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

his eyes vacant. Worse, though, than anything about his expression was something that I tried to tell myself was an optical illusion created by the effect of the flash and the angle. The hoof of the painting’s black goat, resting on Henri’s shoulder, beckoning him to turn and follow.
    I kept the pictures, thumbed through them relentlessly, obsessively, wearing smeared fingerprints into the edges. I meant to confront Nicky with them, throw them down on the table, demand to know why he hadn’t shown them to me, why he’d lied to me, burned the evidence. But instead I watched him, his new confidence, his new photographs. He made friends that I didn’t know, went to parties and gallery openings that I declined to attend, staying home with a bottle in my hand. When he was gone I would take out the pictures, look at them again and again.
    Finally, I waited for him to leave the apartment one night and I followed him. Watched him walk down the street, his head up, not slouching, not anymore, and saw him go to the corner and get into a cab with someone. A woman with long dark hair, wearing a fur coat.

Learn to Kill
    Michael Cisco
     
     
     
    I glance up; there’s a pale young girl, a stranger, standing in the doorway, her dark eyes on me, her set lips motionless, sealed, telling me:
    “Michael—learn to kill.”
    …and gone, in a blink. There might have been some movement back there; a little girl, having somehow wandered into this silent house without being heard by me, might have been able to get out of sight again in the time it took my eyes to close and open.
    I struggle to my feet and cross the bare boards, over to the doorway. I peer the length of the empty hall beyond it. I shuffle the length of the hall, looking around, not looking very closely, not caring, not really, going through the motions. What would I do if she were there?
    No one is there. Not a sound. I can hear the trees on the slope outside, not making sounds. Somewhere, far off, I hear a familiar noise I can’t name. The sound of a motor, I guess. A groan, getting louder, going higher.
    Now what shall I do?
    I go back to my chair and sit down again, as before. Without intending to, I find that I have even reproduced the same posture, like the cast-off coat that keeps the wearer’s shape for a while. Perhaps this sameness will induce her to return; but I don’t think so. It doesn’t work that way, is that what I’m thinking, is that what I am foolishly presuming to know? It doesn’t fail that way, could that be what I mean?
    I already know how to kill. I killed Dad. He would have killed me, if I hadn’t gotten him. No doubt. Little did he ever dream he’d be the first among equals—is that the right phrase? First among my actual, all-withstanding family, taking pride of place, I think, as well he should, and forever in his prime and vigorous as he was the day he died. In protest, I forget at what, I slipped out the front door in the night and pissed on the house. I sprayed everything in sight. It froze, and the next morning I recall the noises of the hinges—the whine of the door hinges with the gasp of the screen door just after—and the usual bang followed by another report I soon learned was the sound his neck made as it broke against the edge of the top step. The slipperiness of frozen urine. So much for him.
    His sister had never liked me and didn’t want me; she disliked children. There was ice everywhere that morning. She didn’t know I’d killed him, no one did. Melted, all of it, before noon. Perhaps there was an odor of urine about the front steps, but a man with a broken neck is liable to let loose, I suppose they thought. No one said a word about it. Angela, Dad’s sister, resented my indifference to his death and, since there was nothing I could do about it, my indifference to my own fate. I felt as if my life were over, too. The end of my life there, with him, and nothing to begin. Nothing else. I had no future, only getting