X's for Eyes by Laird Barron

mists of the caldera receded and a panoply of shivering star fields was revealed. Arthur Navarro, grown to titanic dimensions, lay spread eagle upon a tor of black crystal jutting from the ocean of galaxies. His limbs were skewered with crystal spikes. Suppurating wounds masked him. Grisly lacerations crisscrossed his immense form. A vulture-headed woman clad in a shimmering white girdle crouched atop his chest. She dipped her beak into his exposed intestines. Titan-Arthur howled and the stars rippled and changed.
    Dred and Telemachus Crabbe straggled at that very moment over the rim of the volcano. “Mother!” Dred fell to his knees with all the drama of an actor in a production of Shakespeare. Vulture-headed goddess or not, a mama’s boy always recognizes his own mother.
    “I’m having an epiphany about our lineage,” Mac said. He shuffled his feet. His toes poked through the ragged mukluks. “Toomses are all the evil of the world. Aren’t we?”
    “Most of it for the last millennium, for damn sure!” Atticus cackled and his eyes slipped in their cavernous sockets.
    Mac recalled Grandfather Danzig’s love of models—planes, ships, cities. Especially cities. He could imagine the old man moving pieces on a board, arranging assassinations, kidnappings, rocket launches, and remote expeditions, all with the ultimate goal of manipulating his grandsons into fight or flight responses. “Why the charade of the probe? The insanity with poor Arthur and his brothers? Why fake an expedition to unearth the ziggurat? If the Tooms patriarchs are allied with Mr. Gray, the Emperor, whatever you call it, then they know everything. They set the cult upon us. Allowed Zircon to kidnap us. Risked our lives with the corrupted Spetsnaz and the maze . . . Why? Is this some bizarre test? A trial?”
    “Gauntlet,” Dred said, still clutching his head in both hands as he rocked. “Mac, it’s a gauntlet.”
    “Gauntlet!” the heads cried in unison and the earth trembled and small rock slides plunged into outer space.
    “The Gauntlet is an ancient family rite,” Seneca said. “On every world and across infinite realities, different families, but always the same gods and the same rite. Resources, peons, the lives of your friends, your less gifted relatives . . . expendable in the pursuit of true power. It’s a rare son of the old blood who runs the Gauntlet. Lear and Andronicus were favored to make a run—Mervin, Nestor, and Gage were not. Only the Toomses who undertake and survive this harrowing are fit to enter the inner circle. Congratulations, kids!”
    Mac said, “Our bothers . . . They died in the Gauntlet?”
    Seneca laughed. “No, silly boy. Your uncle slaughtered them. He’s a firebrand, our dear Andronicus.”
    “Didn’t stand before us with knocking knees or pissed pants, either,” Cotton said.
    “Are you afraid to gaze upon the unholy radiance of our patron in darkness?” Atticus rolled his gaze upward to indicate the seeping vault. “Shall I open the way? Shall I send you before our benefactor?”
    Dred wailed and covered his face. Mac took a protective step toward his brother.
    “Oh, calm yourselves. In the fullness of time, you may become one of us, an eternal servant of the Gray Eminence. Meanwhile, the worlds are your oysters. Shuck them and make merry.”
    “How now?” Crabbe said. He stood, pale and blank, as if perceiving his surroundings as a violent hallucination.
    “Be still, cur,” Cotton said. “You exist to serve as a dog fetches conies and licks the boots of its master.”
    Seneca said, “Hold fast, brothers. Far too much golden about this one. I say we corrupt him a tad. Let the aptly named Telemachus partake of the sweetbreads of immortality.”
    Mac waited for the harrumphs and mutters to subside. “We came to retrieve our friend.” He nodded toward Arthur. “If such a thing is possible.”
    “As you wish, it will be so,” Atticus said. “Mortals exist in our domain as