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

ceremonies. I live, die, am consumed, and reborn in the sticky, rancid cycle that governs all matter.” His flesh too had darkened to the sickly gray of spoilage and antiquity. His eyes were reptilian and ebon. He breathed out fumes of kelp and sickness and decay. “Oh, rabbit. I’ve lived a thousand lives, but always it comes to this. For this is the reality behind my façade.”
    When at last he could speak, Nanashi said, “Why did you have me protect the woman?”
    “In my way I loved her.”
    “Such a monster as yourself can know love?”
    “Yes. It is the most exquisite corruption, the greatest perversion dreamt of by the forces of darkness. There can be no curse without love.”
    The ghouls tittered in chorus and dug into the wrestler’s old, abandoned meat.
    Muzaki gestured languidly, imperiously, and several meters offshore the water gathered itself and bulged outward in a slick green dome. An iris slowly widened, revealing a tunnel that corkscrewed who knew where. He said, “Man with No Name, you are the sole living being on this island. Your old life is burned to ash. There are two paths remaining. Here among the ghouls and rebirth into the unlife. Or, out there and the unknown. You must choose.”
    Nanashi gazed first at the tunnel, then at the gory repast of his undead brothers. He groaned and wept. He drew the revolver and slid the barrel into his mouth. For an age he struggled to squeeze the trigger. Defeated, he dropped the gun and stood.
    “Go,” Muzaki said. “This is not for you.”
    For several moments Nanashi swayed, his sight turned inward. Abruptly he bent and snatched the revolver. Six bullets. Six targets. Perhaps it was fate. Perhaps it was fate mocking him. “This place isn’t for anyone.” He began to fire.
     
    *   *   *
     
    Nanashi threw the gun into the sea. He followed its arc. Hitching, halting, almost drunken, his feet carried him from the scene of slaughter and into the infinite mystery.
     

 
     

     
    Laird Barron spent his early years in Alaska, where he raced the Iditarod three times during the early 1990sand worked in the fishing and construction industries. He is the author of several books, including The Croning, The Imago Sequence, Occultation, The Light Is the Darkness, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All . His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in upstate New York.
     

 
Bonus Material
     
    Blood
    &
    Stardust
     
     
    Three years later, as I hike my skirt to urinate in a dark alley in the slums of Kolkata, my arms are grasped from behind. The Doctor whispers, “So, we meet again.” His face was ruined in the explosion—its severe, patrician mold is melted and crudely reformed as if an idiot child had gotten his or her stubby fingers on God’s modeling clay. I can’t see it from my disadvantaged perspective, but that’s not necessary. I’ve been following him and Pelt around since our original falling out.
    Speaking of the Devil…Pelt slips from the shadows and drives his favorite dirk first through my belly, then, after he smirks at the blood splattering onto our shoes, my heart. He grins as he twists the blade like he’s winding a watch.
    “—and this time the advantage is mine.” I laugh with pure malice, and die.
     
    *   *   *
     
    Storms unnerve me. I hate thunder and lightning—it makes me jumpy, even in the Hammer Films I watch nearly every evening. Regardless the patent cheesiness, storms awaken my primitive dread. Considering the circumstances of my birth, that makes sense. Fear of the mother of elements is hardwired into me.
    My nerves weren’t always so frayed; once, I was too dull to fear anything but the Master’s voice and his lash. I was incurious until my fifth or sixth birthday and thick as a brick physically and intellectually. Anymore, I read anything that doesn’t have the covers glued shut. I devour talk radio and Oprah. Consequently, my