisted. They’re rather delicate, actually.”

“Speaking of coconuts,” I said.

“Oh, yeah. Here we go.”

“When I was a young stud, I’d dated this girl for a few weeks. It was all new and mysterious. We went to the ocean with another couple, had a fire on the beach, drank some wine, all that tediously romantic sort of crap. On the way home, me and the guy are up front in his car, discussing rock versus heavy metal, the girls giggling and bickering in the back. I hear the distinctive snap of a bra coming undone, more giggling, then smell coconut scent. The guy’s eyes pop out of his head and he almost swerves into the ditch trying to adjust the rearview mirror. I turn around and by thunder, the ladies have peeled off their tops and are giving each other a coconut lotion rubdown for no logical reason whatsoever, except for our viewing pleasure.”

“My god.”

“Whomever. Trust me, words don’t do the scene justice.”

“Nothing like that ever happens to me.” There was a world of bitterness in that admission.

“I have lived a varied life,” I said. “Short, but varied.”

“Great, now I got sidetracked with visions of gleaming breasts and…Yeah, there was a point to the bit about Scotland. If I could only concentrate…”

“L was in the house?” An easy guess on my part, but something in my brain shifted with the rightness of it as the words were uttered. The phantom click of a pistol’s hammer cocking.

“Yes! The fabulous bastard materialized at the edge of the lounge near the bar. The lights were low and he looked ghostly with his wild hair and strange eyes. He wore an old-fashioned suit with a white carnation in the lapel. And he carried a blackthorn cane. A twisted, sinister accouterment, that cane. I bet there was a cavalry saber hidden inside.” John’s expression was as wistful as Bob’s eyes were blue.

“I thought he avoided conventions. Ruin his image. Le Hermit and all.”

“So they say. Although there are rumors. People know people who spotted him at the bar sipping Ardbeg at World Horror in ’89, haunting the hotel terrace at the World Science Fiction Convention in ’97, sitting in the back of a horror lit panel at Comicon whenever. Jack swore they had a ten minute conversation in the green room at Readercon in 2007. There was a power outage and they sat in the dark and smoked a joint and discussed the suicide cults in Japan. There’s a haunted forest at the base of Mt. Fuji. College students off themselves in droves every year. Suicide Mecca. Japanese government tries to keep it hushed up, but y’know.”

“For a man who loathes existence, you’d think he’d be even more on board with suicide. It’s right for others, not him…”

“Oh, L is definitely against. Antinatalists abhor suicide. Goes counter to the code.”

“Right, ending their miserable existences would trump the much greater joy of pissing and moaning about their miserable existences.”

“That, and it’s big fun to inflict one’s contrarian views upon the hapless.”

“Hapless and gullible. Some people are born looking for a crock of shit to get their head stuck in. Jack didn’t tell me he met L.”

“He only mentioned it to me a few months before he died, disappeared, whatever.”

“That’s unsettling,” I said.

“I have to agree,” John said. “But it’s a coincidence. L didn’t clip Jack. Hell, Jack probably didn’t even really meet L. He got high and dreamed the whole thing. Plus the dude was a hell of a liar.” He laughed and had a drink by way of genuflection. One simply didn’t take Jack’s name in vain.

“No, man,” I said. “It’s unsettling because Jack was obviously hallucinating at the end. That’s a sign of way too many drugs, or mental illness. Maybe he was bipolar. We could’ve helped him.” I tried not to wince at the irony of my observation.

“Sorry, I’m not gonna kick my own ass over what happened to Jack. For your information, I really did spot L. Michael C was sitting next to me. He saw the guy too, before he walked away. I ran over to see if I could flag him down. L was gone baby gone, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “That’s how men of mystery roll. And ghosts. And leprechauns.”

“Michael’s taking us for a few drinks before the show. You can ask him yourself. He’s keen on the subject. Actually knows L from the old days. Calls ’em the cat food days instead of salad days.”

The last thing either of us needed were more drinks. On the other hand, who was I to turn down a chance to booze with Michael C, an author nearly as cultish and reclusive as the inimitable L? Besides, Michael only drank the finest single malt, expense be damned.

The train rattled into a tunnel and darkness. By the faint plastic glow of the interior lights I had a rush of vertigo that tricked my body into believing the passenger car no longer moved laterally, but had shifted to the vertical plane and was descending at tremendous velocity, an express elevator to the pits. Streaks of red flickered against the windows. The kid with the earphones glanced at me. His earphones resembled the curved horns of a ram. His eyes reflected the void. He smiled. His smile was the void.

I gave him the finger.



* * *



Michael C awaited us at Grand Central Station. We immediately repaired to a hole in the wall with an Irish house band and a sexy bartender decked in a leather bustier. Thank Jesus, Mary, and the Saints for those.

Most of the clientele were faux bikers and imitation punk rockers. I suspected their tattoos peeled and peacock-hued mohawks combed over to make office dress code come Monday morning. The garage music banged and wheedled with stops and gaps that hurt my brain. I ordered a round of Glenrothes and we toasted good old dead Jack one more time.

Michael was clad in black, as ever. Black silk shirt and string tie, black slacks and black wingtips. His hair was black and curled spring-tight. He was pale, gaunt of cheek, and wiry as a hound, ever restless without actually twitching or fidgeting. His eyes, though. They shivered and crackled. He proved quite pleased to discuss Tom L.

“Sure, we saw him in Glasgow. Dude was there, scoping the joint. I recognized him right away.”

“What does he do? For a living, I mean.” Anybody who knows anything knows writers don’t survive off earnings from writing. We all have real jobs such as being teachers, dish washers, drug dealers, and crack whores.

“Works as an underwriter. Or writes technical manuals for research and development at an auto plant. Or he heads a lab at a defense contractor. Point is, nobody knows what he does outside of writing because he says something different to whomever asks. Wilum and S.T. told me L bought several blocks of abandoned properties for a dollar and that he lives completely alone. Pushes a shopping cart to and from an outlet store like a bag lady. Spends evenings on the stoop in a pair of John Lennons and a peacoat, smoking foreign cigarettes and watching kids smash in the windows of wrecked cars. Sleeps in a king-sized poster-bed in the penthouse of a historic brownstone that used to be a famous hotel where all the Mo-Town singers and execs held court. Just him now, and the things that go bump in the night.” Michael had snagged Poe and was experimenting with the marionette’s strings as he talked, causing Poe to strut and lurch on the tabletop in a creepy pantomime of moonwalking, then spinning like a 1970s break-dance king performing a herky-jerky tarantella. In sixty seconds Michael had gotten more of the hang of it than John had in a whole year. John shrugged and cheerfully kept at his scotch, hugging Bob in the crook of his elbow like the protective father he was.

I said, “Didn’t Nathan B post an exposé on his blog? Exploding the Myth of L?”

Michael nodded. “As a joke, yes. A tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of the L mystique. Nathan thinks, or at least he likes to think, L doesn’t exist. His theory is a few writers got together during the 1980s and created their very own Richard Bachman. He even went so far as to out that British hack, Mark S, as one of the original instigators, although that’s a mighty generous accusation considering Mark S’s best ideas were all previously written by Lovecraft, Aickman.”

“Yeah, I read something by Mark S—The White Paws. That was his bestseller. Moved thirty-six copies at the British Fantasy Convention when everybody got drunk and thought they were signing up for a charity drive.”

“The White Paws was followed closely by The Man Who Collected Barbara Cartland,” John said. “But it didn’t do so hot, alas.”

“Kicked ass in the Commonwealth,” I said.

“Does that even count?”

“Nah, not really. I apologize.”

I hadn’t thought much of Mark S’s The White Paws. The sorry bastard worshipped at the altar of L and his work came off all the worse by way of comparison. L lite, so to speak.

Sadly, he’d been famously murdered by another author, an English lady he’d cyberstalked for ages. They’d had an ongoing feud over a metafictional story good ol’ woman-hating S wrote that painted her in an unflattering light. Then the female author had the audacity to go and win the British Fantasy Award a few times while S was passed over without comment, as usual. Despite his public disdain for industry laurels and accolades, he snapped and began haunting internet message boards the lady frequented, and posting pseudo-anonymous rants about how girls like her only won awards because they looked fetching in a skirt.

He finally crossed the line by rummaging through trash bins outside her apartment one night and she, having lost her wits due to S’s relentless fear campaign, sneaked upon him and cracked his skull with a ball peen hammer, cut off his head and stored it in the freezer behind a frozen Butterball turkey, or whatever the f*ck brand they sell in jolly old England. She was currently finishing up a remarkably short stint at a women’s prison and her book sales were sensational.

I’d heard that S’s funeral reception was attended by exactly one person: feared and dreaded genre editor S Jones who’d show up for anything that offered free alcohol and who’d once infamously hailed Mark S as the savior of British horror, much to everyone’s eternal chagrin. At least Jones sprang for the wreath. HOCUS, the science fiction industry magazine, gave S a one-sentence obituary, which was more than they’d given any of his books at least. All very lurid, as befitted the community.

Michael said, “Anyway, Nate hypothesized the L Syndrome was a sophisticated long con. A masterful grift. Dead letter drops, fake email addresses, phony author bios, author photo of some guy dead since the Roaring Twenties. Started as a game, each of them penning gibberish and sending it to Space & Time, Horror Show, Night Cry, etc., etc. It got out of hand and editors actually bought the stuff and next thing you know, Tom L is a hot property, a horror wunderkind, the underground antidote to Stephen King and Dean Koontz, the Jack Spicer headbutt to Rod McKuen’s yammering gob that is category horror. The gig got stale years ago, but now these pranksters are stuck with carrying on the charade. Hard to let go of those royalty checks. Nathan is wrong, of course. I’ve corresponded with L since 1988. We were pen pals on Usenet for a while before he got so reclusive. Met him on five other occasions. Went to his house once. The man is real as real gets.”

“You visited his house? Goddamn it!” John pounded the table with his big fist and our shot glasses jumped. “That pisses me off more than the story you told me on the train.” He glared at me.

“Today is the day to face the fact you are a frustrated and unfulfilled sonofabitch,” I said. “And if you’d rather ogle L’s house than coconut oil dripping off a perfectly formed breast, well, I am not certain what kind of friend you are.”

“There’s no reason I can’t do both!”

Michael continued patiently. “It was just an apartment L stayed in after his wife died. Or disappeared. Similar to the Jack situation. Whatever the case, L camped for a while before he picked up and moved to where he is now. Nothing special, that apartment. Neat as you please, though. Sterile as a gynecologist’s office.”

“What, no copies of the Necronomicon lying on the coffee table?” I said. Probably sarcastically.

“Just something about the history of puppets. No bodies hanging in the closet either.”

I didn’t ask the obvious: what L was like, because I really didn’t give a shit. So I asked about our good buddy Nathan instead. “Where’s Nathan? He’s in town, right?” Nathan had been a bartender in New Orleans during the aughts. He got out right before the hurricane and the floods. His daughter was thirteen and working on a PhD in nuclear physics at Cal Tech. Meanwhile, he lived in a shack in South Carolina and wrote the most delicately horrific short stories I’d ever read. Another recluse. Damn, we all had at least that much in common with Tommy L.

“No. Hell of a thing. Nate B and Paul from Boston were up north visiting Canadian Simon at some Podunk book festival. Those Canucks release a chapbook every other effing weekend it seems. Paul got hurt in a sledding accident, broke his wrist, but he’s okay. None of the Canadians in the sled were injured. Nate should’ve gone sledding instead of doing whatever he was doing… He contracted a mess of flukes, so now he’s getting de-wormed. Gonna be a while.”

“De-wormed?” I said. “He’s got worms? No shit?”

“That’s what flukes are, worms,” John said, so drunk he sounded sober again.

“No shit.” Michael made the Scout sign. “He’ll be crapping spaghetti for six weeks minimum.”

“Everybody knows you don’t drink the water up there,” I said.

“Mentally challenged children know it,” John said, taking a huge gulp of scotch. He was beginning to worry me.

“Maybe he got ’em directly from Simon,” I said.

“I’m careful to stick to booze north of Maine and I don’t kiss Canadians, ever,” Michael said, handing me Poe’s reins. He rose with the sudden grace of a mantis and fetched another round: brimming mugs of a honey mead I’d not tasted before, kind of earthy and coppery and acidic. It felt like fur sliding down my throat the wrong way. My eyes watered and the hairs in my nose bristled. “A rare cask,” he said when I asked what the f*ck it was. “This is the only place in New York it can be found and the proprietor only serves it to certain customers on special occasions. I’m such a customer and a live reading by L is definitely a special occasion.”

“There’s an occultation of the moon in three hours,” John said.

“Our fair maiden in the pointy bustier mentioned it—the clincher,” Michael said.

“What in blue-blazes is so special about this reading, besides a kooky horror author showing his face in public for once instead of staying in with the cats?” I said, wiping my mouth. My head felt half staved-in. Another part of my brain was turning over possibilities like a kid flipping rocks with a stick and that part of me imagined the liquor was so rare, so exotic, Michael had paid for it with a Black AMX card he only used once a decade for this singular event, and the promise of services to be rendered later. Sexual services. This simply had to be the donkey show of gourmet hooch.

We regarded one another for a few moments, then he leaned closer, so his chin was level with the tabletop, and said, “Okay, look. Here’s the thing you rubes gotta know. Especially you, John-Boy. First, L won’t be showing his face at all. This is the new deal. He wears a costume. And he doesn’t speak.”

I laughed. “Right. He doesn’t speak.”

“He does not.”

“Oh, yeah,” John said. “Meant to tell you, the guy—”

Michael shushed him with a hard look. “No, no, don’t spoil the effect. He’ll see soon enough.”

“How does he orate if he won’t open his mouth?” I said, feeling very drunk and very petulant. Pretty soon they’d be telling me the a*shole didn’t walk, but floated, as if on a palanquin toted by tiny elves in rhinestone jumpsuits. “Is it a pantomime like charades? An interpretive dance?”

“You’ll see,” Michael said and his eyes shimmered with the void I’d been noticing more and more all around me every day.

“Oh, man, it’s weird,” John said happily. Actually, he pitched his voice to a falsetto and held As You Know Bob in front of his face and pretended the puppet was adding its two-bits to the conversation.

“Yes, weird indeed,” Michael said, brandishing Poe in a similar manner. “You’ll see. You’ll see.”

“I do hope it’s something new,” I said, choosing to ignore their foolishness. “I keep the paperback of Enemy of Man in the bathroom. I’ve read the thing cover to cover twice.”

“Yes, oh yes, you are in luck, mon frère. L’s written a fresh book of essays, the companion volume to Horror of Being. No one other than his agent has even glimpsed the manuscript, but word is, it’s his masterpiece. Distils fifty-odd years of spleen in one raging spume of a satirical opus. It’s called The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. A howling void of blackness, I imagine.” Michael said that with what I swore was a shiver of delight.

“It’s going to do for the antinatalists what Ron Hubbard did for the whack jobs waiting to be whisked to Yuggoth by the E.Ts,” John said.

Time and space dilated. So did the tavern and the heads of everyone inside. John and Michael were Thanksgiving parade floats tethered to chairs, smugly amused by my agnosticism toward all things L. I would see, I would see…



* * *



The next thing I recalled, we disembarked a subway in Brooklyn and were on the Dr. Seuss-angled steps of the Kremlin Bar that wound and wound and rose and rose from the glittery icy darkness of New York winter’s night to the velvety gloom of interiors that had, in their day, seen a lot of blood from the innards of poets, and booze, and bullet holes. Wood creaked beneath our shoes and brass gleamed here and there between folds of curtains, and the space around the bar was at capacity with an audience that buzzed rather than spoke. A living, breathing, telepathically communing Yin-Yang symbol. Intimate and impersonal as an Arctic starfield. Everything smelled of cigarette smoke and liquor and sweet, sweet perfume, and musk. The golden-green light tasted exactly like the last round of mystery mead we’d shared at the nameless tavern.

I’d been in the business a while, but though I recognized an occasional face such as a genre radio show host and a couple of editors and agents and a handful of local authors, most were strangers to me, seldom glimpsed wildlife that had crept from the forest depths to gather in the sacred glade and listen to Pan wheedle on his recorder by the dark of the moon. Literally the dark of the moon as a glance at my watch confirmed the eclipse John mentioned earlier would be in progress at any moment. I was an interloper, a blasphemer, and I half-expected a torrent of white blood corpuscles to gush forth and consume me as a hostile bacterium.

John and Michael shouldered a path to our reserved spot in a corner beneath a green-gold shaded dragon lamp. Its radiance made our hands glow against the tablecloth. Ellen D, famed editor and hostess of the event, came by and said hello and snapped our pictures and bought us another round in recognition of Jack’s empty seat. I just poured the whiskey straight down my gullet, inured to its puny effects, and waited for whatever was coming, to come.

Tom L was not in evidence yet. His table of honor lay near the burnished wooden podium that had propped up many generations of crazed, catastrophically inebriated authors. The table was tenanted by two women, a blonde and a brunette in slinky sheath dresses, and a man in a slinky turtleneck. The man was handsome and clean-shaven the way one can only get with a straight razor. He reminded me of the actor Jan Michael Vincent during his youth before he socked some chick in the jaw for handing his girlfriend an eight ball at a party and tanked his career. I hadn’t thought of Vincent in ages. I looked sidelong at the women some more and decided they were way out of my league no matter how smashed I might endeavor to get. Both wore long velvet gloves and smoked cigarettes with hoity-toity cigarette holders. Neither wore a Dalmatian puppy stole, but that wouldn’t have surprised me an iota.

“Jumping Josephat, that’s W Lindblad!” John said, rattling his puppets in excitement.

“THE W Lindblad?” I said and rolled my eye.

“Is that Jan Michael Vincent?” a woman stage-whispered.

“No way…OMG! The Puppet Master is in the house! Eeeee!” I heard another woman exclaim.

“Sonofa…he flew in from Texas!” John said.

“Who wouldn’t?” Michael said.

“Oh, for f*ck’s sake,” I said and wished mightily for another shot. Drano would’ve worked fine. The philosophy behind HoB was becoming more appealing by the second. Every necktie made me think of nooses and solid overhead fixtures.

“Lindblad isn’t allowed in the UK,” Michael said, lowering his voice like we were conspiring to knock over the joint. “Larceny rap. I don’t know all the details, except that he got in hot water regarding some rare book that was up for grabs on the black market by way of Finland. Ah, those wily Finns. There was a bidding war going down in some rickety warehouse on the Thames and the Bobbies busted in and clapped the whole lot in irons. I guess twenty different consulates got frantic midnight calls. Lindblad’s chummy with more Arab princes than the Bush family is, so getting the governor to pinch hit wasn’t much of a trick. After much legal finessing, he was sprung on the promise he wouldn’t show his face in England for a while. That, in a nutshell, is that.”

“Must’ve been a hell of a lot of kinky nudity in ye tome,” I said.

“Not really. It was the foreign edition of a US weird almanac or an occult guidebook. Rather innocuous, you ask me.”

“He did a dime in Huntsville back in the late 1970s for gashing somebody with a broken wine bottle,” John said with grave respect. “Lived on the mean streets, close to the bone. After getting his MFA, Lindblad was a derelict for like fifteen years, or something. L befriended him, scraped him out of the gutter and gave him a purpose. Heard that from Lee T. Lee knows everybody in Texas. Got his ear to the ground.”

“That sexy little twerp over there did not do hard time in Huntsville,” I said trying to remain cool. “And he sure as shit didn’t do hard time in Huntsville in the ‘70s. Too pretty and too young. Look at those soft, effeminate hands.”

“Looks sorta hard to me,” John said with an intrigued arch of his brow. Luckily, his powers didn’t work on suave ex cons.

“Older than he appears,” Michael said. “Oil of Olay is a miracle product.”

I rubbed my temples and counted to ten. Thank god right then two things happened: Ellen saw my plight and brought me another triple of whatever was cheap at the bar, and Tom L drifted from a shrouded alcove and stood near his trio of groupies. Stood, mind you, not sat. “Whoa. Okay, that’s a big dude.” I drank up and plunked my empty on the table and gawked, just like everybody else.

“Behold the man,” John said with or without irony; I was too bombed and too awestruck to make that call.

Larger than life was a cliché that fit this apparition all too well. L was conservatively six-feet-eight and broad as the proverbial barn. His bulk was encompassed in a heavy robe of crimson silk that pooled around and hid his presumably huge feet. He wore what I can only describe as an executioner’s hood, also of crimson silk. No flesh was visible, not even the glint of his eyes through the hood slits. He stood motionless, a statue briefly animated, that had shambled unto view, and was now once again frozen in place. Something about his great size and stoicism, the inscrutability of the slits for his eyes and mouth, the blithe obliviousness of his entourage as they chatted amongst themselves, ignoring the giant entirely, scared the living bejeezus out of me, scared me on the level where the coyotes and the lizards and lonely rolling tumbleweeds held sway. A polar bear had beached itself upon an ice shelf with a herd of seals and the seals barked with joy, witless to their mortal danger.

I’d seen a picture of L once, a candid shot of him in a sport coat and a bad haircut, hunched in the act of stubbing a cigarette into an ashtray, grimacing at the camera as a thief with his hand in the till might. A grainy, fuzzy, slightly out of focus picture, but clear enough and contextualized by the presence of other persons in the frame that it was utterly incongruous with the figure in crimson. The author in the photograph was of average size and build. No way no how the same individual as this behemoth holding court. I said as much to my comrades.

“He’s changed over the years,” Michael said. “It’s rather uncanny, I admit.”

“How can you be sure it’s even him?”

“Who else would it be?”

I glanced at my empty glass and sighed. “Could be motherf*cking Patrick Ewing in there for all we know.”

The crowd was apparently sufficiently lubricated in preparation for the appointed moment. Ellen made her way to the podium where she efficiently introduced her guest with, “I present a man who needs no introduction. Please help me welcome Tom L to the Kremlin.”

Applause followed, although none of the raucous hooting or whistling that usually accompanied the appearance of a famous and popular author, and the room subsided into a deep and reverential hush as the giant ascended the dais with a slow, measured shuffle and then loomed without flexing a muscle or uttering a word for at least a full minute. This silence gathered weight. A current began to circulate through the room and the lamps dimmed further, and as they dimmed, L’s already massive form seemed to absorb the light as a black hole bends and deforms everything in its well, and his silk costume shifted black and he was limned in white like the white-hot edge of a blade. Yes, my senses were swimming from enough scotch to paralyze a rhino. Nonetheless, that powerful forces were in play between performer and audience was unmistakable and unmistakably unnatural. Even though nothing was happening, everything was happening. I thought of the silvery moon going dark over the city, and behind Luna’s shadow, Mars through Pluto falling into a radical symmetry, cogs linking and locking along axial darkness.

L’s left sleeve rustled with inner life and slowly, horribly from its cavernous depths birthed a puppet. The thing that emerged was the girth of a toddler, soft and yellow as decayed bone, and glistening with a sheen as of jelly. It wore a skullcap, rusty bells, dark surcoat, a red cloak and red leggings; a diminutive malformed jester, or a monk of Franciscan lore. Misshapen, malignant, diabolic—the hand puppet’s countenance was remarkable in its jaundiced smoothness, its cockeye, and demented smirk. Its arms were overlong, its spindly hands and fingers mockeries of human proportion. The hands were restless. They writhed and gestured, both languid and spasmodic, gracile and palsied.

The puppet gazed at the audience, tilting its head and shuttering one off-kilter eye, then the other. It reached out with the deliberateness of a hunting spider extending a pedipalp to taste prey, and tapped the microphone. During none of the creature’s articulations did the towering form of L so much as twitch. So dexterous were L’s manipulations, the puppet appeared to operate wholly independent from the man himself.

The puppet said breathily, the male analogue to Marilyn Monroe prepping to sing Happy Birthday, Mr. President, “I am Mandibole.” And, after a pause where it groaned like an asthmatic, “Tonight, I shall recite a story created by my benefactor, the incomparable L. It has never been told. It is a true story.” The voice seemed to emanate directly from the puppet’s twisted lips. “Imagine the heads of everyone at every table in this room disembodied and attached, like ripe fruit, to the branches of a tree in a field. A huge, leafless tree in a wide and grassless field. The field is black dirt and the tree is also dark, fleshy and warm, however it does not live so much as persist, suckling the life force from its own fiber, its own fruit, in essence a cannibal of itself.

“The hanging heads: your comrades, your neighbors, yourselves, do not speak, cannot speak, for their mouths and yours are crammed with bloody seeds. You and they hang from the black tree in the black field, this tableaux illuminated by interior flames from the heads, for the seeds glow with fire, swelling and frothing maggots of deathly light. You sway in the breeze like Jack O’ Lanterns and cannot utter protest, or question your Maker, or petition your Accuser. You are muted by choking mouthfuls of gore. And this is Hell, my friends. It will continue and continue unto Eternity, until it becomes something worse. Something worse.” It repeated something worse at least twenty times, imperceptibly lowering its voice until the words trailed off.

I observed this spectacle with profound unease. I felt as a man helplessly staked near a colony of fire ants might feel, flesh crawling in anticipation of the approaching swarm. A needlessly surreptitious glance around the room confirmed that every person was slack-jawed, faces shining in rapt concentration while their bodies faded to lumps within deepening shadow. John and Michael had completely forgotten my presence. They, along with everyone else at the Kremlin, were on some distant soundstage in Hell, hanging from the Tree of Anti-Life.

Certainly my overreaction was the result of mental depression and an admittedly tenuous grasp on reality. Being wasted on god knew how many brands of liquor was likely a contributing factor. This tempered my urge to beg forgiveness of John and Michael for doubting them, for sneering at the notion L was some evil messiah sent by the dark gods to spread a message of disharmony and dread. But only a little.

Mandibole said, “Now imagine the hours passing, the days, weeks, months…Imagine the flesh deliquescing from bone, hair peeling in strips. The blackbirds feasting on eyes, noses, tongues…But you see everything that happens, feel every exquisite inch of yourselves slithering down the craws of the flock…”

I rose and lurched to the bar, hand covering my good ear to block the persistent drone of Mandibole’s oration. The bartender didn’t meet my eye when I demanded a shot. He grabbed a fresh bottle of Johnnie Walker and shoved it at me. I cracked the seal and had a pull worthy of Lee Van Cleef and Lee Marvin combined, and listed against the rail, gasping for breath, and for a few moments this distracted me from whatever malevolent shit the puppet was spouting.

“Hey there, sailor,” the blonde from L’s table said, sliding next to me so her red lips were near my neck, the heat off her tongue tracing my skin in collaboration with the alcohol igniting my veins. Her body lotion was lilac and water. She laid her hand on my thigh and didn’t exactly smile, but made an expression something like one. “Buy a girl a drink?” She took the bottle and sipped, delicate and ladylike. Her un-smile widened. “You seem sad. It’s because you’re alone.”

“I’m with friends,” I said, conscious of the thickness of my voice, wondering if its intrusion upon the scene would cause the crowd to turn on me, to hiss at me for silence. No one seemed to notice; they were a roomful of wax dummies glued into their seats, heads fused, gazes fixed upon the podium. Only the brunette and the man in the turtleneck were watching us. Both of them were doing the un-smiling thing.

“Don’t worry about these…people,” the blonde said, her breath hot and sweet with the Johnnie Walker. “We’re all all alone in the world.” She wasn’t a true blonde—her roots showed dark where the peroxide ran thin.

“Of course we are. That’s why I’m sad. Man alive, I carried a torch for Julie Andrews. You’re more vulpine, but I’m not picky.”

“It’s a different thing entirely. Sun and moon. Heaven and Hell.” Her fingers roamed my thigh as she talked. Strange though, rather than erotic; jittery and unsynchronized as Mandibole’s hand movements or Poe moonwalking as Michael pulled its strings.

I stuck out my hand, although the gesture seemed superfluous at this point. “I’m—”

“We know who you are, Mr. B.”

“We?”

“Certainly. You’re recognizable enough if one squints just right.”

“What’s your name, baby?”

“I’m W Lindblad. Whom else?” She swept her fingers perilously near my crotch, then tweaked my nose, leaned back and laughed coldly. Over her shoulder, the man in the turtleneck gesticulated and pantomimed the blonde’s motions and behind him Mandibole exaggerated a pantomime of Mr. Turtleneck. Elsewhere, Pluto groaned and rolled off its axis.

“I f*cking knew it would be something like this.” I had to chuckle, though. The last time a beautiful woman approached me at a bar she’d bought me a scotch and then asked if I’d found Jesus. JC was still missing, apparently. “Of all the poor schmucks in this joint, you had to pick on me?”

“You’re the only one rude enough to interrupt this momentous performance, this ritual that will open the way and bridge the gulf between new stars and old ones.” She laughed a dog’s laugh without changing expression. “Oh, okay. Amazing work with that puppet. I assume it’s one of yours.”

“You refer to puppets as it. Refreshing. Most people say he or she.”

“No sense in imbuing inanimate objects with sexual characteristics, even in jest.”

“Says a world about you. In this case it is more correct than you could possibly conceive. The precise term, in fact. None other would do. However, Mandibole is no invention of mine. It comes from elsewhere. It’s a traveler. A visitor.”

In the background, Mandibole said, “Something worse, something worse, something worse,” and kept chanting it and chanting it. Several of the listeners joined in and soon it was like a church revival meeting with the parishioners chorusing the right reverend’s punch lines. All of the lights had died except for the one hanging directly over the podium. Beyond the first row, all was darkness. The blonde and I sat, bumping knees, in darkness too.

The blonde’s face blended into the ink. Her eyes glinted red though, seeming to hang in blank space. “Why the ring? She’s gone gone gone.”

I didn’t understand for a moment, then reached instinctively for my throat where I kept my wedding ring on a chain under my collar. The ring was an empty gesture, not that acknowledging this changed anything, and so the emptiness conquered all. I couldn’t decide how to feel, so I tittered uneasily. “Nice. Are you a cold reader? Do divinations for old biddies and their toy poodles in Manhattan?”

“I like Rick James and long walks on the beach. Maybe I’m too forward. My secret weakness. I read minds as a party trick. Free of charge. So, if you had to guess, why do you think your woman left you?”

“Leave me? Ha! She kicked my ass to the curb.”

“Why do you suppose this sad thing has occurred?”

“Why is the center of the universe as soft as a tootsie pop undulating with nuclear sludge serenaded by an orchestra of idiot flautists playing Hail to the Chief?”

“Fair enough,” she said.

“Wanna get out of here?” I said.

Her red eyes burned like coals. “A minute ago you were thinking of our Lord & Savior. There’s a fascinating case.”

“Is this a long story? Because—”

“Silence, fool. That Christ was a puppet, strings played by a master in the gallery of stars, is the kind of truth that would get you burned in earlier days. The parallel between God and Gepetto, Christ and Pinocchio, surely an absurdist’s delight. I think the supernatural element is bunk and lazy storytelling to boot. That the holy carpenter was only a simple lunatic with delusions of grandeur makes his fate all the more grisly, don’t you agree? His suffering was the ultimate expression of the form. Torturers long ago discovered that pleasure and pain are indistinguishable after a certain point. Jesus ejaculated as the thorns dug in and the spearhead stabbed, and he waited in vain for his imaginary father. Suicide is a sin, so they say. Unless you’re a martyr, then green light go. Doesn’t have to be hard, even though it’s harder for some. Some have a talent for destruction. I swallowed seventy sleeping pills and half a magnum of raspberry champagne on prom night. Wow, my mascara was a mess. The homecoming queen was my sister, if you can believe. She snuffed it right with a bag of bleach over her face on New Year’s Eve, 2001. Bitch was better at everything.”

I froze, dreams of a semi-anonymous fare-thee-well blow job in the bathroom across the hall going down like the Titanic, so to speak, and considered the possibility that besides obvious derangement, the woman might be physically dangerous to me, especially in my current helpless state. The scene had taken on the tones of the anaconda from The Jungle Book cartoon mesmerizing that sap Mowgli with its whirly eyes and thespian lisp: trust in me! It seemed wiser to keep my trap shut and grunt noncommittally, which is what I did.

She said, “But he’s beyond all this and he finally knows. He’s a real boy now.”

“What does Jesus know? The obvious answer would be everything, at the Right Hand of God and such.”

“He’s seen the beautiful thing that awaits us all. Waiting at the bottom of the hole beneath everything.”

“If you’re saying shit rolls downhill, I have to concur.” I turned away and she grabbed my wrist. Her flesh was icy beneath the gloves. I witnessed Christ broken upon the cross. The sky burned. Christ’s battered face was my own. The sky dimmed to starless black and filled his eyes with its void. “Jesus!” I said and blinked rapidly and flinched from the woman, convinced she’d somehow projected this image into my brain.

Mandibole cried, “Death is the aperture, the cathode into truth, the beginning! The beginning, my sweet ones. More fearsome words were never spoken. A more vile threat has never been uttered. Yes, there are worse things, worse things, and death is not among them.”

The blonde’s grip tightened and tightened. Oh, yeah, an anaconda, all right. “That’s a goo-ood boy,” she said and her many teeth glinted as her eyes glinted. Not a serpent, but a monstrous rat with tabby tom under her claw and pleased as punch. Good ol’ Punch. Or, maybe just maybe it was Judy who’d become a real girl. “I can see that you’ve seen. Infinite dark, infinite cold, infinite sleep. Much better than the alternative—infinite existence as a disembodied spirit. Awareness for eternity. All you have to do is let go. Let Mandibole eat your consciousness. Then, trot back to your little hotel room and go on permanent vacation.”

“My choice is non-being via having my mind dissolved or be a screaming head for eternity? What the f*ck happened to door number three?” I said.

“Be glad of the choice. Most don’t receive one. Talk to L after the gig. He can help you get your mind right for the voyage into nothing. Don’t quit your quest a few miles from home. Don’t linger like HP and die of a tumor, last days spent wasting away on tins of cat food and the indifference of the universe. Don’t end it foaming and raving in a ditch as dear Edgar did. Who’d come to your grave with a flower and a glass of brandy every winter to mark your sad demise? You don’t rate, I’m afraid.”

Something cold and hard pressed against my temple and across the way, Mandibole, haloed in a shaft of hellish angelic light, the far wandering ice-light of devil stars, swiveled and stared into the gloom directly at me, into me, and winked, and an abyss was revealed.

“Oh, what is this bullshit again?” A bulb in the liquor case behind the bar blinked to life as a diving bell surfacing from the deeps, and worldfamous publisher GVG appeared and pried the bottle from the woman’s hand where she’d stuck it to my head. “Go tell Tom I don’t care how many Horror Writer’s Guild Awards he’s got rusting on his mantle. I still don’t regret not publishing that crap.” He smacked her sequin-studded ass and shooed her away, and she retreated to her friends with a hiss and a glare.

GVG owned a venerable science fiction magazine and had given me my first pro sale. I hadn’t seen him since the previous year’s World Fantasy Convention.

“Thanks,” I said, slumping with sudden weariness. “Quite a scene. One minute I’m getting lucky, the next I don’t even know what.”

“You weren’t getting lucky, farm boy. In New York City we call that shit getting unlucky. Take a hedge trimmer to that beard and you might not scare away all the nice girls. Or, on second thought, write something remotely commercial for once. Yeah, try that second thing.”

“The girlies like a man with folding green,” I said.

“Ain’t that the truth, my friend.” He smiled sadly and looked me in the eye. “The secret is chicks don’t dig seldom-read hosers like Mark S. So don’t be that guy. A little less of your Henry James lovin’-grampa’s favorite toilet reading and a bit more twenty-first century. Come into the light.”

I didn’t have the heart to crack wise, or to confess that it was way too late for a career-defining shift. We listened as Mandibole dispassionately described skulls stripped to bloody bone kicked around the equivalent of an Elysian soccer field while the gods cheered and diddled each other in the grandstands. But for me the spell was broken. I said, “Not giving Tommy boy the spring cover, huh?”

GVG shrugged and adjusted his Buddy Holly glasses. “I’m immune to the charms of pseudo philosophizing horror writers and their vampire bride entourages. Wanna see horror, come see what my three year old and a bottle of rubber cement did to the cat and a pile of slush manuscripts in my living room. Gonna have to bite the bullet and go electric one of these days. Just remember something, okay? Dunno what that spooky chick told you, what you’ve got planned, but the only thing that changes when you check out is that nothing ever changes again. It’s no different on the other side. No different at all.” With that, he squeezed my shoulder and darted back into the shadows, good deed for the evening accomplished.

“The faithful shall be eaten first as a reward. The non believers, the scoffers, the faithless, shall be eaten last, or not at all. As for you, my sweets, your fate is this—” Mandibole ceased speaking midsentence and became inert. As slowly as it had appeared, its body now receded into L’s sleeve and the sleeve collapsed upon the brief, discomfiting jangle of rusty bells, an echo of Poe and a cask of Amontillado and the masonry of ancestral catacombs, a whiff of moldy death. The lights brightened and the audience awakened, table by table, from its daze and clapped with sustained appreciation. My bottle was damn near empty and I snatched it and sidled away before the bartender remembered to charge me. One for the road to Eldorado.

“Okay, you keep an eye on our buddy here—I’m going in,” John said as I returned to our spot. He smoothed what remained of his hair, scooped up As You Know Bob and Poe, and charged off to meet his destiny. L had expeditiously—for such a hulking man—retreated behind the beaded curtain of his alcove. A candle or lantern flickered murkily on the other side. A conga line quickly formed—at least a dozen starry-eyed supplicants bearing books, tattered magazines from the glory days of commercial horror lit, and in John’s case, a pair of cheap marionettes swiped from his kid.

“Good luck, pal,” I said to myself as Michael lolled in his seat, drooling and muttering imprecations in Pig Latin, far beyond paying John’s departure or my grousing any heed. I killed the bottle and left it crossways among the cascade of empty glasses and made for the stairwell, which proved jammed with a secondary crowd of night owls who knew nothing of the reading we’d just survived, or the beautiful thing that W Lindblad swore awaited us all, but were instead standing on line for the midnight jazz club upstairs to throw open its doors. How nice for them to be them and not us!

No one stepped aside, kissy-faces too enamored with one another, too intoxicated by their own adorableness, each of them locked elbow and flank in a swanky retro mass, as I pushed my way through the gauntlet of cocktail dresses, feathery boas and pinstripe suits and white fedoras. The people smelled pretty, and all I could see were their skulls dangling in Hell. F*ck you, Tommy L, f*ck you and your little hand puppet too!

Freezing rain tick-tacked on the sidewalk awning, the roofs of parked cars. I tightened the collar of my overcoat and hunched in the stairwell, sharing the smoke of a drunk woman balanced on high heels as she waved a cigarette and cackled into her cell phone. The air was just chilly enough to slice through the fog and remind me of how much alcohol I’d guzzled over the past few hours, and for the first time since I’d walked into the Kremlin I visualized the gun waiting for me in the dresser drawer, back at the hotel. The psycho blonde had accused me of loneliness, but that wasn’t quite right. Loneliness didn’t justify self-destruction. Despair and grief, self-loathing and self-recrimination, failure and desertion… those were justifications.

Yet, the whole suicide plan sounded lame in the frigid glare of the lamps along the boulevard; a piker’s lament to avoid paying the tab. Robert Service once said dying is easy, it’s the keeping on living that’s hard, and of course the poet was on the money, as poets usually are when it comes to smugly self-evident affirmations. I planned to blast a hole through my skull less because of insurmountable heartache, but more because I’d become too weak and too chickenshit to carry the cross one more goddamned bloody step. The marbles were going into the bag and I was headed home, exactly like any selfish, self-indulgent fifth grade snot was wont to do when confronted with one losing throw too many.

I’d almost decided to ask the woman screeching into her phone for a cigarette despite the fact I wasn’t a smoker when John and Michael burst through the doors yelling and flailing their arms. I couldn’t understand a word—a string of guttural yips and clicks and snarls. They were men with hyena heads.

That did the trick. I leaned over the rail and vomited up the dark heart of the cosmos.



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