"Bulldozer"

by Laird Barron
Published SCIFICTION, 2004

Some time in the 1860's or 1870's.  Jonah Koenig, a Pinkerton detective has arrived in Purdon, a California frontier town, looking for a man named Iron Man Hicks, (or Mullen).  Wanted as a suspect in a series of ritual murders, and by no less than P.T. Barnum for stealing valuables while working as a circus strongman. Among them at least one occult book (the real life Dictionnaire Infernal).

After proving himself tough by shooting a local troublemaker and making it with local hookers, Koenig gets an interview with a man named Langston Butler, holed up in a work camp outside town. He and Hicks have had some adventures involving hallucinogenics and occult rituals.  Hicks is barbaric and corrupt, but possessed of strange powers, including being able to open holes in space.  He's also being devoured by a parasitic fungus. But not exactly.  According to Butler, Hicks is in the process of changing or evolving, into something else.

He directs Koenig to "The House of Belphegor", a cave not far from the camp, made by the hands of an extinct race "before the continents split and the ice came over the world."

Koenig finds animal skeletons and bizarre symbols scratched onto boulders (many of them faded with time).

Something happens to him in the cave.  He remembers it being large inside than expected; gargantuan statues, being weightless.  He comes back in bad shape. He dynamites the cave.  He hears that Butler has died.  Mullen (Hicks?) has been seen.  He finds Hicks in his hotel room and shoots him, to no effect.  Hicks grabs his arm, leans toward him - "his face split apart at the seams, a terrible flower....:"

This is an effective story and I like Barron's writing a lot.  It manages to invoke Lovecraft cliches without wallowing in them - a nice touch.

"The Men from Porlock"

by Laird Barron
originally published The Book of Cthulhu, Night Shade Press, 2011

Miller is a lumberjack, working at Slango, a small, hellish lumber camp in the Pacific Northwest.  It is 1923.  Miller is a WWI vet, still suffering from his experiences.

McGrath, the straw boss, sends Miller, Horn, Ruark, Bane, Stevens, Calhoun, and Ma out into the woods to bag a couple deer to serve when a photographer comes to visit the camp.  Miller reluctantly accepts.

They head off into the woods.  Camping in a hollow, Bane regales them with hints of old legends of burial mounds and demons dwelling in the earth, and a black-bound book with a strange symbol on it that his grandfather, a preacher, was in possession of.

The next days hunt is a mixed success.  Ma, Horn and Calhoun are left in the woods pursuing a wounded buck.  Miller and Ruark are to head back to Slango, while Stevens and Bane round up the other three.  Then things go sour.  

They find Horn, knocked out and bruised and a little unsure what happened to him.  Thinking they're up against bushwhackers, the men brace for trouble.  Horn can't tell them where Calhoun and Ma are, only that he heard them talking to someone.  They search.  They find a tree with a symbol carved into it - a symbol Bane recognizes as the same one that appeared on his grandfather's black book.  The tree also has a hinged door carved into it.  Inside they find something that "squirmed and uncoiled".  They flee.

They find an odd, Puritan-ish village, unknown from any maps.  There are only women there, dressed in Colonial style and speaking in affected Olde English.  But they say the men will be returning, presently.  There is a strange tower at the center of the village. Believing they must be hiding their missing men, they begin a house-to-house search. Miller notes that most of the women appear to be pregnant, but there are no children.  

In the tower, they find Ma, eviscerated.  The women, and the returning men, attack.  A bloody battle ensues, with the village quickly catching fire and the loggers holed up in a cave.  Horn begins babbling about "Ol' Leech", a slumbering entity that lives in the woods and is worshiped by the villagers, who offer their newborns to it.  During the night they hear Calhoun screaming for help. The others are carried off during the night, presumably into tunnels where the loggers have spied evidence of gruesome altars.  Finally Stevens and Miller are the only ones left.  They re-enter the village, but the surviving villagers only glare at them, and allow them to leave.

Returning to Slango, they find the logging camp obliterated without a trace, and a tall, finely-dressed man who identifies himself as Dr. Boris Kalamaov, who tells them they will come to live among the villagers.  They decline.  Kalamov kills Stevens, but allows Miller to live, telling him they will be watching.

Years later, Miller, now married and a father, cuts down a tree in his backyard and finds a slimy creature in the center of the stump.  He sets it on fire.

Laird Barron writes tuff, hard-boiled, gory, violent stories about brutal, damaged men.  And he writes them quite well.  This story is a winner - loaded with atmosphere, its eerie, powerful build-up is reminiscent of Blackwood's "The Willows", which I'm sure was intentional.