ODD?

by Jeff VanderMeer

  It was not difficult for Slokker to obtain the drugs he needed to calm his nerves, but he did it as discreetly as he could, for his medical studies were in a state close to chaos and his failure to attend seminars and lectures was attracting comment. There was really no alternative, though, because the strain was becoming unbearable.

  In one of the pamphlets that he had not read the previous night, and which he seemed to have had the presence of mind to bring with him to his rooms, Slokker found a short history of the group calling themselves “La Société des âmes mortes”. They had made their first investigations into the afterlife by means of séances but had dismissed this line of enquiry after a series of encounters with fraudulent mediums. They had then explored the “science” of ouija boards and claimed that their subsequent use of psychomantic chambers was a consequence of a spirit message thereby received. The first experiments had been uneventful and the techniques that they had borrowed from the psychic literature of the time, involving the sitter concentrating on photographs and handling the effects of the deceased, produced results that were easy to dismiss as mere fancy.

  Just after the Society proposed the abandoning of this new line of research, one of the sitters began to make extraordinary claims about having communicated with the dead. He insisted that a horrible secret had been revealed to him. Investigation of the transcripts he had made whilst experiencing the visitations revealed disturbing hints about the nature of consciousness after death. But the most extraordinary claim of all was that he had begun to communicate with his own dead spirit. However, he would not be drawn on the exact nature of these exchanges. What was apparent was that his mental state had suffered a dramatic collapse and, only a few weeks later, he was found to have committed suicide. There were those in the Society who followed in his wake, unable to resist the lure of the forbidden knowledge that their dead selves might impart to them. Those who did not succumb to the temptation abandoned all association with psychic research. There were hints that the revelations experienced were based on the concept that it is the dead that sustain the structure of the waking world through their dreams and that all living existence is illusory.

  When Slokker came to a part of the pamphlet featuring a sepia photograph, one hundred years old, of the members of the “Société des âmes mortes”, he nearly dropped the thing in fright. Even had there not been a list of names beneath the photograph, he would have recognised the face of the man in the second row at the extreme right. It was that of Deschamps, or some identical ancestor. But this was not the worst of it. The other faces also seemed familiar, though they were blurred. One had a curious resemblance to the old concierge. And sitting next to him someone whose identity could scarcely be mistaken. It was Slokker’s own face that stared back at him from the photograph.

  Although Slokker tried to dismiss these strange events and revelations from his mind, he found that his nightly compulsion to return and gaze into the mirror of the psychomantium was overwhelming. The drugs helped him to sleep and he still had recourse to binding his feet to the bed, but events soon overtook him, despite all of his precautions.

  One morning, just as he had finished shaving, the mirror above the sink filled with the silvery-white glare. Slokker’s normal, bleary-eyed reflection was replaced with an image of his leering corpse-face. Its eyes had sunk deep into black-rimmed sockets and the yellowish skin stretched tight over the skull, drawing the lips back from teeth made prominent by the flesh’s decay. Hair was plastered down horribly across its mottled forehead. The face was close enough to touch and though it materialised for only a moment Slokker could trace each lineament of decay. It seemed to lean forward towards him, confidentially, and whispered:

  “You are simply a dream . . . and I am tired of dreaming.” Then it was gone.

  After that, Slokker could not bear to be alone. For hours, he tramped the streets of the city, seeking people, crowds. He sat in cafés during the afternoon and mingled with revellers in the evenings, but despite all his efforts to join in he was gripped by the idea that all this was merely scenery, abandoned backstage.

  While he was out drinking himself into a state of oblivion in a bar close to Sacre Coeur, a group of his fellow medical students came across him, slumped over a corner table. They pressed their company upon him, enquiring after his health with real concern. Slokker was glad of their attentions and lost himself in evasion and claims that he would soon return to the University and complete his studies. But as his drunken elation reached its height, when even he half-believed that his fears were caused by nothing more than nervous exhaustion that would be overcome with time, he happened to glance at a mirror hanging on the wall behind one of his friend’s heads. There again was the silvery brightness and his dead, decaying face twisted into an expression of malign contempt. But this time it was not a momentary visitation; the image remained. And he thought that within the laughter around him he could hear a mocking quality, as if it were at his own expense. The dead face too, seemed to be laughing, and Slokker’s friends exchanged anxious glances as his own laughter turned to screams of horror. He got to his feet and pushed through the throng, shoving them roughly aside, until he was out into the streets and the Parisian night.

  From then on all mirrors seemed to have become contaminated. In the darkness even shop windows glowed with the silver-white glare. When he got back to his apartment he smashed the mirrors in his rooms and covered the windows with newspaper to mask any reflections.

  Shortly after Slokker had begun to retreat from the world he received some startling information from the concierge. Coming across him in his office after a trip out to buy some bread, the old man had beckoned Pieter over. It seemed that Deschamps’ body had finally been discovered. A police boat had found it floating miles downstream in the Seine, weeks of decomposition having brought the corpse to the surface. It seemed that the man had drowned himself. Apartment 205 was to be let out again, after extensive redecoration, of course.

  Slokker’s mental condition continued to deteriorate. Some of the medical students who had heard about the encounter in the bar attempted to visit him, but he refused to let them in. Even his old lecturer came to the apartment once, but his initial sympathy soon turned to threats of calling in the authorities when faced with Slokker’s stubborn refusal to communicate. But Slokker viewed all these visitors as he would a series of shadows. He was afraid that the dead face in the mirror was now really set on his shoulders, despite the fact that his sense of touch told him otherwise. It had been days since he’d looked in a mirror. Mornings and afternoons were taken up with sitting in the corner of his living room, watching the flies circling around the centre of the ceiling. And when it was night he would sit in the darkness and stare into space, hoping to lose himself in it. He no longer dared sleep. Even after binding himself to the bed he found that the once laborious process of disentanglement no longer awoke him. He had learned to untie the most complex knots whilst still asleep.

  Exhausted, emaciated, Slokker gradually lost the strength to resist the silent summons that drew him to the psychomantium. Soon, he knew he would give himself over to the compulsion to see again the dead face, and to listen to anything it might care to tell him.

  Late one night, as he struggled to resist, Slokker remembered the landlord’s intention to have Apartment 205 redecorated. Suddenly panic-stricken, he hurried from his rooms and down the short corridor. He could barely turn the key in the lock for fear that the psychomantium might not be there, but as he entered he saw that, although the painters’ ladders and buckets had been stacked in the living room, work had yet to begin. He entered the windowless room and the dead face, appearing more decomposed than ever, was visible at once, as if it had been waiting for him. In the background was the familiar glare, like a continuous burst of lightning that reached only as far as the mirror’s surface. Slokker sat in the darkness for hours as the rotting face with the whispering, hollow voice spoke to him. It urged him to cast aside his life, this mira
ge, this dream in the decaying brains of the dead. It told of the grey, insensible void where the hopes and miseries of living existence have no meaning. “The world you move in is not real,” the voice told Slokker. “The thoughts you think are not your own. Down in their mouldy graves, where the worms creep, the dead sustain the illusion you call life, waiting for you living beings to awaken in your narrow houses for all eternity. You will not die,” said the voice, “for you have never been alive.”

  And as Slokker gazed into the mirror he saw the revenant’s face smile almost benignly.

  Some days later the old concierge made his way up the stairs to Slokker’s apartment. He had not seen the young man during this period and although he didn’t particularly care for him, he was obliged to investigate, as the owners of the building had complained that the rent had not been paid. Up until now the concierge had ignored the various entreaties that Slokker’s medical friends had made; his distaste for their profession made him dismiss them as do-gooders. The old man had his own theory: Slokker had simply absconded in the last few days without a word to anyone in order to escape his debts. It had happened before. What else would you expect from foreign students?

  No one answered his knocking so he entered, using the duplicate key. He had knocked quietly as he had no desire to attract the usual crowd of neighbours. Inside, the apartment looked much as it had before. The old concierge shuffled about, looking through Slokker’s personal effects. His clothes were still hanging in the wardrobe, and even his watch lay on the bedside table, next to the unmade bed. The mirror on the wardrobe door had been smashed and likewise the one above the sink in the bathroom. There were newspapers stuck to the windows, and he recognised the pile of pamphlets that Slokker must have taken from Deschamps’ apartment.

  The concierge closed the door quietly and walked softly down the corridor to 205. He was doing his best not to feel jumpy, but he had to admit that the whole thing was odd. Once inside, he too noticed that although the painter’s equipment was there, they had yet to begin work. Nevertheless, it looked to him as if someone else, probably Slokker, had been there before him. Things had been moved around. When he checked the windowless room he had to leave the door open so that he could see more clearly into the unlit chamber. There was an odd shadow in the gloom, and so he switched on the dim lamp.

  The light revealed Slokker’s starved body hanging in mid-air. The face was fixed in a grimace of pain and the lips were drawn back from clenched teeth. The sightless eyes were staring downwards at his reflection in the mirror. Slokker must have taken the belt from his trousers, fastened it around his neck, climbed up onto the chair and then attached the buckle to the obsolete light fitting on the ceiling. He had then kicked away the chair.

  The concierge made himself turn away from the sight and his first thought was of the nasty reputation another suicide might lend the building. First Monsieur Deschamps (though he had at least had the decency to end his life elsewhere) and now this young idiot! He closed the door behind him, ensured that it was securely locked once more and made his way back to his office downstairs. As he sat waiting for the gendarmes’ arrival, he realised that he must have picked up some of the pamphlets from Slokker’s rooms. They were there in front of him, on the desk. He must have put them down there before he’d telephoned the authorities.

  That night, after they had taken Slokker’s body away, the concierge was troubled by a dream about being trapped in a dark, windowless room.

  MODERN CITIES EXIST ONLY TO BE DESTROYED

  Michael Cisco

  Michael Cisco is best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, which won the International Horror Guild Award in 1999. Since then, Cisco has published The San Veneficio Canon, The Traitor, The Tyrant, The Narrator, and The Great Lover. The story included herein previously appeared only in a limited edition published in Bucharest.

  Standing at the edge of the platform, X. gazes at a panel set in the dingy, bruise-colored wall on the opposite side of the tracks. The wall folds inwards a few feet to the left of the panel, forming a corner that has been invaded by an irregular patch of lacy white scale, which, at times, he thinks looks like the spray of a violent sea, frozen in mid-leap as it dashes against the rocks of the shore. At other times, he sees profiles in it: a grimacing hag with a surprised-looking eye nestled in her hair, or a supine child’s face gazing up in death or wonder as another, half-formed spirit face emerges from its nostrils.

  The panel is perhaps a little more than three feet square, and set in the wall at floor level. Large bolt heads stud the outline at intervals, and both they, and the panel, which might be slightly concave, are the same grimy color as the wall. What’s behind it? The question barely glances through his mind. He looks at it as if he were imagining first one possibility and then another, but no such thing. He is only looking at it because it holds his attention magnetically. What might lie behind it is of no more importance than what or who might happen, for example, to be behind him, just at that moment.

  The panel is more like a mirror, reflecting something about himself. It could be the door of a tomb, rudely chiseled into the wall of a cave and sealed with excessive measures, as if being dead weren’t enough, one also had to be imprisoned. At the same time, the panel is obviously the work of some impersonal city agency, one job among many done by one functionary among many, so that the work and its purpose, the one who directs the act and the one who carries it out, are not united in one place and time. The panel is at least as real as he is. But it may be that its reality is bestowed on it by his attention.

  X. glances at the people standing to either side of him on the crowded platform. They are all facing the wall, and all of them are reading. The distant train, which hoots once down the tunnel as it comes, presses dank, cemetery air before it, stirring the white leaves of the books. It’s the end of the working day, and they are all presumably going home. His physical stamina, thanks to the Gurdjieff Exercises, is excellent, and his body is neither especially lively nor particularly tired. His mind, however, feels like a piece of fabric that has been stretched out of shape, and his thoughts are lifeless and subdued. The day of work just completed was long and filled with effort, but, even though he is all too sensible of the fatigue it left behind in him, it nevertheless seems in hindsight as though it had flashed by in an instant.

  A booming voice comes over the public address system, at once loud and unintelligible. The announcement goes on and on, with every now and then a word poking up into near comprehensibility through the wash of sound like a figure under a blanket, until it becomes a kind of oppressive smoke hanging under the ceiling. The less attentively he listens, the more plainly he can make out what is being said:

  “The purpose of these announcements is not to impart information, but to prevent aesthetic impressions from taking form by impairing your ability to concentrate and by forcing you to seal yourself off from outward sensation, so as to make you unreceptive to mood, thereby relentlessly dragging you back to the idiotic, abbreviated world that must continue to confine you . . .”

  People continue to pour onto the platform from the enormous stairway that opens, like a chute, at one end. As they continue to stream past him, one after another, steadily streaming past him, piling into that station, endlessly piling in and piling in, a feeling of horror begins to stir in him. It doesn’t matter if the train comes. However many may board it here, they will be instantly replaced, and then some. What grips him is nothing other than the streaming of these people, that there is no end to it.

  The train glides into the station. The doors part like buttocks. He enters with relief, and goes to the spot prepared for him. Once again, briefly, he fixes his gaze on the panel in the wall, which is still visible through the window. While he stood on the platform, he looked at it passively, but, this time, he seeks it out and takes hold of it with his mind, perhaps with the confused idea that he might be able to collect from it some of the sense of his own reality with which he had imbued
it. The train croons and the panel slides away into a purple shadow.

  He observes the other passengers as they appear reflected in the black windows. Looking at them, it would be easy to get the impression that groping vacuously in bags and purses was the sole purpose for their existence. Many of them are slumped in sleep, while others, holding up their books or newspapers, dart suspicious glances this way and that; they are really reading the train and the passengers.

  After another stop, he takes an open seat and tries, without much success, to fit his flaccid, overstretched gaze into the confines of the neat white book in his hands. He is, by preference, only vaguely aware of those around him. There is a man with a shockingly large, rubbery face sitting not far from him on one side, and, on the other, a figure drooping in sleep, and somehow obscured. Glancing in that direction, it’s almost as if a blind spot appears in X.’s field of vision, hiding the man. A modishly-dressed young woman with a wide, goblin face sits opposite him. When it occurs to him to make a brief note to himself about the panel, a way to return once again to that impression even as the panel and its wall are hurtling away from him into a darkness like the depths of the ocean, to linger over that impression and its higher relief of reality. As he takes out his notebook to jot down a few words, a disagreeable expression of self-satisfaction comes over the face of the woman across the aisle, as if she assumed he must be taking down a description of her, so that he could recapture her image later on.

  There is the usual jabbering, too, but his senses are too blunted with fatigue to be susceptible to irritation. It isn’t the language, as there are many spoken here, but the flat, insistent manner of speaking that is grating. Glancing around, he takes in the other passengers in a quick, perfunctory survey. They wear the faces printed on money.