The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

by Laird Barron

What is known versus what is hidden.

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.

“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.”

A choir of corrupt angels sang from the darkness all around—a song sweet and repellent, and old as Melville’s sea and its inhabitants. Sulfurous red light illuminated the fog and impossible shapes danced and capered as if beamed from the lens of a magic lantern.

Luke Honey finished his cigarette. The sun slowly ate through the clouds and its pale light shone in the gaps of the foliage. He turned his back and walked deeper into the woods, into the darkness.

A gust rattled the windows and moaned in the chimney.

Of all the weird stories, the morbid campfire tales they tell the tourists on stormy nights around the hearth, The Lady of the Lake Murder is the one everybody remembers.

That lake is deep and cold—there aren’t any deeper or any colder in the continental US. The frigid alkaline water preserved Dolly pretty much fully intact.

Bones? Undoubtedly, a reef of them exists somewhere in the deep. We won’t find them, though. Like the old timers say: the mistress keeps those close to her heart.

She fell asleep and dreamed of sinking into icy water, of drifting helplessly as a white figure crowned in a Medusa snarl of hair reached for her.

She sat with the windshield wipers going, a soft, sad ballad on the radio. She began to shake, stricken by something deeper than mere sorrow or regret; an ancient, more primitive emotion.

Life is just one long train wreck.

Seagulls circled the car, their shadows so much larger than seemed possible, the shadows of angels ready to carry me into Kingdom Come.

Pacific Northwest gloom and rain has always agreed with me.

The cords of his neck went taut and he looked away, as if embarrassed, eyes milky, a doomed petitioner gaping at Hell in all its fiery majesty.

Then I gathered my Thompson and its case and retreated into the hotel stairwell to pack the gun, scrape the blood from my shoes and comb my hair.

The rich and beautiful are somewhat phobic regarding the criminally insane no matter how affluent the latter might be.

Your father was a killer with the eye of an artist, the heart of a poet.

I didn’t care about the naked chickadees; my attention was divided between my recurrent pains of hand and ear, and gazing in wonder at our satyr host, lacking only his hooves to complete the image of the great god Pan taking a mortal turn as a simple gang boss.

Children go missin’ from their beds and tender maidens are ravished by Black Bill of the Wood,”

“All of you kooky bastards in this county into black magic?”

Just like that the sun snuffed as a burning wick under a thumb and darkness was all around, held at bay by a few lanterns in the yard, a trickle of light from the open doors on the porch and a handful of windows.

“The magician once speculated to me that he had a plan to create moving images that would wipe minds clean and imprint upon them all manner of base, un-sublimated desires. The desire to bow and scrape, to lick the boots of an overlord. It was madness, yet appealing. How his face animated when he mused on the spectacle of thousands of common folk streaming from theatres, faces slack with lust and carnal hunger.

Ask me if Satan exists, I’ll say yes and slice a virgin’s throat in the Dark Lord’s honor. Ask me if I believe He manipulates and rewards, again yes. Directly? Does He imbue his acolytes with the power of miracles as Helios Augustus surely believes, as the crones believe their old gods do? I will laugh in your face. Satan no more interferes in any meaningful way than God does. Which is to say, by no discernible measure.”

When the drum clicked empty I dropped the rifle and jumped through the patio doors in a crash of glass and splintered wood, and loped, dragging curtains in my wake, across the lawn for the trees. I weaved between the mighty lines of the burning pentagrams that now merely smoldered, and the trailing edge of my train caught fire and flames consumed the curtains and began eating their way toward me, made me Blake’s dread tyger zigzagging into the night, enemies in close pursuit.

Meanwhile, I’d probably avoid motion pictures and stick to light reading.

Her thoughts turned to the woods, the hills, a universe of dark, sweet scent.

The canopy of the trees across the street shushed in the breeze, and fields littered with pockets of light swept into the deeper gloom like the crown of a moonlit sea.

“I don’t give a shit about Stone Age crop circles. Who was behind the kidnapping. What was the motive. I’ll let you in on a secret—we got nothing, man. No claims or demands from terrorist groups, no chatter, nada. That isn’t how this goes. We always hear something.” “Motive? There’s no motive. The ineffable simply is.”

“All this flesh is but a projection. We are the dream of something greater and more dreadful than you could imagine. To gaze into the abyss is to recognize the dreamer and in recognition, to wake. Not all at once. Soon, however.”

How I wish the Pod People could give me a hand, help me explore self-annihilation or ultimate enlightenment, which I’m certain are one and the same.

Nobody knew much about Ruark—he didn’t say two words on any given day, but he swung an axe like a fiend from Hell.

The sun had burned through the overcast, but its rays fell weak and diffuse here in the cool, somber vault of the forest. The air lay thick and damp as if they’d shuffled into the belly of a crypt.

The old growth trees were enormous. These were the elders, rivals to the Redwood Valley sequoias that predated Christ, the Romans, everything but the wandering tribes of China and Persia.

There were those who believed to speak of a thing was to summon it into the world, to lend it form and substance, to imbue it with power.

Bane paused to gaze into the darkness that encroached upon the circle of the cheery blaze.

“Y’all remember the child’s tale Rumpelstiltskin? The king ordered the miller’s daughter to spin straw to gold or die, an’ a little man, a dwarf, came to her an’ said he’d do the job if’n she promised him her firstborn child? Done deal an’ she didn’t get her head chopped off.”

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.

“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.”

“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.”

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

John and I didn’t say much. His face resembled forty miles of bad road, as a country philosopher might say;