The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All - By Laird Barron


Introduction by Norman Partridge

LAIRD BARRON.

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

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

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

Laird Barron.

It’s a name that conjures images, if you’ve an imaginative turn of mind. That’s no surprise—if you know the words of the man who owns it. If you know the work he has set down on the page.



* * *



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

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

Of course, that didn’t happen with Laird.

He was nobody’s one-hit wonder.

He proved that with each new story he published.

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

Let me size up that situation.

Let me put it simply.

I just can’t picture Laird Barron going gently into that good night. I’d pay green money to see those Aztecs try to do their stuff, though.

Especially if that wormhole and pyramid came complete with a requisite number of slithering things.

Now, that’d be something to see.

Or read about—in a Laird Barron story.



* * *



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

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

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

It’s that good.

And so is Mr. Barron.



* * *



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

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

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

That’s a pretty fine place to be.



* * *



The man himself?

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

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

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

Google that.

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



* * *



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

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

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



* * *



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

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

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

Periodically, I noted old, old pylons made of sawn logs erected off the beaten path. Markers. Initially, I didn’t have much reaction, but as darkness drew down around us, the dogs’ ears pricked up and a general sensation of nervousness radiated from the team. Within a few minutes I was very much overcome by a sense of dread, a profound and palpable impression of being watched by an inimical presence. Later, I queried several of the villagers about the markers (which indicated trails to hunting and burial areas) and they told me that the region was absolutely unsafe to travel after dark due to aggressive spirits. In the years since, former racers, some of them hard-bitten ex-military men, trappers and hunters, have expressed identical experiences of the approach to Shageluk. As I learned, it’s simply something almost every racer goes through if they find themselves in that stretch around dusk. Not a damned thing happened, but I haven’t shaken the creepiness of those vibes in the seventeen years and it inspires me whenever I contemplate the antagonism between man and wild, the modern and the ancient, or what is known versus what is hidden.



* * *



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

What is known versus what is hidden.

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

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

No doubt.

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

All you have to do is step right up.

All you have to do is turn the page.

—Norman Partridge Lafayette, California October 6, 2012





Blackwood’s Baby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He stuck the telegram into his shirt pocket, then drank his whiskey. He poured another shot and lighted another cigarette and stared at the window. The light darkened to purple and the wall faded, was almost invisible. “I have nightmares. Give the ladies my apologies.” He’d lived in the boarding house for three weeks and this was the second time he and Clerk Galtero had exchanged more than a word in passing. Galtero’s brother Enrique managed the place in the evening. Luke Honey hadn’t spoken to him much either. After years in the wilderness, he usually talked to himself.

Clerk Galtero spilled the dregs of water on the floor and walked over with his queer, hitching step, and poured the glass full of Luke Honey’s whiskey. He sat in one of the rickety chairs. His good arm lay atop the table. His hands and arm were thickly muscled. The Legion tattoos had begun to elongate as his flesh loosened. “I know you,” he said. “I’ve heard talk. I’ve seen your guns. Most of the foreign hunters wear trophies. Your friends, the other Americans, wear teeth and claws from their kills.”

“We aren’t friends.”

“Your associates. I wonder though, why you have come and why you stay.”

“I’m done with the bush. That’s all.”

“This place is not so good for a man such as yourself. There is only trouble for you here.”

Luke Honey smiled wryly. “Oh, you think I’ve gone native.”

“Not at all. I doubt you get along with anyone.”

“I’ll be leaving soon.” Luke Honey touched the paper in his pocket. “For the States. I suppose your customers will finally have some peace.”

They finished their drinks and sat in silence. When it became dark, Clerk Galtero rose and went about lighting the lamps. Luke Honey climbed the stairs to his stifling room. He lay sweating on the bed and dreamed of his brother Michael, as he had for six nights running. The next morning he arranged for transportation to the coast. Three days later he was aboard a cargo plane bound for Morocco. Following Morocco there would be ships and trains until he eventually stood again on American soil after half a lifetime. Meanwhile, he looked out the tiny window. The plains slowly disappeared into the red haze of the rim of the Earth.



* * *



Luke Honey and his party arrived at the lodge not long before dark. They’d come in two cars and the staff earned its keep transferring the mountain of bags and steamer trunks indoors before the storm broadsided the valley. Lightning sizzled from the vast snout of fast approaching purpleblack clouds. Thunder growled. A rising breeze plucked leaves from the treetops. Luke Honey leaned against a marble colonnade and smoked a cigarette, personal luggage stacked neatly at his side. He disliked trusting his rifles and knives to bellhops and porters.

The Black Ram Lodge towered above a lightly wooded hillside overlooking Olde Towne. The lodge and its town lay in the folds of Ransom Hollow, separated from the lights of Seattle by miles of dirt road and forested hills. “Backward country,” one of the men had called it during the long drive. Luke Honey rode with the Brits Bullard and Wesley. They’d shared a flask of brandy while the car left the lowlands and climbed toward the mountains, passing small, quaint townships and ramshackle farms tenanted by sober yeoman folk. Wesley and Bullard snickered like a pair of itinerant knights at the potato pickers in filthy motley, bowed to their labor in dark, muddy fields. Luke Honey didn’t share the mirth. He’d seen enough bloody peasant revolts to know better. He knew also that fine cars and carriages, horses and guns, the gloss of their own pale skin, cursed the nobility with a false sense of well-being, of safety. He’d removed a bullet from his pocket. The bullet was made for a .454 rifle and it was large. He’d turned it over in his fingers and stared out the window without speaking again.

After supper, Dr. Landscomb and Mr. Liam Welloc, co-proprietors of the lodge, entertained the small group of far-flung travelers who’d come for the annual hunt. Servants lighted a fire in the hearth and the eight gentlemen settled into grand oversized chairs. The parlor was a dramatic landscape of marble statuary and massive bookshelves, stuffed and mounted heads of ferocious exotic beasts, liquor cabinets and a pair of billiard tables. Rain and wind hammered the windows. Lights flickered dangerously, promising a rustic evening of candlelight and kerosene lamps.

The assembly was supremely merry when the tale-telling began. “We were in Mexico,” Lord Bullard said. Lord Bullard hailed from Essex; a decorated former officer in the Queen’s Royal Lancers who’d fought briefly in the Boer War, but had done most of his time pacifying the “wogs” in the Punjab. Apparently his family was enormously wealthy in lands and titles, and these days he traveled to the exclusion of all else. He puffed on his cigar while a servant held the flame of a long-handled match steady. “Summer of 1919. The war had just ended. Some Industrialist friends of mine were visiting from Europe. Moaning and sulking about the shutdowns of their munitions factories and the like. Beastly boring.”

“Quite, I’m sure,” Dr. Landscomb said. The doctor was tall and thin. He possessed the ascetic bearing of Eastern European royalty. He had earned his degree in medicine at Harvard and owned at least a quarter of everything there was to own within two counties.

“Ah, a trying time for the makers of bombs and guns,” Mr. Liam Welloc said. He too was tall, but thick and broad with the neck and hands of the ancient Greek statues of Herakles. His hair and beard were bronze and lush for a man his age. His family owned half again what the Landscombs did and reportedly maintained ancestral estates in England and France.“One would think there are enough territorial skirmishes underway to keep the coins flowing. The Balkans, for example. Or Africa.”

“Exactly. It’s a lack of imagination,” Mr. Williams said. A bluff, weatherbeaten rancher baron attired in Stetson boots, corduroys and impressive buckle, a starched shirt with ivory buttons, and an immaculate Stetson hat. He drank Jack Daniel’s, kept the bottle on a dais at his side. He’d come from Texas with Mr. McEvoy and Mr. Briggs. McEvoy and Briggs were far more buttoned down in Brooks Brothers suits and bowlers; a banker and mine owner, respectively. Williams drained his whiskey and poured another, waving off the ever-hovering servant. “That’s what’s killing you boys. Trapped in the Renaissance. Can’t run an empire without a little imagination.”

“Besides, Germany is sharpening its knives,” Mr. Briggs said. “Your friends will be cranking up the assembly lines inside of five years. Trust me. They’ve the taste for blood, those Krauts. You can’t beat that outta them. My mistress is Bavarian, so I know.”

Lord Bullard thumped his cigar in the elegant pot near his foot. He cleared his throat. “Harrumph. Mexico City, 1919. Bloody hot. Miasma, thick and gray from smokestacks and chimneys of all those hovels they heap like ruddy anthills.”

“The smog reminded me of home,” Wesley said. Wesley dressed in a heavy linen coat and his boots were polished to a high gloss. His hair was slick and parted at the middle and it shone in the firelight. When Luke Honey looked at him, he thought Mr. Weasel.

“A Mexican prince invited us to a hunt on his estate. He was conducting business in the city, so we laid over at his villa. Had a jolly time.”

Mr. Wesley said, “Tubs of booze and a veritable harem of randy strumpets. What was not to like? I was sorry when we departed for the countryside.”

“Who was it, Wes, you, me, and the chap from York… Cantwell? Cotter?”

“Cantwell.”

“Yes, right then. The three of us were exhausted and chafed beyond bearing from frantic revels at the good Prince’s demesne, so we ventured into the streets to seek new pleasures.”

“Which, ironically, constituted the pursuit of more liquor and fresh strumpets.”

“On the way from one particularly unsavory cantina to another, we were accosted by a ragtag individual who leaped at us from some occulted nook in an alley. This person was of singularly dreadful countenance; wan and emaciated, afflicted by wasting disease and privation. He smelled like the innards of a rotting sheep carcass, and his appearance was most unwelcome. However, he wheedled and beseeched my attention, in passable English, I must add, and clung to my sleeve with such fervor it soon became apparent the only way to rid myself of his attention was to hear him out.”

“We were confounded upon learning this wretch was an expatriate American,” Mr. Wesley said.

“Thunderstruck!”

“Ye Gods,” Dr. Landscomb said. “This tale bears the trappings of a penny dreadful. More, more, gentlemen!”

“The man’s name was Harris. He’d once done columns for some paper and visited Mexico to conduct research for a story he never got around to writing. The entire tale of his fall from grace is long and sordid. It’s enough to say he entered the company of disreputable characters and took to wickedness and vice. The chap was plainly overjoyed to encounter fellow speakers of English, but we soon learned there was much more to this encounter than mere chance. He knew our names, where we intended to hunt, and other details I’ve put aside.”

“It was uncanny,” Mr. Wesley said.

“The man was obviously a grifter,” Luke Honey said from his spot near the hearth where he’d been lazing with his eyes mostly shut and thinking with mounting sullenness that the pair of Brits were entirely too smug, especially Lord Bullard with his gold rimmed monocle and cavalry saber. “A spy. Did he invite you to a séance? To predict your fortune with a handful of runes?”

“In fact, he did inveigle us to join him in a smoky den of cutthroats and thieves where this ancient crone read the entrails of chickens like the pagans read Tarot cards. It was she who sent him into the streets to track us.” Lord Bullard fixed Luke Honey with a bloodshot stare. “Mock as you will, it was a rare experience.”

Luke Honey chuckled and closed his eyes again. “I wouldn’t dream of mocking you. The Romans swore by the custom of gutting pigeons. Who am I to argue?”

“Whom indeed? The crone scrabbled in the guts, muttering to herself while Harris crouched at her side and translated. He claimed the hag dreamed of our arrival in the city for some time and that these visions were driving her to aggravation. She described a ‘black cloud’ obscuring the future. There was trouble awaiting us, and soon. Something about a cave. We all laughed, of course, just as you did, Mr. Honey.” Lord Bullard smiled a wry, wan smile that accentuated the creases of his face, his hangdog mouth. “Eventually, we extricated ourselves and made for the nearest taproom and forgot the whole incident. The Prince returned from his business and escorted us in style to a lavish country estate deep in the central region of the country. Twelve of us gathered to feast at his table, and in the morning he released boars into the woods.”

“Twelve, you say?” Mr. Williams said, brows disappearing under his big hat. “Well, sir, I hope one of you boys got a picture to commemorate the occasion.”

“I need another belt to fortify myself in the face of this heckling,” Lord Bullard said, snapping his fingers as the servant rushed over to fill his glass. The Englishman drained his glass and wagged his head for another. “To the point then: we shot two boars and wounded another—the largest of them. A prize pig, that one, with tusks like bayonets and the smoothest, blackest hide. Cantwell winged the brute, but the boar escaped and we were forced to spend the better part of two days tracking it through a benighted jungle. The blood trail disappeared into a mountain honeycombed with caves. Naturally, honor dictates pursuing wounded quarry and dispatching it. Alas, a brief discussion with the Prince and his guides convinced us of the folly of descending into the caverns. The system extended for many miles and was largely uncharted. No one of any sense attempted to navigate them. We determined to return home, satisfied with the smaller boars.”

“Eh, the great white hunters balked at the precipice of the unknown?” Luke Honey said. “Thank God Cabot and Drake couldn’t see you fellows quailing in the face of fear.”

Lord Bullard spluttered and Mr. Wesley rose quickly, hand on the large ornamented pistol he wore holstered under his coat. He said, “I demand satisfaction!” His smile was sharp and vicious and Luke Honey had little doubt the man yearned for moments such as these.

Dr. Landscomb smoothly interposed himself, arms spread in a placating manner. “Gentlemen, gentlemen! This isn’t the Wild West. There’ll be no dueling on these premises. Mr. Wesley, you’re among friends. Please, relax and have another drink. Mr. Honey, as for you, perhaps a bit of moderation is in order.”

“You may be correct,” Luke Honey said, casually sliding his revolver back into its shoulder holster. He looked at Mr. Williams who nodded approvingly and handed him the rapidly diminishing bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Luke Honey took a long pull while staring at Mr. Wesley.

Mr. Wesley sat, folding himself into the chair with lethal grace, but continued to smile through small, crooked teeth. “Go on, Arthur. You were getting to the good part.”

Lord Bullard wiped his red face with a handkerchief. His voice scarcely above a mutter, he said, “An American named Henderson had other ideas and he convinced two Austrians to accompany him into the caves while the rest of us made camp for the night. The poor fools slipped away and were gone for at least an hour before the rest of us realized what they’d done. We never saw any of them again. There was a rescue mission. The Mexican Army deployed a squadron of expertly trained and equipped mountaineers to investigate, but hard rains came and the tunnels were treacherous, full of rockslides and floodwater. It would’ve been suicide to persist, and so our comrades were abandoned to their fates. This became a local legend and I’ve reports of peasants who claim to hear men screaming from the caves on certain, lonely nights directly before a storm.”

The men sat in uncomfortable silence while the windows rattled and wind moaned in the flue. Mr. Liam Welloc eventually stood and went to a bookcase. He retrieved a slim, leather bound volume and stood before the hearth, book balanced in one hand, a crystal goblet of liquor in the other. “As you may or may not know, Ian’s grandfather and mine were among the founders of this town. Most of the early families arrived here from places like New York and Boston, and a few from California when they discovered the golden state not quite to their taste. The Black Ram itself has gone through several incarnations since it was built as a trading post by a merchant named Caldwell Ellis in 1860 on the eve of that nasty business between the Blue and the Gray. My grandfather purchased this property in 1890 and renovated it as the summer home for him and his new bride, Felicia. Much of this probably isn’t of much interest to you, so I’ll not blather on about the trials and tribulations of my forebears, nor how this grand house became a lodge. For now, let me welcome you into our most sacred tradition and we wish each of you good fortune on the morrow.”

Dr. Landscomb said, “I concur. As you know, there are plenty of boar and deer on this preserve, but assuredly you’ve come for the great stag known as Blackwood’s Baby—”

“Wot, wot?” Mr. Wesley said in mock surprise. “We’re not here for the namesake of this fine establishment? What of the Black Ram?”

Mr. Liam Welloc smiled, and to Luke Honey’s mind there was something cold and sinister in the man’s expression. Mr. Liam Welloc said, “There was never a black ram. It’s a euphemism for…Well, that’s a story for another evening.”

Dr. Landscomb cleared his throat politely. “As I said—the stag is a mighty specimen—surely the equal of any beast you’ve hunted. He is the king of the wood and descended from a venerable line. I will note, that while occasionally cornered, none of these beasts has ever been taken. In any event, the man who kills the stag shall claim my great grandfather’s Sharps model-1851 as a prize. The rifle was custom built for Constantine Landscomb III by Christian Sharps himself, and is nearly priceless. The victorious fellow shall also perforce earn a place among the hallowed ranks of elite gamesmen the world over.”

“And ten thousand dollars, sterling silver,” Mr. Wesley said, rubbing his hands together.

“Amen, partner!” Mr. McEvoy said. “Who needs another round?”

It was quite late when the men said their goodnights and retired.



* * *



The rain slackened to drizzle. Luke Honey lay with his eyes open, listening to it rasp against the window. He’d dreamed of Africa, then of his dead brother Michael toiling in the field of their home in Ingram, just over the pass through the Cascades. His little brother turned to him and waved. His left eye was a hole. Luke Honey had awakened with sick fear in his heart.

While the sky was still dark he dressed and walked downstairs and outside to the barn. The barn lay across the muddy drive from the lodge. Inside, stable hands drifted through the silty gloom preparing dogs and horses for the day ahead. He breathed in the musk of brutish sweat and green manure, gun oil and oiled leather, the evil stink of dogs swaggering in anticipation of murder. He lighted a cigarette and smoked it leaning against a rail while the air brightened from black to gray.

“There you are, mate.” Mr. Wesley stepped into the barn and walked toward Luke Honey. He wore workmanlike breeches, a simple shirt, and a bowler. He briskly rolled his sleeves.

Luke Honey didn’t see a gun, although Mr. Wesley had a large knife slung low on his hip. He smiled and tapped the brim of his hat and then tried to put out the Brit’s eye with a flick of his flaming cigarette. Mr. Wesley flinched, forearms raised, palms inverted, old London prizefighter style, and Luke Honey made a fist and struck him in the ribs below the heart, and followed that with a clubbing blow to the side of his neck. Mr. Wesley was stouter than he appeared. He shrugged and trapped Luke Honey’s lead arm in the crook of his elbow and butted him in the jaw. Luke Honey wrenched his arm loose and swiped his fingers at Mr. Wesley’s mouth, hoping to fishhook him, and tried to catch his balance on the rail with his off hand. Rotten wood gave way and he dropped to his hands and knees. Light began to slide back and forth in the sky as if he’d plunged his head into a water trough. Mr. Wesley slammed his shin across Luke Honey’s chest, flipping him onto his back like a turtle. He sprawled in the wet straw, mouth agape, struggling for air, his mind filled with snow.

“Well. That’s it, then.” Mr. Wesley stood over him for a moment, face shiny, slick hair in disarray. He bent and scooped up his bowler, scuffed it against his pants leg and smiled at Luke Honey. He clapped the bowler onto his head and limped off.

“Should I call a doctor, kid?” Mr. Williams struck a match on the heel of his boot, momentarily burning away shadows around his perch on a hay bale. A couple of the stable hands had stopped to gawk and they jolted from their reverie and rushed to quiet the agitated mastiffs who whined and growled and strutted in their pens.

“No, he’s okay,” Luke Honey said when he could. “Me, I’m going to rest here a bit.”

Mr. Williams chuckled. He smoked his cigarette and walked over to Luke Honey and looked down at him with a bemused squint. “Boy, what you got against them limeys anyway?”

The left side of Luke Honey’s face was already swollen. Drawing breath caused flames to lick in his chest. “My grandfather chopped cotton. My father picked potatoes.”

“Not you, though.”

“Nope,” Luke Honey said. “Not me.”



* * *



The lord of the stables was named Scobie, a gaunt and gnarled Welshman whose cunning and guile with dogs and horses, and traps and snares, had elevated him to the status of a peasant prince. He dressed in stained and weathered leather garments from some dim Medieval era and his thin hair bloomed in a white cloud. Dirt ingrained his hands and nails, and when he smiled his remaining teeth were sharp and crooked. His father had been a master falconer, but the modern hunt didn’t call for birds any more. The dogs and the dog handlers went first and the rest of the party entered the woods an hour later. Luke Honey accompanied the Texans and Mr. Liam Welloc. They rode light, tough horses. Mr. McEvoy commented on the relative slightness of the horses and Mr. Welloc explained that the animals were bred for endurance and agility.

The forest spread around them like a cavern. Well-beaten trails crisscrossed through impenetrable underbrush and unto milky dimness. Water dripped from branches. After a couple of hours they stopped and had tea and biscuits prepared by earnest young men in lodge livery.

“Try some chaw,” Mr. Briggs said. He cut a plug of hard tobacco and handed it to Luke Honey. Luke Honey disliked tobacco. He put it in his mouth and chewed. The Brits stood nearby in a cluster talking to Dr. Landscomb and Mr. Liam Welloc. Mr. Briggs said, “You in the war? You look too young.”

“I was fifteen when we joined the dance. Just missed all that fun.”

“Bully for you, as the limeys would say. You can shoot, I bet. Everybody here either has money or can shoot. Or both. No offense, but I don’t have you pegged for a man of means. Nah, you remind me of some of the boys in my crew. Hard-bitten. A hell-raiser.”

“I’ve done well enough, in fact.”

“He’s the real great white hunter,” Mr. Williams said. “One of those fellers who shoots lions and elephants on the Dark Continent. Fortunes to be won in the ivory trade. That right, Mr. Honey?”

“Yeah. I was over there for a while.”

“Huh, I suppose you have that look about you,” Mr. Briggs said. “You led safaris?”

“I worked for the Dutch.”

“Leave it be,” Mr. Williams said. “The man’s not a natural braggart.”

“Where did you learn to hunt?” Mr. McEvoy said.

“My cousins. They all lived in the hills in Utah. One of them was a sniper during the war.” Luke Honey spat tobacco into the leaves. “When my mother died I went to live with my uncle and his family and those folks have lots of kin in South Africa. After college I got a case of wanderlust. One thing led to another.”

“Damned peculiar upbringing. College even.”

“What kid doesn’t dream of stalking the savanna?” Mr. Briggs said. “You must have a hundred and one tales.”

“Surely, after that kind of experience, this trip must be rather tame,” Mr. McEvoy said.

“Hear, hear,” Mr. Briggs said. “Give up the ivory trade for a not-solikely chance to bag some old stag in dull as dirt U.S.A.?”

“Ten thousand sterling silver buys a lot of wine and song, amigos,” Mr. Williams said. “Besides, who says the kid’s quit anything?”

“Well, sir, I am shut of the business.”

“Why is that?” Mr. Briggs said.

Luke Honey wiped his mouth. “One fine day I was standing on a plain with the hottest sun you can imagine beating down. Me and some other men had set up a crossfire and plugged maybe thirty elephants from this enormous herd. The skinners got to work with their machetes and axes. Meanwhile, I got roaring drunk with the rest of the men. A newspaper flew in a photographer on a biplane. The photographer posed us next to a pile of tusks. The tusks were stacked like cordwood and there was blood and flies everywhere. I threw up during one of the pictures. The heat and the whiskey, I thought. They put me in a tent for a couple of days while a fever fastened to me. I ranted and raved and they had to lash me down. You see, I thought the devil was hiding under my cot, that he was waiting to claim my soul. I dreamt my dear dead mother came and stood at the entrance of the tent. She had soft, magnificent wings folded against her back. White light surrounded her. The light was brilliant. Her face was dark and her eyes were fiery. She spat on the ground and the tent flaps flew shut and I was left alone in darkness. The company got me to a village where there was a real doctor who gave me quinine and I didn’t quite die.”

“Are you saying you quit the safaris because your mother might disapprove from her cloud in heaven?” Mr. Briggs said.

“Nope. I’m more worried she might be disapproving from an ice floe in Hell.”



* * *