Man with No Name: A Nanashi Novella by Laird Barron

neuroses have spread like weeds. Am I getting fat? Yes, I’ve got the squat frame of a Bulgarian power lifter, but at least my moles and wens usually distract the eye from my bulging trapeziuses and hairy arms.
    I also dislike the dark, and wind, and being trussed hand and foot and left hanging in a closet. Dr. Kob used to give me the last as punishment; still does it now and again, needed or not, as a reminder. Perspective is extremely important in the Kob house. The whole situation is rather pathetic, because chief among his eccentric proclivities, he’s an amateur storm chaser. Tornadoes and cyclones don’t interest him so much as lightning and its capacity for destruction and death. Up until his recent deteriorating health, we’d bundle into the van and cruise along the coast during storm season and shoot video, and perform field tests of his arcane equipment. Happily, those days seem to be gone, and none too soon. It’s rumored my predecessor, daughter numero uno , was blown to smithereens, and her ashes scattered upon the tides, during one of those summer outings.
     
    *   *   *
     
    Time has come for action.
    My birthday was Saturday. I’m thirty, a nice round number. By thirty, a girl should have career aspirations, picked out a man, that sort of thing. I stuck the white candle of death in a cupcake, said my prayers, and ate the damned thing with all the joy of a Catholic choking down a supersized holy wafer. Then I doused my sorrows with a bottle of Glenfiddich and watched a rerun of the late night creature-feature.
    I’ve decided to record my deepest thoughts, although I’m young to be scribing even this outline of a memoir. Some bits I’ve written in spiral notebooks with ponies and unicorns on the cover.
     
    *   *   *
     
    We live in a big Gothic mansion on a hill outside of Olympia. We being Dr. Kob, Pelt, and me. Pelt came to the U.S. with the Master. The old troll doesn’t talk much, preferring to hole up in his backyard tree house and drink Wild Turkey and sharpen his many, many knives. I call him Uncle, although so far as I know he’s no more my uncle than the good Doctor is my father.
    Dr. Kob’s workshop is the converted attic in the East Wing. He’s got a lordly view of everything from Olympia to Mt. Rainier. When he’s in his cups, he refers to the people in the city as villagers.   That’s exactly how he says it—with a diabolical sneer. I think he reminisces about the Motherland more than he should. His skeletons are banging on the closet door. He just keeps jamming in new ones. I wager it’ll bite him in the ass one of these fine days.
    The housekeeper, chef, and handyman stay in bungalows in the long shadows of the forest on the edge of the property. The gardener and his helpers commute daily. They tend the arboretum and the vast grounds. Yet despite their indefatigable efforts to chop back the vines, the brambles, and the weeds, the estate always seems overgrown. It looks a lot like the thicket around Sleeping Beauty’s castle in the classic cartoons. Some rooms in the mansion leak during rainstorms. Like the grounds crew, our handyman and his boys can’t replace rotten shingles and broken windows fast enough to stay ahead of entropy that’s been gathering mass since 1845. There’s not enough plaster or paint in the world to cover every blister and sore blighting this once great house.
    But Dr. Kob doesn’t care about such trivialities. He’s obsessed with his research, his experiments. Best of all, there are catacombs beneath the cellars; an extensive maze chock full of bones. Beats digging up corpses at the graveyard in the dead of night, although he waxes nostalgic about those youthful excursions.
    I’m careful in my comings and goings despite the fact Dr. Kob crushes the servants under his thumb and virtually saps their will to live. He imported most of them from places like Romania and Yugoslavia. They’ve united in tight jawed dourness and palpable resentment.