The Croning
OTHER BOOKS BY LAIRD BARRON
Occultation
The Imago Sequence
LAIRD BARRON
NIGHT SHADE BOOKS
SAN FRANCISCO
The Croning
© 2012 by Laird Barron
This edition of
The Croning
© 2012 by Night Shade Books
Cover Illustration and design by Cody Tilson
Interior layout and design by Amy Popovich
Edited by Ross E. Lockhart
All rights reserved
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-59780-414-1
Night Shade Books
http://www.nightshadebooks.com
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to the following for making this book possible: Amy, Marty, Jason, Jeremy, Ross, and the entire staff of Night Shade Books; my agents Brendan Deneen, Colleen Lindsay, Heather Evans, and Peter Rubie; Matt Jaffe; Jody Rose; JD and Lara Busch; Mark Ibsen; Larry Roberts; and Ellen Datlow.
Special thanks to my loyal companions Athena, Horatio, Ulysses, and Persephone; and my friends—you know who you are.
Extra special thanks to Jason and Harmony Barron; and the Langan family—John, Fiona, and David. I love you guys.
For Oksana, Julian, and Quinn
.
CONTENTS
Looking for Mr. R
(Antiquity)
1.
T
hat venerable fairytale of the Miller’s daughter and the Dwarf who helped her spin straw into gold has a happy ending in the popular version. The events that inspired the legend, not so much.
The Spy who was the son of the Miller embarked upon a perilous mission into the Western Mountains. The cart tracks and game trails he followed were tortuous, wending through darksome forests full of robbers and all manner of wild beasts. Such were the dangers of travel in most regions of the world in those days. He chose to walk and was accompanied by a grizzled mastiff who’d served him faithfully through many a bleak hour. He carried a dagger, a water skin, a few coins in a dried-up purse, and a tiny crucifix around his neck. Just those meager possessions and his heart, which burned for the Queen. That devotion guided him through thorn thickets and quicksand, over rockslides and across rivers. It comforted him all those dark, dark nights as he and the dog camped along the trail, wrapped in his cloak, fire dwindling to embers, wolves howling among the trees. The stars glowed cold as stones, cold as the snowy caps of the peaks he climbed closer to each passing day.
He thought of his sister, the Queen, also daughter of the Miller, albeit of a different mother. She’d elevated herself unto royalty by convincing the old King she possessed the secrets of alchemy, that she could spin flax into gold, or some similar horseshit. The Spy couldn’t be certain what particular deception his lovely sister had practiced for this high-stakes roll of the bones. He loved her all the more for her foibles, her casual cruelty.
The Spy knew damned well, however, that while Sister possessed a golden tongue for sucking cock and other manipulations, she was no fucking alchemist. Thus, when the old King called her bluff and imprisoned her in a dungeon with a pile of straw and a dawn deadline, literally a dead-
line
, the Spy, who was at that time a humble groom, figured her head would roll into a basket before noon the next day. He sent his nicest black peasant ensemble to be cleaned, and picked a bouquet of white roses for the pauper’s grave.
Imagine everyone’s amazement when she emerged from the cell twelve hours later with several baskets of gold wire and a formula scrawled on a parchment for repeating the process under spectacularly rare astrological conditions. Her smug little smile and coy eyelash batting aside, the Spy sensed her fear.
In the three years that followed, all through her lavish marriage ceremony to the Crown Prince, which half the population of the neighboring kingdoms attended; the opulent honeymoon; the abdication of the old King, and her subsequent elevation to queen and consort; the gala balls and garden parties of epic extravagance; the rosy pregnancy; only the Spy detected a black cloud of gloom piling around her in a gathering storm. Only he paid heed to crows in the branches of the willow tree in her favorite garden.
Despite a ruthless nature and innate talents for subterfuge and skullduggery, he was the Spy entirely due to his sister’s generosity. She’d rewarded their father with retirement to a country estate and her brother with a post at court in the clandestine services. The Ministry of Red Hot Pokers, as certain wits dubbed the office.
The Groom was happy to be shut of his prior job. No more getting kicked by nags during shoeing, no more pitching shit or fetching water for the irritable stable master. No more shagging brawny farrier’s daughters and warty hags in back alleys (or so he thought)! It was going to be frock coats, feathered hats, and high-tone pussy until he keeled over.
Things went in that general direction for a while. Until the Queen showed pregnant and the creepy Dwarf started hanging around the palace…
During a polo match the Spy noticed the Queen staring at a dwarf in a cassock who was lurking near the bleachers. Horrible creature—and the Spy knew from horrible after his many misspent years on the mean streets among lepers and beggars, and maimed veterans of foreign adventures. He’d seen his share of pox-ridden, congenitally defective, gods-cursed twisted caricatures of the human form in alleys and brothels alike. The Dwarf, hunched and scabrous, peeping at the world through gimlet eyes and grinning with the malice of a butcher or coroner who enjoyed his job for all the wrong reasons, was something special indeed. The Spy figured the fellow for a mendicant or an entertainer, an itinerate jester. Then the Dwarf tipped the Queen a sly wink, eyeing her by then prodigious belly, and the Spy smelled trouble brewing.
That night he separated her from the entourage of ladies-in-waiting and snot-nosed footmen and brought her into the garden under the weeping willow. He came right out and asked if she was being blackmailed regarding the fact the baby did not belong to the virile young King who’d, ironically, made a virtue of siring hundreds of bastards during his boring wait for the throne.
“Have you told anyone it’s mine?” the Spy said, holding her small, chilly hand too tightly.
“I’m not stupid,” she said in a tone that indicated she thought
he
sure as hell was. “I prefer my head where it’s positioned rather than mounted on the wall in my loving husband’s study.”
“Then who’s the pygmy working for and what do they want?”
“The Dwarf never told me his name. He’s an imp of Hell.”
“This doesn’t sound very good,” the Spy said. “The pigfucker smuggled in the gold and now he wants a royal favor, is that it? God’s blood, honey. You’re in a real bind if it’s political.”
“He doesn’t desire a political favor.”
“Really. No maps, no troop movements, no appointments to the cabinet?”
“Nothing of the sort.”
“Your sweet ass?”
“He wasn’t interested in the royal preserves.”
“Well, shitfire. Fuck. Piss. What’s his game, then?”
“The Dwarf spun the gold, not I. He’s come for his prize.”
“What, dear sister, have you gone and done?”
Sister grinned exactly as a fox in a trap baring her teeth, and told him what pact she’d made to produce those fabled baskets of gold wire and thus get her family out of the poorhouse. It hadn’t involved the Spy’s biggest fear at the time—her blowing the misshapen Dwarf. No, it was far worse.
2.
A few nights after the Prince was born, the Dwarf arrived on a cold draft, then went away empty-handed. However, the reprieve would be short-lived. He vowed to return in three months to the minute and collect payment—the tender babe who presently nuzzled the Queen’s fair breast. Although, if dear Queenie could learn the Dwarf’s name during the interim, why then he’d declare the whole sordid pact null and void and they’d take crumpets and tea instead.
Fat chance.
The Spy learned of this the next morning when he was summoned to the Queen’s parlor alongside several of her majesty’s other best men. She kept the briefing short and sweet and the Spy figured he was the only member of the cadre to know the whole ugly truth of the mission. He also doubted that
even he
was privy to everything. Sister being a sneaky bitch and whatnot.
The Queen dispatched them to the four corners of the land. They had seventy days to learn the Dwarf’s name, else there’d be hell to pay. Should someone happen to find the sawed-off bastard and stick a knife into his ribs, all the better.
Predictably, the other men, whipped into a patriotic lather, leapt upon their trusty steeds and bolted hither and yon to begin the search. As the best of the best, the Spy employed unorthodox methods to secure the lead that later sent him across the kingdom to the mountains and the darksome territories beyond.
He spent even more time than usual in taverns and nunneries. He poured drinks for off-duty bailiffs, finger-banged lonely scullery maids, beat merchants and pimps. He held a groom’s left foot over an open flame. The Spy despised grooms with a passion. He bribed, blackmailed, and cajoled. To hilarious effect, if not much utility.
Everyone
knew of the Dwarf, but not his name or whence he came. He was a shadow flickering in and out of reality. Rumors abounded—some claimed he was an assassin in the pay of a rival nation; he was the last scion of a ruined noble house, reduced to begging and prostitution; he was an evil magician descended from the Salamanca Seven who trafficked with demonic forces and had lived far in excess of any mortal span; he was a devil, an incubus, the decrepit human form of the Old One, the Serpent. One syphilis-addled courtesan claimed the Dwarf consorted with worms and the Lord of the Worms. She refused to elaborate.
Those who spoke of meeting the Dwarf made the sign against the evil eye and spat, or clutched their crucifixes. A strapping barmaid who moonlighted as a doxie for the well-heeled gentlemen in the High Market swore the Dwarf was in tight with mercantile princes, that he taught them secrets of the black arts in return for abominable favors. She’d seen him unhinge his jaw to devour a screaming baby which he’d received from a harlot as recompense for his services to a certain burgher. The barmaid had been sleeping it off after an orgy. None of the principals realized she was lying beneath a mound of cushions on the other side of an ornamental screen when the dark deal was consummated. She was a young lass, a former redhead, except her hair had gone white as the mountain snow, allegedly upon witnessing the horrible murder.