ODD?

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Then she crouches and takes the head in her lap. As if to caress, she brushes the cheeks with her hand. . . all the men have sat down, gathering around her . . . now she seizes one of the tiny enameled nails in one hand and a hammer in the other, and with one quick thwack, she drives it fully into the skull.

  Another thwack of the hammer, and one more nail disappears into the lush feminine hair.

  As she hammers, she hums a song. One of those terrible, sensual, strange folksongs ripe with ancient magic.

  Around her, the bloodthirsty monsters sit silent and pale with horror, with eyes aghast staring at her out of somber sockets. She hammers and hammers, driving nail after nail into the head, all the while humming her ancient and strange incantation to the rhythm of the hammering blows.

  All of a sudden, one of the men gives a piercing cry and jumps up, eyes bulging, froth bubbling at his mouth . . . he throws his arms backward and twists his body at either side as in a fit of painful convulsions, and out of his mouth burst strident, bestial screams.

  The young woman hammers on, humming her song.

  Yet another jumps up, howling and swinging his arms about. He snatches a brand out of the fire and jabs it into his chest, again and again, until his clothes begin to burn and a thick, acrid smoke spreads around him.

  The others sit there, pale and frozen to the spot, and do nothing to stop him.

  And a third man stands up — and the same frenzy grips the rest. A deafening noise, a din, an uproar, a hubbub, a hoo-hah, a howling. Entangled limbs flailing out. Those who fall stay down . . . the others carry on their stomping over the fallen bodies . . .

  In the middle of this orgy of madness sits the young woman. She sits, and hammers, and sings.

  Now she has finished; she has planted the head, studded with nails, at the end of a bayonet and brandishes it high above the howling, leaping mass. Then someone scatters the fire; burning brands are pulled out of the embers and thrown in a shower of sparks into the blackest corner of the courtyard . . . the fire dies out. . . A few screams of lubricious rage rise again, a vociferous din like a demented melee—I know, all these crazed men, these feral beasts have thrown themselves at the one woman, biting and clawing at her.

  Darkness clouds my sight.

  Did my consciousness persist just long enough for me to witness all these horrors? . . . Dawn breaks, dull and blurred, like the declining light of a somber winter afternoon. It rains on my head. A chilly wind entangles my hair. My flesh becomes loose and frail. Is it the beginning of decomposition?

  Then, a change of scenery. My head is taken to a different place, to a somber pit, but down there it is warm and quiet. Clarity and sharpness are given back to me. Other heads rest with me in the somber pit. Heads and bodies. And I notice that heads and bodies have joined again, as well, or as badly, as they can manage. And with the contact they recover the ability to speak, in a faint, inaudible, unexpressed language that they nevertheless use to communicate.

  I yearn for a body, I yearn to get rid of the unbearable chill where my neck was sectioned, this chill that has grown into a searing burn. But I look around in vain. Heads and bodies, all are joined together. There is no body left for me. Still, after a long, strenuous search, I find one at last . . . down at the bottom, hiding inconspicuously in a corner . . . a body that is still without a head, a woman’s body.

  Something in me balks at the idea of uniting with this body, but my wish, my yearning wins and, impelled by my willpower, I approach the headless body, and I see that the body is striving to reach my head as well; and now the two sectioned areas touch . . . A mild shock, a sensation of gentle heat. Then one fact overtakes me: I have a body once more.

  But how strange it is . . . after the initial feeling of well-being has passed, I sense a terrible difference between the two halves of my being . . . one would think that utterly different fluids are meeting and mingling, fluids that have no similarity. The female body, on top of which my head rests, is svelte; its skin has the marble-like coolness of an aristocrat who bathes in wine and milk, and wastes costly oils and lotions to pamper herself. Nevertheless, on its right-hand side, covering the hip and part of the belly, is a strange drawing, a tattoo. Tiny, minuscule blue dots trace a pattern of hearts, anchors and arabesques, with the elaborate letters I and B enlaced and intertwined. Who may this woman have been?

  I know one day I will find out—soon! An outline emerges from the hazy darkness below my head. Indistinct and blurred, the image of my body is forming in my mind. By the minute, this image becomes clearer and more precise, as the fluids belonging to the two halves mingle painfully. And suddenly I feel as if I had two heads . . . and the second head—a woman’s head—bloodied, disfigured, ruined, riddled with tiny enameled nailheads—begins to take form before my eyes. That is the head that belongs to this body, and at the same time it is my head, for I can feel the hundreds of nails in my skull and my brain; I want to cry out with pain. Everything around me merges into a red veil that throbs and entangles itself into knots, rippling as if torn back and forth by violent gusts of wind. I can feel that I am female, only my mind is without contest masculine. And now an image emerges out of the red veil . . . I see myself before my very eyes, in a room decorated with extravagant prodigality. I am lying down, buried in soft white furs and . . . naked. In front of me, bending over me, is a man with the harsh, coarse features of a commoner, with the calloused hands and weathered skin of a sailor. He is kneeling over me, pricking my soft flesh with a needle to etch strange designs on my skin. It hurts and at the same time it arouses a peculiar, sensual pleasure in me . . . I know that the man is my lover.

  Then a brief, needle-sharp pain contracts my whole body in a spasm of delight. I enlace the man’s neck with my white arms and pull him down to me . . . I kiss him and place his hard, calloused hands on my breasts, on my shoulders, and kiss him again in a wild frenzy and I clutch him fiercely, and I hold him so tight that he moans, breathless.

  Now I’ve set my teeth to his suntanned throat, the throat I love, the sight of which has ravished me so many times, my tongue covers this throat in moist caresses . . . and now—and now, I need to sink my teeth into this taut, brown flesh—I cannot help it . . . I must bite . . . and I bite . . . bite . . . his moans become a death rattle . . . I feel the man twist and contort in my arms . . . but I do not let go . . . his body becomes heavy, heavy . . . a warm runnel flows down my body. His head falls back . . . I let him slip from my arms . . . with a muffled sound he lands on his back on the soft carpet, a thick stream of blood pouring out of his neck. Blood, blood everywhere, on the soft white polar-bear furs, on me, everywhere.

  I begin to scream, raucous sounds from my hoarse throat. The chambermaid hurries in, she must not have been very far . . . was she eavesdropping? For moment she stands stock still, as if unconscious, and then she throws herself over the body of the dead man . . . without a word, she buries her face into the man’s bloodied chest —I can only see her clench her fists. Now I know everything . . .

  And then I see another image . . .

  I see myself again, as well as my other self, in the wooden tumbrel that is taking me to the guillotine. Then I am standing up there on the scaffold, gazing at the sun for the last time, and as I turn around I catch the sight of a young woman who has elbowed her way to the first row . . . that woman . . . that lover of the man who used to be the instrument of my pleasure . . . in a red petticoat, her shirt open, her face pale and twitching, hair streaming . . . a savage gleam in her eyes, like a beast of prey, moist, conceals a deep grief and at the same time an intense jubilation, as in expectation of pleasure. She raises her clenched fists before her face, her lips move . . . she wants to speak, to mock me and curse me, but she can only scream in a broken, unintelligible voice . . . I lay my head beneath the blade.

  Now I know everything. I know whose head it was that, in the night, by the blazing flames of the bonfire, suffered a terrible vengeance that reached beyond the grave. I also know w
ho the woman is that, the same night, in the dark palace courtyard was crushed, shredded, torn limb from limb by the wild brutes . . .

  I feel in my head the torment of a hundred nail points . . . I am tied to this body . . . to this body marked by terrifying memories and horrible pain, to this beautiful body steeped in sin, which has traveled through all the circles of Hell.

  This abominable scission of my consciousness is tearing me apart . . . oh, but not for long . . . I sense a lethargy pervading my limbs, my flesh sags and softens . . . all my internal organs become spongy, they liquefy . . . decomposition begins.

  Soon night will enfold my conflicting halves . . . the night of putrefaction . . . the bodies will fall apart and the spirit will be free. - - - - - - And the hand stopped writing and disappeared.

  A CHILD’S GUIDE TO THE HOLLOW HILLS

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  Caitlín R. Kiernan has steadily moved beyond a reputation as an heir to the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft and Southern Gothic literature to become one of the most original and audacious weird writers of her generation. Perhaps more than any other writer of the past thirty years, Kiernan places the reader somewhere alien and inhabits points of view that seem both luminous and edgy.

  Beneath the low leaf-litter clouds, under endless dry monsoons of insect pupae, strangling rains of millipede droppings and noxious fungal spores, in this muddy, thin land pressed between soil and bedrock foundations, the fairie girl awakens in the bed of the Queen of Decay. She opens her violet eyes and sees, again, that it was not only some especially unpleasant dream or nightmare, her wild descent, her pell-mell tumble from light and day and stars and moonshine, down, down, down to this mouldering domain of shadow walls and knurly taproot obelisks. She is here, after all. She is still here, and slowly she sits up, pushing away those clammy spider-spun sheets that slip in and tangle themselves about her whenever she dares to sleep. And what, she thinks, is sleep, but admitting to myself this is no dream? Admitting that she has been snared and likely there will be no escape from out this unhappy, foetid chamber. Always she has been afraid of falling, deathly frightened of great heights and holes and wells and all the very deep places of the world. Always she has watched so carefully where fell her feet, and never was she one to climb trees or walls, not this cautious fairie girl. When her bolder sisters went to bathe where the brook grows slow and wide beneath drooping willow boughs, she would venture no farther in than the depth of her ankles. They laughed and taunted her with impromptu fictions of careless, drowning children and hungry snapping-turtle jaws and also an enormous catfish that might swallow up any careless fairie girl in a single lazy gulp of its bristling, barbeled lips. And you only looked beneath a stone, the Queen sneers, reminding her that she is never precisely alone here, that her thoughts are never only her thoughts. Your own mother, she told you that your sisters were but wicked liars, and there was no monster catfish or snapping turtles waiting in the brook. But, she said, do not go turning over stones. And the fairie girl would shut her violet eyes now, but knows too well she’d still hear that voice, which is like unto the splintering of granite by frost, the ceaseless tunneling noises of earthworms and moles, the crack of a goblin’s whip in air that has never once seen the sky. Don’t you go looking under stones, the Queen says again and smiles to show off a hundred rusted-needle teeth. In particular, said she—your poor, unheeded mother—beware the great flat stones that lie in the oldest groves, scabbed over with lichens and streaked with the glinting trails of slugs, the flat stones that smell of salamanders and moss, for these are sometimes doorways, child. The Queen laughs, and her laughter is so terrible that the fairie girl cringes and does close her eyes. Disobedient urchin, you knew better. “I was following the green lizard,” she whispers, as though this might be some saving defence or extenuation, as if the Queen of Decay has not already heard it from her countless times before. “The green lizard crawled beneath the stone—” —which you knew damn well not to lift and look beneath. So, here now. Stop your whimpering. You were warned; you knew better. “I wanted only to find the lizard again. I never meant to—” You only came knocking at my door, dear sweet thing. I only answered and showed you in. You’d have done well not to entrust your well-being to a fascination with such lowly, squamous things—serpents and lizards and the dirty, clutching feet of birds. The fairie girl opens her eyes again, trying not to cry, because she almost always cries, and her tears and sobs so delight the Queen. She sees herself staring back with watery sapphire eyes, reflected in the many mirrors hanging from these filthy walls, mirrors which her captor ordered hung all about the chamber so that the girl might also witness the stages of her gradual dissolution. The fracturing and wearing away of her glamour, even as water etches at the most indurate stone. Her eyes have not yet lost their colour, but they have lost their inner light. In the main, her skin is still the uncorrupted white of fresh milk caught inside a milkmaid’s pail, but there are ugly, parchment splotches that have begun to spread across her face and arms and chest. And her hair, once so full and luminous, has grown flat and devoid of lustre, without the sympathetic light of sun or moon, wilting even as her soul wilts. She is drinking me, the girl thinks, and Yes, the Queen replies. I have poured you into my silver cup, and I am drinking you down, mouthful by mouthful. You have a disagreeable taste upon my tongue, but it is a sacred duty, to consume anything so frail as you. I choke you down, lest your treacle and the radiance of you should spread and spoil the murk. And all around them the walls, wherever there are not mirrors, twitch and titter, and fat trolls and raw-boned redcaps with phosphorescent skins and hungry, bulging eyes watch the depredations of their queen. This is rare sport, and the Queen is not so miserly or selfish that she will not share the spectacle with her subjects. See, she says, but do not touch. Her flesh is deadly as cold iron to the likes of us. I alone have the strength to lay my hands upon so foul a being and live. In the mirrors hung on bits of root and bone and the fishhook mandibles of beetles, the fairie girl sits on the black bed far below the forest floor, and the Queen of Decay moves across her like an eclipse of the sun. Do not go looking under stones, your poor mother said. I have heard from the pill bugs and termites that she is a wise woman. You’d have done well to heed her good advices. It is hard for the girl to see the Queen, for she is mostly fashioned of some viscous, shapeless substance that is not quite flesh, but always there is the dim impression of leathery wings, as if from some immense bat, and wherever the Queen brushes against the girl, there is the sensation of touching, or being touched by, matted fur and the blasted bark of dying, lightning-struck trees. The day she chased the quick green lizard through the forest, she was still whole, her maidenhead unbroken, the task of her deflowering promised—before her birth—to a nobleman, an elfin duke who held his court on the shores of a sparkling lake and was long owed a considerable debt by her father. The marriage would settle that account. Would have settled that account, for the Queen took the fairie girl’s virginity almost at once. We’ll have none of that here, she said, slipping a sickle thumb between the girl’s pale thighs and pricking at her sex. Only as much pain as she’d always expected, and hardly any blood, but the certain knowledge, too, that she had been undone, ruined, despoiled, and if ever she found some secret stairway leading up and out of the Queen’s thin lands, her escape would only bring shame to her family. Better a daughter lost and dead and picked clean by the ants and crows, the Queen of Decay told her, than one who’s given herself to me, who’s soiled my bedclothes with her body’s juices and played my demimondaine. “Nothing was given,” replied the fairie girl, and how long ago was that? A month? A season? Only a single night? There is no time in the land of the Queen of Decay. There is no need of time when despair would serve so well as the past and all possible futures. Mark it all the present and be done. What next? the Queen asks, mocking the laws of her own timeless realm. Have you been lying here, child, asking yourself, what is next in store for me? “No,” said the girl, refusing to admit the tr
uth aloud, even if the Queen could hear it perfectly well unspoken. “I do not dwell on it,” the girl lies. “You will do as you will, and neither my fear nor anticipation will stay your hand or teach you mercy.” And then the Queen swelled and rose up around her like a glistening, alveolate wreath of ink and sealing wax, and the spectators clinging to the walls or looking out from their nooks and corners held their breath, collectively not breathing as though in that moment they had become a single beast divided into many bodies. I only followed the lizard, the fairie girl thinks, trying not to hear the wet and stretching noises leaking from the Queen’s distorted form, trying not to think what will happen one second later, or two seconds after that. It was so pretty in the morning sun. It’s scales were a rainbow fashioned all of shades of green, a thousand shades of green, and she bows her head and strains to recall the living warmth of sunlight on her face. Show me your eyes, child, growls the Queen of Decay. We will not do this thing halfway. And, reminded now of details she’d misplaced, the girl replies, “Its eyes were like faraway red stars twinkling in its skull. I’d never before seen such a lizard—verdant, iridian, gazing out at me with crimson eyes.” The moldy air trapped within the chamber seems to shudder then, and the encircling mesh that the Unseelie queen has made of herself draws tighter about the girl from the bright lands that are ever crushing down upon those who must dwell below. I have not taken everything, she says. Not yet. We’ve hardly begun, and the fairie girl remembers that she is not chasing a green lizard with red eyes on a summer’s morning, that she has finally fallen into that abyss—the razor jaws of a granddaddy snapping turtle half buried in silt and waterlogged poplar leaves, or the gullet of a catfish that has waited long years in the mud and gloom to make a meal of her. There is always farther to fall. This pool has no bottom. She will sink until she at last forgets herself, and still she will go on sinking. She glances up into the void that the Queen of Decay has not bothered to cover with a mask, and something which has hidden itself under the black bed begins to snicker loudly. You are mine, daughter, says the Queen. And a daughter of loam and toadstools should not go about so gaudily attired. It is indecent, and, with that, her claws move swiftly and snip away the girl’s beautiful dragonfly wings. They slip from off her shoulder, falling from ragged stumps to lie dead upon the spider sheets. “My wings,” the girl whispers, unsurprised and yet also disbelieving, this new violation and its attendant hurt seeming hardly more real than the bad dreams she woke from some short time ago (if there were time here). “You’ve taken my wings from me,” and she reaches for them, meaning to hide them away beneath a pillow or within the folds of her stained and tattered shift before any greater harm is done to those delicate, papery mosaics. But the Queen, of course, knows the girl’s will and is far faster than she; the amputated wings are snatched up by clicking, chitinous appendages which sprout suddenly from this or that dank and fleshy recess, then ferried quickly to the sucking void where a face should be. The Queen of Decay devours the fairie girl’s wings in an instant, less than half an instant. And there below the leaf-litter clouds and the rustling, grub-haunted roof of this thin, thin world, the Queen, unsated, draws tight the quivering folds of her honeycomb skin and falls upon the screaming, stolen child. . .