Free Man with No Name: A Nanashi Novella by Laird Barron

him from the tiny screen on the pump.
    Onward, he toiled.
    Muzaki awaited him at the rim of the pit. He crawled forth over the lip in a parody of birth--first his clutching hands, then his head and torso, all of him moving at strange angles until he straightened to his full height. The wrestler appeared unscathed, albeit slightly pallid. He wore a white robe that gathered the frail light like the filament of a bulb. He got into the front passenger seat.
    Nanashi swallowed hard. “Where do we go from here?”
    “That depends on whether you saved her.”
    Nanashi remained silent.  Muzaki nodded and a small, odd smile tugged at the corners of his blue lips. He pointed north with a hand that shone queerly alabaster.
    Nanashi drove north. Kilometers rolled past. Dials and gauges reset themselves to their starting positions, but the car zoomed smoothly along the endless highway. He said, “I had a vision of Hell.”
    “Hell is just another neighborhood.”
    “I have tried to convince myself that this is a nightmare.”
    “Awake or dreaming, there’s no appreciable distinction.”
    “Who are you? Are you even the man I watched on television all those years ago? Was there ever such a man?”
    “I am a cursed, malignant brute. I cast a black aura. Other deserving souls, damned souls, in other words, sometimes catch in its hooks like fish in a dragnet.”
    There was nothing to say. They flew more kilometers through the changing gloom until Muzaki said, “We exist in a universe of miracles and curses. The shipwreck during my childhood was both. Those of us who survived the waves and the rocks and the sharks, were stranded upon an island. The island was barren. There was nothing to eat except for one another. So it went and madness followed. On the forty-ninth day, rescuers came. Pale Ones, terrible to behold. They brought me and a couple of others away from the island. The bones of the rest were left for the seagulls to pick.”
    Nanashi saw the child Muzaki lifted from the dirt by inhumanly gracile hands and borne across dark waters upon a gasp of wind. He beheld a crimson and purple mist, and through the mist the flint-sharp spikes of black cliffs streaked in white. He beheld towers, slender and jagged and cruel and the folk within them must also have been of a kind. An island of skulls and weeping shadows, haunted strains of melancholy tunes fluting through abandoned bones. A necropolis sanctuary. Nothing living could enter. Nothing human could enter. Yet there Muzaki had lived. There Muzaki had supped. There Muzaki had grown ever stronger with the passing cycles of time and tide.
    Nanashi trembled and bit his tongue just to feel the pain and be reassured that he yet dwelt among the living.
    Muzaki gestured and they took a spur that angled toward the sea. Nanashi spotted Koma’s Cadillac nosed into the ditch. Its doors were sprung. Bullet holes stitched the cobalt paint. The windows were blasted out. Glass and blood made a tapestry of the plush interior. The corpses were disfigured beyond recognition. Fistfuls of shell casings from automatic rifles glinted upon the ground. Nanashi wondered who’d betrayed his brothers to the Dragon; a passing thought not unlike a stray cloud floating across the subterranean sky.
    Muzaki read his mind. “Were the gracious Innkeeper and his wife afraid to see you? Afraid as if you’d returned from the grave?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Ah. I regret to inform you that those inestimable persons have dealt family secrets to your foes for many, many years. We should continue, eh?”
    “I have seen enough.”
    “It’s not enough until you’ve seen everything. Hurry!”
    A bit farther the road branched and branched again and they came to a seawall. Jiki and Mizo’s Honda was parked in an otherwise empty lot near a metal pavilion that had toppled. No sign of the Terrible Two.
    Nanashi pulled alongside the Honda and exited. His clothes were whipped by a breeze that came hard and cold, strong with