The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron Read Online Free PDF Page A

The light…”
    ( the dark )
    Unable to keep from connecting the dots, now it’d finally been said—from seeing the hole, the place left empty for an answer, and being therefore driven to fill it. To keep from wondering whether that had perhaps been her mother’s problem all along, solution inherent in its own equation: Could she have been cured all along, and this easily? A single, fairly simple operation, just one; cut a hole, take out what you find there and throw it away, down into the dark. Just offer it up to whatever wants it, and find the courage to finally accept things as they really goddamn are, without having to be afraid. And then…
    …and then.
    Standing there wound down, sunk inside herself, no longer able to tell whether or not she was saying any of this out loud, or what. Then something at the corner of her gaze again, a black flicker; she looked up. Just in time to see Paula put down the skull (carefully, gently, reverently ) and reach up, behind her head, to flick open some sort of knot or clip, slackening her headband until it was loose enough to unwind. Which she began to do, one long fold at a time, without haste or worry—slow and careful, the very same way she told Lydie, still smiling—
    “I knew we were right about you, Mrs Massenet… Lydie. Though of course, I haven’t been as entirely honest, from the beginning, as I might have hoped to be; I knew you already, you see, that first day I came here. Of you, at any rate.”
    Lydie swallowed, dryly. “Oh?” she managed, eventually.
    “Yes… as Lydie Pell, to be exact. Through your mother.”
    One twist, then another, then another—just one more, the final one. Leaving Paula’s forehead bare at last, high and broad and smooth, yet pitted centrally with a perfect shell of scar tissue, cracked just a hint at its core: the very same place where Lydie could feel that intermittent migraine-seed of hers re-forming, bone-planted but pushing upwards and out, threatening to bloom. Because here she was at last, arrived, like she’d always somehow known she one day would be: this place, this very moment, teetering on the brink and wondering just what might be lurking under there, waiting, in the dark. A naked pineal bud, eyelid-furled, waiting to breach the scar’s tissue-plated embrace, sip at the air, twitch and blink?
    But: Does it matter, Lydie? her mother replied, wearily, memory-locked. The hole has its own reasons, always. Do you really want to know what they are?
    Inside the bathouse, the sleeping bats cooed and scrabbled, shrilling sleepily.
    “I fell in a hole once, a long time ago,” Paula went on, stroking down along the ridge that threatened to bisect her open, guileless gaze with one pinkie delicately lifted, as though she were about to serve tea. “Just like this one. And it was scary, at first: so dark, so deep. But after a while, once my eyes adjusted, I found that I didn’t want to get out again at all, let alone go home. Because there were so many wonderful things down there, to see, and do, and be. Wouldn’t you like to know what?”
    “Do I have a choice?”
    “Always. You always have a choice.”
    Which sounded plausible, and not, both at the same time—a truth, thinly disguised as a lie. Or vice versa.
    Tongue leather, head swimming. Migraine between her eyes, turning in a tightening spiral, like a screw. Like the coin-shaped burr hole a trephine leaves behind, after the flesh has been cut away and the skull pierced, to show the sweet grey-pink beneath.
    Thinking: So the first harrowing was me breaking up the earth and sifting it for traces, exposing more and more of this buried ruin. But the second harrowing will be a descent into the underworld, a sort of anti-transfiguration… instead of rising into the sky, sinking into the earth and burrowing down, fertilizing it with yourself, a hole inside a hole. Become, at last, the mulch from which something new will grow.
    Lydie looked down, then up again, meeting