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

make it up.”
    “Yeah, hope so.”
    Annoyed, Lydie turned over, scoffing. “C’mon, Ethan, they want our money, don’t they— your money. Of course I can.”
    The next day, however, she was back down in the hole (cellphone still charging on the bedside table, blissfully forgotten) when Paula’s long shadow fell over her, making her look up. And: “Hey!” Lydie called. “So you did come back, after all.”
    “I said I would.”
    “Uh huh. Your supervisor… he like the artifact?”
    “Very much. I’ve got it, if you want it back.”
    “Just give me a sec.”
    More like thirty to finish up, thirty more to clamber free, wiping the sweat from her eyes. Paula stood there, toad-rock already extended, offered up; Lydie put out her hand as Paula dropped it, fisting the totem gratefully, as if reclaiming a lost piece of herself. She gave a cave-deep sigh.
    “That feels good,” she’d said out loud, before she could think to stop herself.
    Paula smiled. “I thought it would. Now—if you don’t mind me disturbing you just a little bit further, might I possibly be able to see what’s in the shed?”
     
    ***
     
    No actual rack, just a long, low trio of shelves which had once held flowerpots, before Lydie relocated them. She’d cleaned the skulls off carefully, one by one—each so muddy they’d initially looked like they were sculpted from clay—by first letting them dry before going at them with a variety of unofficial fine-cleaning tools, paring away dirt and grime with brushes meant for paints or makeup, scaling the eye-sockets with wire loops to remove as much detritus as possible before breaking out the sand, the bleach soaks, the polyurethane sprays. Now they grinned in welcome, display-organized left to right, until Paula gingerly picked up the first on the uppermost row, raising it towards the light.
    Each came with a hole just above where the bridge of the nose would be, if there was a nose, mirroring the totems, and on each the hole at first seemed differently shaped, though careful examination revealed another, more subtle pattern of variation. For in those holes, so seamlessly fitted they almost appeared to have been individually made for the space it now occupied, Lydie had laid each of the totems she’d dug up carefully to rest: insect, bird, snake, bat, toad, plus some sort of low, broad thing with long claws, squat legs and a blunt, blind head, like a mole or badger. A catalogue of every crawling and creeping thing which ever forced itself through some crack in the earth and hid itself inside, trading light for dark, at the urging of some hidden, hollow voice.
    “Thought they were signs of trepanning, at first,” Lydie heard herself explain, her own tone thinning, flattening, words tumbling out in a breathy, secretive rush, as though she feared being stopped before she could finish. “Even though they were in the wrong place. I didn’t even think to match them up for… must’ve been weeks, a month. A happy accident.”
    “Often the way,” Paula murmured. “And then what?”
    “I started thinking about why. The point of the exercise.” Lydie paused, feeling her way, waiting for the words to suggest themselves. “What you could hope to—extract, that way. From the same place people used to think visions came from, or dreams… the seat of enlightenment.”
    “The ajna , or brow chakra. Where things open up.”
    “Yeah, but not if something’s blocking it—fear, maybe. Desire, Some kind of… lower instinct. Like an animal.”
    “And you think that’s what they were removing.”
    “Metaphorically, it makes a certain kind of sense—I mean, no sense at all, really. But still… that is what it looks like, to me: like they were trying to create a completely new way of seeing. A totem for every hole, a congealed bit of nightmare, a filter that needs to be removed, before you can see clearly. The plug that keeps us all from letting something out—”
    “—or in.”
    “Or in, yes.