Where the Summer Ends

•VIII•

She was the most beautiful, and at the same time the most frightening, woman Mandarin had ever seen. She danced in a whirl of blue, how could his heart forget? Blue were the skies, and blue were her eyes, just like the blue skirt she wore...

And she whispered to him as she waltzed, and the things she whispered to him were beautiful, and Mandarin wanted to hear more, even though her whispers terrified him.

And the more she danced and whispered and sang, the worse his vertigo became, and he was dizzy and falling, and he was clutching at her blue skirt to keep from falling, and she kept dancing away from him, and he cried out to her to come back...

He didn’t understand...

But he had to understand...

“Come back!” he screamed. His voice was a tortured rasp.

The blue light became a lance of blue flame, searing his brain. And her hands of coldest ice pierced through him and seized upon his soul, and the blue lady was drawing him away, pulling him through the darkness...



Dimly, through the haze of throbbing pain, Mandarin became aware of the man bending over him.

Gritting his teeth, he forced his eyes to focus. It was hard. A bright beam of light bored into his face.

“Christ! He’s coming around, Sid!”

The light swept away.

Mandarin struggled to rise—groaned and fell back. Bright flashes of pain rippled from the numbing ache of his skull.

“Just stay put, buddy. Jesus! We thought you were...”

Russ’s vision was clearing. Blotchy green afterimages swam across his eyes. But he saw the patrolman’s uniform, and the rising wave of panic subsided.

“Neighbor says she knows who he is, Hardin.” The other voice drifted from farther away. “He’s a friend of the guy who owned this place. Drops by every week or so.”

Russ dully recognized the floor of Stryker’s side porch spread out around him. It was damp and sticky. He could hear a woman’s voice speaking from the kitchen, though he couldn’t follow her words.

“I think the bullet must’ve just grazed the top his forehead,” the first man called out. “There’s blood all over the back of his head, but it looks like he just busted his scalp open falling back against the post here. You’re one lucky hard-headed bastard, buddy.”

His partner was examining Russ’s billfold. “Name’s Dr Russell Mandarin. He’s that shrink friend of Lieutenant Saunders, I think. Hope that’s the ambulance I hear coming. He’s been out a damn long time.”

“I’m all right,” protested Mandarin without conviction. He tried again to rise, made it to his knees. The porch seemed to whirl and pitch. He shut his eyes hard and waited.

An arm steadied his shoulder. “Maybe you better stay down, buddy. You got blood leaking all across the back of your head.” Doggedly Mandarin got his feet under him, lurched onto a porch rocker. The chair almost tipped, then steadied. With careful fingers he touched his forehead, found pain there. His hair was clotted with blood. Squinting across the narrow porch, Russ saw the support post opposite the back door. He remembered a gunshot, and falling backward. He must have bashed his head against the oak pillar.

“Dr Mandarin? Are you all right?”

Russ recognized Mrs Lieberman, Stryker’s closest neighbor. Russ had often kidded Stryker that the widow had designs on him, and Stryker would always reply that only a cad tells.

“I heard that loud old car of yours turn into Mr Stryker’s driveway,” she was saying. “And then I heard a shot. I thought it must be a gang of burglars, and so I called the police.”

“And it’s good you did, ma’am. They might have finished the job on your friend here otherwise.”

The one called Hardin looked down the driveway. “Here’s the ambulance—and our back-up, now that we don’t need it.”

“I think I heard them miss the turn-off twice,” his partner replied.

“What’s happening?” Mandarin asked, recovering enough to become aware of his situation.

“You been shot, Doc, but you’re going to be all right now.”

“Shot?”

“Reckon you busted in on whoever it was that’d broke into the house. Can’t see that anything’s taken, but the place is sure a mess.”



•IX•

Saunders was waiting for him when Mandarin got out of x-ray. Russ had insisted on viewing the films himself, after making enough of a scene that the radiologist seemed a little disappointed to find no evidence of fracture or subdural. Russ let them wheel him back down to the ER, where a nervous resident began to patch him up.

“I am goddamn glad to see you here,” was Saunders’ first comment.

“Same to you, sideways,” Russ said. “Did you know those two clowns of yours had radioed me in as DOA? Damn lucky I didn’t bleed out waiting.”

“Damn lucky you got a thick skull and a hippie haircut. Somebody bounced a bullet off your head, and if they’d aimed an inch or so lower, it’d’ve gone between your eyes instead of parting your hair. I hear you busted loose a porch rail banging it with your head afterward.”

“Nothing much hurt but my good looks,” Russ allowed. “They want to keep me overnight for observation, but I’m heading home from here. I can damn well observe myself—no point in being a doctor if you can’t change your own oil. And don’t tell me the one about ‘... has a fool for a physician.’”

Saunders was serious now. Too serious.

“Russ, I’m going to tell you that the only reason you’re not headed from here to the station is because you were lying there DOA on Stryker’s porch at the same time Brooke Hamilton was being murdered.”

Mandarin decided he was still suffering the effects of his concussion. “What’s that about Hamilton?”

Saunders was looking for a cigarette, then remembered he couldn’t smoke here. “Just came from his place. A boyfriend let himself in around midnight, found Hamilton tied to a chair, throat had just been cut. And he’d been cut up pretty good elsewhere before he got his second smile. After that business this afternoon, I was afraid it was you I’d be bringing in. I was at your house when word came in that you were dead at the time of the murder. Reckon we’ll hold his boyfriend now instead.”

“Jesus!” Russ muttered. It was all coming too fast for him. “These queers do some weird shit when they have their love spats,” Saunders informed him. “Likely high on pot and LSD.”

“I didn’t know Hamilton was gay”

“No? Well, he looked queer. I can spot them. Anyway, if you hadn’t been busy getting shot in the head at Curtiss’s house at the time Hamilton was last seen alive, you’d be in worse trouble now.”

“I think I want to go home.”

“I’ll see that you get there,” Saunders said. “Only this time you stay put.”

“Scout’s honor.” Russ held up three fingers.

Saunders watched him without amusement. “And when you get there, you can help fill out a report. Tell us if anything’s missing.”

“Missing?”

“Somebody’d broke into your house right before we got there.”



•X•

Mandarin had a bottle of Percodan tablets for pain—contraindicated, of course, in the presence of recent head injury—and he prescribed himself a couple and washed them down with a medicinal glass of Jack Daniel’s. He supposed he should sue himself for malpractice. After all, he’d only been permitted to leave the hospital after signing an “against medical advice” form. A fool for a physician.

Was it possible for a head to ache any worse than his did? He had a gash above his forehead where the bullet had grazed his scalp, a lump across the back of his skull from his fall, and a terminal hangover. Russ almost wished his assailant had aimed lower. Saunders’ people hadn’t turned up any brass, and Saunders was of the opinion that Russ’s attacker had got off a lucky shot with a junk .22 revolver—probably one of his hippie dope-fiend patients. Typical of the times, Saunders judged, and with our boys dying in Viet Nam while scum like this dodged the draft.

Three break-ins in one night—not to mention the burglary of Stryker’s office the day before—hardly seemed random, Mandarin had argued. Saunders had pointed out that these were only a few of the dozens of break-ins that took place each night, and that it was all due to drugs, and that if certain psychiatrists would stick to shrinking heads and let the police go about their business, a lot of this sort of thing would be stopped.

Russ promised to go to bed.

But neither the Percodan nor the bourbon could ease the pain in his skull. And the thoughts kept running through his brain. And every time he closed his eyes, she was there.

I dream of that night with you

Darling, when first we met...

Mandarin realized that his eyes weren’t closed. She was there. In his room. And she whispered to him...



Mandarin screamed and sat up. His drink, balanced on the back of the couch, fell over and spilled melted ice cubes onto his lap.

The dancing image faded.

Never, thought Mandarin, never mix Percodan and alcohol. He was shaking badly, and his feet seemed to float above the floor as he stumbled into the kitchen for another drink. Maybe he ought to take a couple Valiums. Christ, he was in worse shape now than when Alicia died.

Could a poltergeist direct a bullet?

Russ noticed that he was pouring bourbon over the top of his glass. He gulped down a mouthful, not tasting it. His hands were steadier.

Could a poltergeist direct a bullet?

Either he was succumbing to paranoid fantasies and alcoholic hallucinations, or maybe he should have stayed in the hospital for observation. Was he going over the edge? What the hell— he hadn’t been worth shooting since Alicia died.

Someone thought he was worth shooting.

Could a poltergeist direct a bullet?

Was he haunted?

It wasn’t random; Saunders was wrong. There was a pattern, and it had all started that afternoon when Gayle Corrington told them about her poltergeist. A ghostly lesbian who dabbled in the occult and who liked blue. The stuff of one of Stryker’s pulp thrillers, but now there were two people dead, and someone— or something—had broken into the homes of everyone involved and scattered things about like a vengeful whirlwind.

Mandarin decided that a walk in the early dawn would do him good. He just might be sober by the time he reached the clinic and his car.

Could a poltergeist deflect a bullet?



•XI•

This one ends on a bright summer morning, and a fresh dew on the roses that perfume the dawn.

Russ Mandarin eased his Jensen Interceptor into the driveway and killed the engine. All at once it seemed absurdly dramatic to him. He really should have phoned Gayle Corrington before driving over to her house at this hour.

Or maybe he shouldn’t have.

He closed the door quietly and walked up to the carport. The white Corvette was parked there as before, only before there hadn’t been a scraping of maroon paint along its scored right front fender. Fiberglass is a bitch to touch up.

Russ tried the doorbell long enough to decide that Gayle Corrington wasn’t going to answer. Either not at home (her car was still there) or a sound sleeper. Russ pounded loudly against the door. After a time his knuckles began to hurt. He stopped and thought about it.

Nothing made sense. Mandarin wished he had a drink—that was always a good answer to any crisis.

He ought to call Saunders, tell him about the maroon paint on Gayle Corrington’s white Corvette, Maybe just a fender-bender, but it might match up with the crease on the left side of Stryker’s Buick, And so what if it did? Curtiss was a terrible driver—he might well have paid Gayle a second visit, scraped up against her car in parking.

Nothing made sense.

Just this: Gayle Corrington had told Stryker something in the course of the interview—while Mandarin had been out of the room. Stryker had been excited about it, had written it into his account of the haunting. And someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make certain that whatever Stryker had discovered would never be published.

Only Gayle Corrington had freely asked Stryker to investigate her haunted house.

Nothing made sense.

Mandarin thought he heard a television set going. Maybe Gayle was around back, catching some early morning sun, and couldn’t hear his knock. Worth trying.

Russ headed toward the rear of the house. As he reached the patio, he saw Prissy lying beside a holly bush. At first he thought the little border collie was asleep.

Not random. A pattern.

The sliding glass door from the patio was curtained and at first glance appeared to be closed. Russ saw that the catch had been forced, and he cautiously slid the glass panel open, stepped inside.

Gayle Corrington was wearing dark slacks and a black sweatshirt. She was hog-tied with her wrists bound back to her ankles, her body arched like a bow upon the couch. Her lips were taped with adhesive, but the cord knotted tightly into her neck would assure that she would never cry out.

Russ stared at her dumbly. He knew there was no point in searching for a pulse.

“Hello, Russ,” said Stryker. “Come on in.”

Russ did as he was told.

Curtiss Stryker was straightening out from where he worked over the brick hearth. The hearth had been lifted away, revealing an opening beneath the floor.

“Used brick hearth on a mountain stone fireplace. Should have tipped me off from the first—an obvious lapse in taste.” Stryker was holding a Colt Woodsman. It was pointed at Mandarin’s heart.

“Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” said Stryker.

“You son of a bitch,” said Mandarin.

“Probably. But you just stand still where you are.”

Russ nodded toward Gayle’s body. “Your work?”

“Yes. While you were ringing. Just not quite in the nick of time, Doctor. But don’t waste any tears on our Mrs Corrington. She tried to kill both of us, after all—and I gather she was certain that you, at least, were most decidedly dead. This is her gun, and she would be disappointed to learn that her aim was not as infallible as she imagined.”

“I don’t get it,” Russ said. “What are you doing?”

Stryker glanced toward the opened hearth. “Just getting a little social security. Maybe you can understand.”

“I don’t understand a goddamned thing! I came here to ask Gayle what it was that she told you while I was out of the room that day. Seems that a lot of people are interested.”

“You might as well know,” Stryker decided. “She wanted me to perform an exorcism.”

“An exorcism?”

“Or something to that effect. She’d read my books on the occult, decided I was a better ghostchaser than a priest would be. Maybe she’d already tried a priest.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Then I’ll make it short and snappy.”

“Is this the point in your story where the villain always explains everything to the hero before he shoots him?”

“It is. I’m afraid this story won’t have a happy ending, though. After all, an author has his privileges.”

“I wept for you.”

“I know. I’ll weep for you.”

Stryker kept the Colt Woodsman steady in the direction of Mandarin’s chest. Russ recalled that Curtiss had always bragged about his marksmanship.

“Our Mrs Corrington changed a few details, and she changed a few names. She played the part of Cass in the highly revised account she gave us of this house. She and her Libby were medical secretaries. They had access to patients’ records, and they knew various prominent citizens who had certain sexual quirks. Knowing their particular weaknesses, it was simple enough to lure them out here for an odd orgy or two— black magic, S&M, any sort of kink their secret selves desired. Then there were the hidden mikes and camera, the two-way mirrors. Made for some lovely footage. Here’s a respected publisher who likes to dress up in women’s clothing and be whipped, here’s a noted doctor who prefers to give enemas to submissive girls. Maybe just a Baptist preacher who can’t get a blow job from his wife. They knew about them, and preyed on them.

“But they needed another girl—another feminine one for their fantasies—delivered orgies. So they brought in a third girl—and that was a crowd. Cass—Gayle—liked her better than Libby, and Libby got jealous. She was going to blow the whistle on the entire operation, unless the other girl was sent away. But that was too dangerous, and Gayle was growing tired of Libby. They had a special black sabbath orgy that night, and when it was over they gave Libby an injection of insulin. Your friend, Dr Royce Blaine, didn’t give any trouble over signing the death certificate; after all, he was in the photos. Later, when Gayle grew tired of Tina, she married Dr Blaine—probably saved her life; his too, maybe.”

“But why did Mrs Corrington call you in on this?” Russ wondered if he could jump the older man.

“Because she really did think she was being haunted. Nothing more than a nuisance, but it preyed on her nerves. So she made up this plausible story, and she reckoned I’d perform some magical miracle, just like the heroes in my stories. But she didn’t reckon on how good a researcher I was. I got suspicious—you know: ‘Doctor, I have this friend...’ and it didn’t take long to dig out the facts. It happened while you were off in New York.”

“So then?”

“Well, I wrote down my findings, made a carbon for you, then set out for another talk with Gayle Corrington. Of course, then I didn’t know about the blackmail angle—I just wanted to confront Gayle with the fact that I knew her part in the story was more than just an innocent bystander.

“She followed me after I left her house, ran me off the road into the lake. By then I knew about the blackmail—she was too upset with me to lie convincingly that night—so I thought I’d just lie doggo for a few days and see what happened. I destroyed my notes, but that little bastard Brooke Hamilton beat me to my office and stole your carbon of the chapter rough. I caught up with him last night, made him tell me where he’d hidden everything, then destroyed it all—and that little shit. In the meantime, Gayle knew of my carbons, so she was checking out my house, and afterward yours. You walked in on her at my house, and she thought she’d killed you. That’s two mistakes. You should have seen her expression when she walked in here afterward. Thought she’d seen a real ghost this time.”

“Just Uncle Dudley in a monster suit.”

“Just like one of my old thrillers. No ghosts. Just greed. And a guilty conscience that made ghosts out of chance phenomena.”

“Now what?”

“I take over the racket, that’s all. After a little persuasion, Gayle told me what I already knew—that the films and tapes were all hidden in a little safe here beneath the raised hearth. I’ve got enough on some of our city’s finest and wealthiest to retire in style. I’ll just make an appearance later on today, say I was knocked for a loop by my accident, took a day or two wandering around the lakeside to remember who I was.”

“What about me?”

“Now that does bother me, Russ. I hadn’t counted on your dropping in like this. I think you’ll be the drugged-out killer in the story—the one who conveniently takes his life when he realizes what he’s done.”

“Saunders won’t buy that.”

“Sure he will. You’ve been walking around town with a screw loose ever since your wife died—before that maybe. You were the one who blew her diagnosis when she complained of chronic headaches.”

“I was your friend, Curtiss.”

“Writers don’t have friends. Only deadlines. And cheating publishers. And meddling editors. And carping reviewers. And checks that never come when they’re supposed to come, and are always short when they do come. I’ve scraped along for a living at this damn trade for over forty years, and I’m still living hand to mouth, and I’m just an old hack to my fellow writers. This is my chance to make someone else pay—pay big.”

Stryker steadied the pistol. “Sorry, Russ. I’ll miss you. Hope you can understand.”

The Victrola behind them made a rattle and whir. There was an audible clunk as the heavy tone arm descended.

Stryker looked toward it for an instant. Russ started to go for him. Stryker nailed him through the upper left shoulder with his first shot. Russ collapsed.

I dream of that night with you...

“Going to be a tough job of suicide now,” Mandarin whispered.

“I’ll figure something,” Stryker assured him.

Blue were the skies

And blue were your eyes

Stryker leveled his pistol again. “Very interesting.”

Come back, blue lady, come back

“There are too many dead!” Russ managed. “She’s grown too strong.”

“I never really believed in ghosts,” said Stryker, lining up on Russ’s heart.

Don’t be blue anymore.

There was a sudden scraping at the fireplace behind them.

From its brackets, the Parker shotgun swung away from the stone wall. It seemed to hesitate an instant, then slowly fell to the hearth, stock downward.

Stryker turned to stare at it, open-mouthed in wonder. He was still gaping into its double barrels, looking down into the blackness within, when both shells fired at once.





In the Shadows of the Pines by Laird Barron



It’s getting late.

A bloody yellow moon floats over the pines. A man sits on the porch in a rocking chair. A big guy, a grizzled, salt of the earth type, tie unstrung, collar loose. He’s sweating, and it’s a cold sweat. In his hand, a glass of bourbon, neat. Not the first of the evening, not the last. To his right, a small table upon which rests a bottle and a revolver. His calloused hand lies in the middle. He meditates on the choice between another drink or a bullet. Maybe one, then the other, like love and marriage. Wind rises beneath that sanguine moon and rustles the pines. Upon the air, a hint of jasmine, out of place here at the border of endless night. Yes, a trace of jasmine that almost disguises an undercurrent of rotting leaves, wet bones, approaching death.

Down there in the creaking pines, softly, sweetly, a woman calls his name, invites him into the shadows. Invites us.

This is the essence of my experience with Karl Edward Wagner, a larger than life figure who achieved fame as an author of the occult and the fantastic, and as an editor of the same. His strange worlds are populated by a cast of drifters and malcontents, alcoholic salesmen and conniving archeologists, of demons, devils, and other things that shamble in the dark. Of a mind with his contemporary, Michael Shea, another famous devotee of the weird tale, Wagner embraces and elevates the trappings of classical pulp fiction to modern art, carves out elements from the archetypal works of Blackwood, Lovecraft, and Howard, among others, and repurposes them into a warlock’s brew of modern, hardboiled dark fantasy and horror.

For my money, when it comes to literary modes, short fiction ranks as first among equals. From London’s “To Build a Fire,” and Blackwood’s “The Willows,” to Vance’s “Liane the Wayfarer,” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” by Poe, the short story, the novelette, and novella strike me as the most potent expressions of horror and dark fantasy literature. Horror thrives on escalation of tension and dread, elements that all too easily dissipate in novel format. Wagner is an acknowledged master of the short form. We are fortunate, nearly twenty years after his passing, to finally see a definitive collection of his stories.

A skilled prose stylist, his writing is redolent of a worldly, blue collar aesthetic that dominates stories such as “.220 Swift,” and “Where the Summer Ends,” and “Sticks,” his quintessential Lovecraftian masterpiece. Even the sinuous and erotic gothic horror novelette “The River of Night’s Dreaming” possesses something of his characteristic gruffness, his taciturn delivery, rumbling in the background like the low growl of a bear in its den; a growl that the hypnogogic prose merely smoothes and softens until the crushing final moments when all hell breaks loose.

Wagner’s gritty aesthetic is often divergent from the baroque pleasures of the aforementioned Shea, yet no less poetic insomuch that Wagner’s greatest power resides in his bluntness, the simplicity and directness of his descriptions, his genius at deconstructing traditional tropes and reincarnating them into something new and vital. He speaks with the conviction of a man who’s scraped his knuckles in a brawl, who’s loved and lost, who’s seen the bottom of a few too many whiskey bottles. A man who has, in fact, seen many things. It’s all there on the page, infusing his characters, his landscapes, and more ominously, those chasms between the lines. You can taste that whiskey, those honeyed lips of forgotten lovers, the violence. When Wagner speaks, you’re there next to him at the scarred bar of some smoky bucket of blood where the men snarl when they smile; men who carry knives in their pockets, and it’s getting late, very late, and the wind is moving in the pines beyond the porch light, the muddy parking lot and the lonely strip of blacktop, and that damned perfume uncoils in your nostrils, mingling with the scents of sawdust and beer. Damned is right. Evil is always waiting, always biding in the darkness of Wagner’s corner of the kingdom.



Evil lurks out there in the shadows, and evil festers in the dark hearts of wicked men. Pick your poison, but poison it will be—a darksome miracle, a sinister revelation, a sudden end. He speaks to the truth of the matter for so many, and all we can do is avert our eyes or shudder as our animal brain recognizes the presence of the immutable reality of the universe as rendered by Wagner’s imagery.

It has been a rare pleasure to explore this manuscript, and one that has evoked a powerful sense of nostalgia. During my youth in Alaska I spent many a lonesome night, after the huskies were put to bed and the sashes drawn and doors barred against the howling wind, wrapped in a blanket near the stove, reading ancient pulp paperbacks by the dying glow of a kerosene lamp. L’Amour, Lovecraft, H. Rider Haggard, Poe, and London kept me company. In those days, my primary experience with Wagner was through a few of his uncollected tales and his selections for the various anthologies that he helmed. His editorial vision increased my appreciation of the genre and introduced my young self to writers I’d surely have otherwise neglected, and in them I found seeds for my own eventual maturation as an author of the weird, the uncanny, the macabre.

This winter, as I made my way through the manuscript of this omnibus the days were passing dark and the nights shrouded in mist and gloom unseasonable even for the Pacific Northwest. Storms howled through this rural neighborhood among towering fir and cedar trees, and shook my house to its foundation. On many of these nights, I reentered Wagner’s mad and twilight realms as the windows rattled, the lamp flickered, and shadows crawled across my bookshelves. The cumulative force of these stories, and the knowledge of his tragic and early death, have reminded me why I possesses such admiration for horror in the literary pulp vein, and kindled a sense of urgency—our hours are few, our days fleeting, and god only knows what awaits beyond the pines, in the darkness.

Would that I live half as large as Karl Edward Wagner did, or make a mark so indelible as this tome he has left to posterity.

—Laird Barron

Olympia, WA

January 14, 2011