Mysterium Tremendum

by Laird Barron

11.

During breakfast I relayed my encounter with the mystery animals, floating the idea that perhaps we should skip the hike. “Wow, a couple of bears outside? Why didn’t you get us up? I would’ve loved to see that.” Victor seemed truly disappointed while Dane and Glenn dismissed my concerns that we might run afoul of them during the day. Dane said, “We’ll just let Vicky run his yapper while we walk. Bears will hear that a mile away and beat it for the hills.”

“Gonna be hotter than the hobs of Hades,” Glenn said after shrugging on his backpack. “What the hell are hobs?” Dane said. “Hubs, farm boy,” Glenn said. “Don’t neglect your canteens, fellow campers. Put on some sunscreen. Bring extra socks.”

“How far we going? The Andes?”

“It’s a surprise. Let’s move out.”

Mysterium Tremendum

by Laird Barron

7.

Sequim (pronounced Skwim by the locals) was lovely that summer. The town rested near the Dungeness River at the heart of a shallow basin of the Dungeness-Sequim Valley and not far from the bay. Fields of lavender and poppies and tulips dominated the countryside. There were farms and mills and old, dusty roads that wound between wooden fences and stands of oak and birch and poplar trees. Raymond Carver wrote a poem about Sequim. I’d never read that one.

Mysterium Tremendum

by Laird Barron

1.

We bought supplies for our road trip  at an obscure general goods store in Seattle—a multi-generational emporium where you could purchase anything from space-age tents to snowshoes once worn by Antarctic explorers. That’s where we came across the guidebook.

Glenn found it on a low shelf in the rear of the shop, wedged between antique souvenir license plates and an out of print Jenkins’ Field Guide to Birds of Puget Sound. Fate is a strange and wondrous force—the aisles were dim and narrow and a large, elderly couple in muumuus was browsing the very shelf and it was time for us to go, but as I opened my mouth to suggest we head for the bar down the street, one of them, the man I think, bumped a rack of postcards and several items splatted on the floor. The man didn’t glance back as he walked away.