handful_ofdust

Being the self-obsessive I am, my Secret Life of Laird Barron story is mainly about me. It was over thirty years ago, now--just at the turn of the eighties, when things were still hangover-coded as the seventies--that I went on an ill-fated camping trip with my class at Spectrum Alternative School. I say ill-fated, because such expeditions have always been that way, for me; I’m a big city girl, so downtown I’ve never had to learn to drive, and have thus never quite learned to properly enjoy the dubious joys of biking five miles into the Ontario hinterlands so you can sleep in a tent so thin raindrops blow through the walls, eating fresh-picked crab apples because everybody thinks it’s hilarious not to warn you not to, then crapping out your guts into a shallow hole dug with your hands before wiping your ass on poison ivy.

At any rate: There I was, “hiking” (lost, though not yet fully aware of just how lost) through a pine forest whose upper reaches were all spiderwebs and blackflies, kicking up ankle-high wads of mulched brown needles and breathing in their funk while the little brown toads fled my approach. And then...I found it. Tripped over the damn thing, but literally.

Yeah, that really fucking hurt. So did the marching fracture I developed, maybe a day later; my foot still swells up in cold weather, and don’t even talk to me about rain. Let alone, say, two or three days of freezing rain cut with sleet, occasionally leavened with a cunning little application of hailstones.

So what’ve you got to show for your grand tweenage adventure in starvation and hypothermia, Gemma? Oh, y’know--I got a rock!

Not “got”, exactly, of course; believe you me, I left the damn thing there, especially once I’d abraded my palms deeply enough from obsessively rubbing myself all over it to snap out of its hypnotic spell. But for years, once the initial “let us never speak of this again”mental flinch/lacuna had worn off, I dined out on the story of that weird--object, artifact, whatever. A stele that rose almost shoulder-height, made from some sort of rock I’ve never seen before, or since--flow, maybe? A vulcanized, turd-like excrescence, full of bubbles and quartz, yet just hard enough to make shifting it almost impossible?

Whoever made it’s still a mystery, just like why they left it there, or anywhere. All I can tell you is that it bore a thin skin of carvings easier to feel than to see, from endless, knotted traceries embossed like Anti-Papal seals to the outlines of a flood of monstrous hybrids--cats with heads like rabbits and four different types of legs, fish with the eyes of flies, seven-hoofed beaver-tailed hedgehogs giving birth to slugs giving birth to octopi, in Matryoshka-style descending order. And on the other side, at the bottom rather than the top, as though everything about it just had to be perversely reversed--

--that’s where I found the face of a man, broad and brutal, fringed with a beard; a thug-poet warrior king’s tomb-marker, teeth bared in what might as well have been a snarl as a smile. It had only one eye.

Further down still, I found letters. And later, much later--in the awful, noisy dark of a nighttime forest, waiting in vain for a rescue that never came--I finally figured out what name they spelled.

Not last year but the year before, I opened a book at random, and saw that name again.

How crazy is that? Friends asked me, over and over. Shit, Gemma. You think it’s still there, somewhere? Couldn’t be, right?

Think you could find it?

Could I, shit.

So here I am, yet again--and even though I’ve still never met Laird Barron, all I can do is curse him, ineffectively: curse his hieroglyph-incised name, from whatever shallow grave they’re eventually gonna find me in. Because...it’s been days now, all out of water and too afraid to pee, and the light on my laptop is going out; I hear noises I’d forgotten how petrified I was of somewhere just beyond the tree-line, though I can’t tell what’s making them, or even if that’s really the direction they’re coming from. And it’s getting dark, and I’m cold, and every part of me hurts from squatting, but I can’t get up, can’t get up; I have to stay down, keep my head low, keep hidden, just in case. Not that it really matters, either way.

Because I still can’t let go of this fucking stupid rock.