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

but that we all thought sounded very familiar. Then the whole room tilted, or at least that’s how it felt, like the hotel was just a model sitting on a tabletop that somebody had stumbled into.
    I felt bodies slamming against me, elbows jamming into my sides, my face. I felt my lip split against bone, I felt myself stumble over someone or something in the dark. Bright strobes of light were going off, and at the time I couldn’t account for them, thinking maybe they were going off inside my own head, though now I know that they were the flashbulb of Nicky’s camera as he desperately sought to catalogue something of the disaster.
    In the flashes, I remember feeling like I had stumbled somehow into one of Henri’s paintings. The faces of the people around me seemed bloated and dead, seemed to float up from out of the darkness to assail me. Like I was drowning in a black river, with only corpses to keep me company. The “servants,” I told myself later, in their grotesque masks.
    I have no clear recollection of making my way outside, but that’s where I found myself, my hands on my knees, Nicky trying to staunch the flow of blood from my face. The bright lights of the hotel were on, making our shadows long on the gravel in front of us, turning the night sky into a black dome above our heads. I turned around, and saw that the hotel was on fire. Flames licked out of the doors and windows of the first floor, sending embers spiraling up into the darkness, like lanterns carried aloft.
     
    ***
     
    I talked about it later, with the other survivors, with Nicky, with the police. I told them what I had seen, what I could remember, though it didn’t seem like much. A few people had been killed in the blaze, many others suffered from burns, smoke inhalation, injuries acquired in the panicked rout. Once the fire was out, the authorities sifted the ruins for bodies, identified the charred remains, sent them back to their families to be buried. Henri wasn’t among them. He was never seen again.
    When Nicky went to develop his photographs from that night, he told me that none of them came out, from any of the cameras. He said that not even the pictures he’d taken earlier, at the airport and on the train, had returned anything but black squares. He blamed a bad batch of film. He should have been devastated, but he didn’t seem to be. After that evening, it was like something turned over inside Nicky. He started photographing again, and turning out good work. The best he’d done in years, but I didn’t like them. They reminded me of things I’d seen that night. He’d go to the zoo and take pictures of the animals; kangaroos and donkeys and goats, yellow eyes staring out of darkened paddocks.
    I believed him, about the photographs, though I wondered about the explanation. I had crazy thoughts, that maybe there was nothing wrong with his film, but instead something wrong with that night. Then I found two of the photographs that supposedly hadn’t come out. They were under the grate in our fireplace, scorched at the edges. One was a blurry shot taken up on the observation deck. It seemed to be one he’d snapped by accident, with the camera in motion so that most of the picture was a smudge, the stars falling like embers, the radome an enormous white blot consuming one entire side of the image. Right at the edge of the picture, though, was a woman, standing near the railing. Only part of her was visible, the edge of a fur coat, long, dark hair.
    The other photograph was obviously one that he’d captured with the flash after the lights had all gone out. In the foreground were the fleshy shapes of panicked guests running in front of the camera, pushing and falling over each other in the darkness, but in the background was Henri, the focus on him perfect so that you could see the defeated expression on his unsmiling face. He stood in front of his “Chernobog” painting, looking out at the rioting crowd as though he could see them,