ODD?

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Curiosity led me to enter into the little grotto, of which a few stones sewn into the current permitted access rather easily. I forgot for a moment all my fears.

  I came in under the vault, bowing, and I advanced a few steps, first in the darkness, then in the middle of a weak light, similar to that of moonlight. The grotto was no more than ten steps deep, it ended in a rounded alcove from which the lunar light emanated.

  I came near, I looked like one looks through a foggy windowpane and, first of all, I saw only a heap of confused things: a series of regular undulations, troughs and mounds.

  But suddenly the interior gleam grew. I could see more clearly! In my wildest and most reckless hypotheses, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine something similar . . .

  The truth was more incredible and more marvelous than any fiction!

  Shall I say it? I had before me a gigantic, a monstrous brain, to which this mountain, as high as Mont Blanc, served as cranium!

  I distinctly perceived the different lobes as vast as hills and convolutions which seemed to me deep ravines. . .

  The giant organs were bathed in a phosphorescent liquid which made them visible to my eyes, and I saw the arteries and veins beat and leap with the powerful movement of a machine’s piston; it even seemed that a lukewarm heat reached all the way to me, through the thick rampart of translucent stone!

  Never has a man experienced astonishment such as mine. I wondered if I wasn’t the plaything of a diabolical hallucination. This creation, so colossal, so outside the normal hypotheses, left me crushed with a horror that had no name; and, in spite of myself, I remained with my eyes glued to this window opened onto the infinite, without having the strength to flee.

  I was dazed, hypnotized by the staggering spectacle. I finally pulled myself away from the grotto and took refuge in the metal forest; my head was splitting, my arteries beat to bursting, I felt madness take hold of me.

  WEIROOT

  Jeffrey Ford

  One of his generation’s best fantasists, Jeffrey Ford has won multiple World Fantasy Awards. His fiction veers from more traditional tales through to surreal, strange compositions like the story included herein, taken from the pages of Weird Tales.

  Weiroot, you mad man, what do you think you’re doing, sitting in the chill of the night, winking at the winking stars? Are you sending them a message? Come visit me? And what if they were to? What if in say a year or two a star fell, swept down out of the dark, trailing green fire, and smashed with an explosion of sparks and black diamond debris into the dunes surrounding your wooden plank palace? What would you do then? Oh sure, you’d call for your four marble men without faces, those savage quadruplets whose stone sculpted arms move with supple grace. “If they get obstreperous, let them have it,” you’d whisper and the four white dolts would nod and flex. But then, imagine your surprise, when the rock from space breaks open and out crawls a little fat baby, purple as a plum with a ridge of webbed spikes like a ladies’ open fan running from the crown of its head back to the base of the skull, orange eyes and a little “o” of a mouth. You know you’d gasp and wave your arms in the air. . .well; at least you’d wear a look of consternation and shake your head, and who wouldn’t? But then, even the four stone flunkies would make amazed faceless expressions when the little fellow from beyond the moon says “Feed me, Weiroot,” in a psychic voice that sounds between the ears. That would snarl your line of thought. So, I can see it now, you’d scoop that star baby up in your robed arms and shuffle with your lame stride back into that cockeyed palace. Then what? A cold leg of mutton? A rasher of game hens from the forest beyond the dunes? Octopus and eel heads you purchased that morning from Yakus, The Bold But Battered? And the miracle is the babe devours all of it. That’s right, that cute little mouth holds rows of needle teeth, and he’s got an appetite. He takes off one of the stone goons’ index fingers in the feeding. Then surprise and a portion of horror when the mewling fright drops a neat little pile of space scat onto the clean swept floor of the dining room. You’d be screaming orders like a second lieutenant in the pontiff’s royal guard, “Drop the rose petals!” “Man the shovel! Haste and earnest effort in the name of all that’s holy!” And after the tumult and chaos of the exigencies of biologic existence, then the quiet time, holding the snoozing fin head cradled in your arms, rocking in the rocker next to your telescope out on the open air observatory while the wind transforms the face of the dunes to a whole new physiognomy, the ocean laps the shore in the distance to the south, and the night birds sing in the forest. In that peaceful time, that’s when the deal will be sealed and you’ll promise your life in protection and care for the helpless fellow. Because, Weiroot, even though your face is a rippling moonscape of healed wounds, your posture is worse than that of your listing home, and you’re feared by those who don’t know you as a strange and cantankerous entity outside of society, The Man Who Escaped Hell, you are no more nor less than any man—a hungry heart and a wavering will. That’s right, don’t deny it. You’re thinking, “Here’s my family. Here’s my opportunity to care and have someone return the emotion.” I see right through your schemes. Your thoughts are utterly transparent to me. And oh, what great pleasure you will derive from naming the wee beast, like it’s a puppy, like it’s your own invention. You’ll try Hartvill, Tharnweb, Wenslav, to see how they roll off the tongue, every now and then checking the child’s countenance to see if the word fits the face like a tailored mask. But all along, all along, you know you’re slowly but resolutely spiraling in a decreasing orbit toward Weiroot Junior or Weiroot II, and the excitement of that has your big toe itching in your eel skin ankle boot. When you’re just about to grasp for one of these narcissistic monikers, something grabs you instead, some dim glimmer of reason, and you veer off and christen the child Oondeshai, which was the name of an island in Hell. Then a kiss to that purple brow and you lean back in your rocker and rock beneath the stars from whence he came, closing your eyes and falling into a dream of the future. Beautiful. Or so you think, but wait, Weiroot. Just a second. Dreams are dreams and the future is like a hall of mirrors reflecting the past and offering up wavering illusions until everything shatters and you’re cut to ribbons by shards of reality. Allow me to suggest where all this is leading. Little Oondeshai will be both a pleasure and a trial for some time, and, though difficult at first, you’ll learn to give of yourself, to feed, comfort, and care for your charge. Your stone men will be put through their paces as they’d never been, even in the ancient time when they were created to serve and protect Satan, long before you found them in the cave in the sea cliff and brought them to life with an inadvertent sneeze. There will rise up a hurricane of activity in the wooden palace, all centered on the child, and every action will embrace him as its eye. This won’t necessarily be bad, for it will take you away from your melancholic study, it will resurrect you from your pointless pondering of the stars. I don’t deny there will be long walks among the dunes in which you will tell the boy stories, half true, half the product of your own skittering imagination, like the one about the man who teaches the monkey to be a man while the monkey teaches the man to be a monkey and they switch places only to discover deep philosophical truths they’d never before conceived of until the man puts the monkey in a cage and the monkey escapes and kills the man and then is shot by the man’s wife, who loved the monkey turned man more than the man turned monkey. Yes, you’ll fill the child’s head with that kind of simplistic clap trap to make him a dreamer, and he’ll show no revulsion when he runs his fingertips over your scarred, tree bark face. Together you’ll fly dragon kites, running over the dunes, in the slanting light of cool evenings. You’ll fish for Tillibar skeeners off the ocean cliffs with a long rope, a hook to snag Leviathan, and the stone quadruplets heaving and ho-ing, hoisting the wriggling silver behemoths of the deep high up the cliffside in the full moonlight. You’ll teach him something like right from wrong, and punish him by confining him to his room. He’ll stamp and howl like a fox
in a leg trap and pass through the walls a hundred times, for this will be one of his special powers, and you’ll patiently catch him and put him back and tell him NO! He’ll, of course, say, “I hate you Weiroot, you turd.” You’ll know he doesn’t mean it, but still, these words will prick your heart like a thistle in the thumb. Later, there’ll be the reconciliation and you’ll give him an orange sugar god on a stick for apologizing. Time will change you both like the wind changes the dunes. Both of you will grow, he physically, you inwardly, expanding to care for two. His purple complexion will lighten to a pale violet. His fin will recede to become a mere ridge of lumps. He’ll lose the webbing on his fingers and toes, the split in his tongue will meld to a single point. He’ll grow taller than you, and his alien abilities will manifest themselves—his ability to detect a lie, to see in the dark, to speak to the dead and know the secret thoughts of the marble quadruplets. All of this will have a profound effect upon you. Just to know that your stone servants have had inner-lives, dreams and anguish, all along will weigh upon your conscience, and you’ll finally be forced to give them their freedom and bid them well in the world. They’ll leave you one day at the end of summer when the leaves in the forest have begun to change and each will choose a direction of the compass and strike out on his own. You’ll extend them each the favor of a pouch of coins, a knife, and a painted expression you or Oondeshai will draw upon their blank faces with the indelible ink of the red octopus. A smile for one, a frown for another, a quizzical look for his brother, and the last will be marked to show compassion. Then they’ll be gone and it will be you and Oondeshai. And he’ll ask you about your past, and there will be no way to lie to him. So you’ll have to say, “I’m the man who escaped from Hell.” But this answer will only give birth to a hundred more questions and you’ll walk with him on a bright morning over the dunes to the edge of the ocean and there you’ll sit as the waves lap your feet and you’ll tell him everything. “I, Weiroot, committed an unpardonable sin,” you’ll say. “Why?” he’ll ask. And you’ll begin, hemming and hawing at first, and then your confession will flow like blood.

  THE BLOAT TOAD

  Leopoldo Lugones

  Translated by Larry Nolen

  Leopoldo Lugones (1874 — 1938) was an Argentine journalist and writer influenced by the Symbolists. “The Bloat Toad” (1906) is typical of his slightly off-kilter tales.

  One day, playing in the villa where my family lived, I stumbled upon a little toad that, instead of fleeing like its more corpulent relatives, swelled up extraordinarily under my stoning. Toads horrified me and it was my pleasure to pelt as many as I could. Thus the small and obstinate reptile soon succumbed to the blows of my rocks.

  Like all those raised in the semi-rural life of our provincial cities, I was knowledgeable of lizards and toads. Besides, the house was situated near an arroyo that crossed the city, which contributed to an increase of such creatures. I share these details so that it is well understood how surprised I was to note that the atrabilious toad was entirely unknown to me. Well, time to consult. And taking my victim with all precaution, I went to ask the old maid, confident of my first hunting enterprise. I was eight years old, she sixty. The event had, of course, interest for both of us. The good woman was, as was the custom, seated by the kitchen door, and I waited to see my story taken in with the accustomed benevolence. Scarcely had I begun when I saw her get up hurriedly and snatch the gutted, nasty creature from my hands.

  “Thank God you didn’t leave it!” she exclaimed with signs of great happiness. “We’re going to burn it right away.”

  “Burn it?” I asked, “But what’s it going to do, if it is already dead?”

  “Don’t you know that it is an escuerzo,” my interlocutor replied in a mysterious tone, “and that this little animal revives if you don’t burn it? Who commanded you to kill it? That ought to be the end of your stonings! Now I’m going to tell you what happened to the son of my late friend Antonia, may she rest in peace.”

  While she spoke, she had gathered and lit some wood chips, over which she placed the escuerzo’s cadaver.

  “An escuerzo!” I said, terrified under my mischievous demeanor: an escuerzo! And I shook my fingers as if the toad’s coldness had clung to them. A revived toad! It would freeze the soul of a grown man.

  “But do you think to tell us a new battle between frogs and mice?” interrupted Julia with the amiable, confident coquettishness of thirty years.

  “Nothing like that, Señorita. It is a story which has happened.”

  Julia smiled. “You cannot imagine how much I know. . .”

  “You will be content, so much more when I intend to take revenge on you with your smile.”

  While my fateful game was grilled, the old maid told her story, which is as follows:

  Antonia, her friend, a soldier’s widow, lived with the only son she had with him, in a very poor little house, distant from every town. The youth worked for both of them, cutting wood in the neighboring forest, and so passed year after year, walking life’s journey. One day he returned, as was the custom, in the afternoon to take his mate, happy, healthy, vigorous, with his axe on his shoulder. And while he did this, he told his mother that on the root of a certain very old tree he had encountered an escuerzo, whose swelling up did not stop it from ending up as a tortilla under his axe’s eye.

  The poor old woman was full of pain upon hearing this, begging him to please accompany her to the site, in order to burn the animal.

  “You have to know,” she said, “that the escuerzo never pardons whoever offends it. If they don’t burn it, it revives, follows its killer and does not rest until it has done the same to him.”

  The good youth laughed greatly at the tale, intending to convince the poor old woman that it was a good hoax for scaring bothersome boys, but beneath worrying a more mature person. She insisted, however, that he accompany her to burn the animal’s remains.

  He joked with her, all references to how distant the site, over the injury that she could cause to herself, being already so old, in the calm of that November afternoon, but it was useless. At all costs she wanted to go and he had to decide to accompany her.

  It was not so far, a mile and a half or so. They easily came upon the recently cut tree, but for all that they poked through the splinters and loose branches, the escuerzo’s cadaver did not appear.

  “Did I not tell you?” she exclaimed, beginning to cry. “Already it has gone; now already it doesn’t have this recourse. My father San Antonio shelter you!

  “But what foolishness, to afflict yourself so. The ants will have taken it or some hungry fox ate it. You have an odd view, crying for a toad! It’s best to return, as it is already dusk and the humidity of the pasture is damaging to you.”

  They returned, then, to the little house, she crying always, he attempting to distract her with details of the cornfield which promised a good yield if the rains continued, until returning anew to the jokes and laughter in the presence of her sadness. It was almost night when they arrived. After a thorough check of every corner, which elicited a new round of laughter from the youth, they ate on the patio, silently, by the light of the moon, and he was disposed to spread out his saddle in order to sleep, when Antonia begged him ,for that night at least, to consent to enclose himself in a wooden box which she possessed and to sleep there.

  The protest against this petition was fierce. She was shocked, the old woman, he had no doubt. To whom did it occur to think of making him sleep in such heat inside a box which surely would be full of vermin!

  But such were the supplications of the ancient woman, and as the youth loved her so, he decided to accede to this caprice. The box was big, and although a little drawn in, it would not be all that bad. With great care, the bed was set up in the back. He placed himself inside, and the sad widow took a seat beside the furniture, dedicated to passing the night in vigil in order to close it if there were the least sign of danger.

  She calculated that it was midnigh
t, as the very low moon began to light the room, when suddenly a little black shape, almost imperceptible, jumped over the lintel of the door which she had not closed due to the great heat. Antonia was shaken with anguish.

  There it was, then, the vengeful animal, squatting on its hind legs, as if meditating a plan. What evil the youth had done in laughing! That little lugubrious figure, immobile on the moonlit door, was growing extraordinarily, taking on monstrous proportions. But what if it was not more than one of those familiar toads which enter the house each night in search of insects? For a moment she breathed easy, sustained by this idea. Then the escuerzo suddenly gave a little jump, then another, in the direction of the box. Its intention was clear. It was not pressured, as if it were certain of its prey. Antonia watched her son with an indescribable expression of horror: sleeping, lost to dream, breathing slowly.

  Then, with an unquiet hand, without making any noise she let fall the cover. The animal was not deterred. It continued jumping. It was already at the foot of the box. It went around it deliberately, it stopped at one of the angles, and quickly, with an incredible leap for its small size, it planted itself on top of the cover.

  Antonia did not dare to make the least movement. All of her life was concentrated in her eyes. The moon now bathed the entire room. And behold what followed: the toad began to swell up by degrees; it grew, it grew in a prodigious manner, until it tripled its size. It remained so for a minute, during which the poor woman felt all the anguish of death pass through her heart. Then, it shrank itself, shrinking until it recovered its primitive form; it leaped to the ground, went through the door and crossing the patio it finally lost itself among the grass.

  Then Antonia dared to lift herself, trembling everywhere. With a violent gesture she opened wide the box. What she felt was so horrible that a few months later she died a victim of the fear that it produced.