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