Free The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron by Ross E. Lockhart, Justin Steele

camera to his eye, and so I froze where I was.
    I can’t remember what Henri said, standing there next to the projector. There was a ringing in my ears, and my headache had come back full force. I thought I could see someone over his shoulder, a familiar shape in fur and silver and long, dark hair. No matter how I moved, though, I couldn’t get a clear look.
    Henri thanked everyone for coming, and started to talk about why we were there, about Muybridge and his films. First the stuff that you could find in the history books—studies of animals in motion, his murder of his wife’s lover and subsequent acquittal—but no one in the crowd was there for so mundane a scandal, so then Henri talked about Muybridge’s other films. Short topics of occult interest, all of them lost to rumor and speculation and myth. Some said he’d even caught the Devil Himself on celluloid.
    My head was splitting, and I needed to get out of the gallery, find a drink, hair of the dog. I was pushing past the other revelers, who all had their gazes fixed forward, on Henri, while my eyes were only for the door. Maybe that’s why I saw her there, standing just inside the entrance. Long, dark hair, dark eyes, fur coat. Her hand on the light switch.
    The lights went down, and the gallery filled with the whirring sound of the projector. In the flickering silver glow that came from the screen, I could see the faces of the people around me, all of them transformed into pallid, disfigured masks by the play of light and shadow, the “servants” now indistinguishable from the guests. All their eyes were black pits, all staring up at the screen. Reluctantly, I turned to see what they were seeing.
    Twenty feet tall, on the wall of the ballroom, three figures wearing conical hats danced in a circle. Their arms were interlocked, their heads down, the points of their hats nearly meeting in the middle as they turned, slowly, rhythmically, like figures on a German clock. Intercut with them were other frames, more animal studies, but wrong this time, donkeys up on their hind legs, turning in a circle. It was just a few frames, figures and donkeys, repeated again and again. Turning and turning, in a dance that would never end.
    There was a flicker, then, and the scene changed. A grove, somewhere, in a black forest, dark and thick as the Doré-inspired jungles of Skull Island, but a real place. Fires burned in the background, out of focus, and cloaked figures watched as a young girl, not more than sixteen, coupled with a black goat the size of a bison. Her eyes and mouth were black holes burned in the film. The images moved with the stuttering, shuddering jerkiness of a zoetrope. Just a few frames, turning on an endless loop. A dance that would never end.
    The blemish began at the place where the girl met the goat. A rip in the film, a hole that gaped wider and wider as the film burned through, with that familiar sound of bubbling and tearing. For a moment the screen was white, and then there was a crack as glass shattered under extreme heat, and the room was plunged into complete darkness.
    It’s hard to remember what happened next. The mind almost certainly played tricks at the time, the memory just as surely has played them since. I know that there was a moment of stillness, as the white light burned on the wall of the gallery. I turned in that moment, my eyes searching for the woman I’d seen inside the doorway, but all I saw were our shadows transformed into giants on the walls behind us.
    When the light went out completely, there was a sound like a rising tide, as dozens of voices all spoke at once, whether to calm or panic, and dozens of bodies all started to move in different directions. The ringing in my ears seemed to have left my head and spread out into the room itself, and underneath it I would have sworn that I could hear the orchestra playing. Others would later say that they heard it too, some wild, discordant melody that none of us could identify