The Weird

by Ann

  ‘Help yourself. You bring bad news, Gilson.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Gilson said, ‘but there it is.’

  ‘Goddam!’ Reeves said loudly. ‘Oh, goddam!’ He seemed to be about to burst into tears. ‘That’ll be the end for me, you know? They won’t even let me in. A damn graduate student? In psychology? I won’t get near the place. Oh, damn it to hell!’ he glared at Gilson in rage and despair.

  The sun had risen, bringing gray light to the clearing and brilliance to the house across the interface. There was no sound but the regular bang of the ice cube machine. The three men stared quietly at the house. Gilson drank his coffee.

  ‘There’s Martha,’ Reeves said. ‘Up there.’ A small face had appeared between the curtains of a second-floor window, and bright blue eyes were surveying the morning. ‘She does that every day,’ Reeves said. ‘Sits there and watches the birds and squirrels until I guess they call her for breakfast.’ They stood and watched the little girl, who was looking at something that lay beyond the scope of their window on her world, something that would have been to their rear had the worlds been the same. Gilson almost found himself turning around to see what it was that she stared at. Reeves apparently had the same impulse. ‘What’s she looking at, do you think?’ he said. ‘It’s not necessarily forest, like now. I think this was logged out earlier. Maybe a meadow? Cattle or horses on it? Man, what I’d give to be there and see what it is.’

  Krantz looked at his watch and said, ‘We’d better go over there. Just a few minutes, now.’

  They moved to where the machine was monotonously batting ice cubes into the interface. A soldier with a stopwatch sat beside it, behind a table bearing a formidable chronometer and a sheaf of charts. He said, ‘Two minutes, Dr. Krantz.’

  Krantz said to Gilson, ‘Just keep your eye on the ice cubes. You can’t miss it when it happens.’ Gilson watched the machine, mildly amused by the rhythm of its homely sounds: plink – a cube drops; whuff – the paddle sweeps around; bang – paddle strikes ice cube. And then a flat trajectory to the interface, where the small orange missile abruptly vanishes. A second later, another. Then another.

  ‘Five seconds,’ the soldier called. ‘Four. Three. Two. One. Now.’

  His timing was off by a second; the ice cube disappeared like its predecessors. But the next one continued its flight and dropped onto the lawn, where it lay glistening. It was really a fact, then, thought Gilson. Time travel for ice cubes.

  Suddenly behind him there was an incomprehensible shout from Krantz and another from Reeves, and then a loud, clear, and anguished, ‘Reeves, no!’ from Krantz. Gilson heard a thud of running feet and caught a flash of swift movement at the edge of his vision. He whirled in time to see Reeves’ gangling figure hurtle past, plunge through the interface, and land sprawling on the lawn. Krantz said, violently, ‘Fool!’ An ice cube shot through and landed near Reeves. The machine banged again; an ice cube flew out and vanished. The five seconds of accessibility were over.

  Reeves raised his head and stared for a moment at the grass on which he lay. He shifted his gaze to the house. He rose slowly to his feet, wearing a bemused expression. A grin came slowly over his face, then, and the men watching from the other side could almost read his thoughts: Well, I’ll be damned. I made it. I’m really here.

  Krantz was babbling uncontrollably. ‘We’re still here, Gilson, we’re still here, we still exist, everything seems the same. Maybe he didn’t change things much, maybe the future is fixed and he didn’t change anything at all. I was afraid of this, of something like this. Ever since you came out here, he’s been –’

  Gilson did not hear him. He was staring with shock and disbelief at the child in the window, trying to comprehend what he saw and did not believe he was seeing. Her behavior was wrong, it was very, very wrong. A man had materialized on her lawn, suddenly, out of thin air, on a sunny morning, and she had evinced no surprise or amazement or fear. Instead she had smiled – instantly, spontaneously, a smile that broadened and broadened until it seemed to split the lower half of her face, a smile that showed too many teeth, a smile fixed and incongruous and terrible below her bright blue eyes. Gilson felt his stomach knot; he realized that he was dreadfully afraid.

  The face abruptly disappeared from the window; a few seconds later the front door flew open and the little girl rushed through the doorway, making for Reeves with furious speed, moving in a curious, scuttling run. When she was a few feet away, she leaped at him, with the agility and eye-dazzling quickness of a flea. Reeves’ eyes had just begun to take on a puzzled look when the powerful little teeth tore out his throat.

  She dropped away from him and sprang back. A geyser of bright blood erupted from the ragged hole in his neck. He looked at it in stupefaction for a long moment, then brought up his hands to cover the wound; the blood boiled through his fingers and ran down his forearms. He sank gently to his knees, staring at the little girl with wide astonishment. He rocked, shivered, and pitched forward on his face.

  She watched with eyes as cold as a reptile’s, the terrible smile still on her face. She was naked, and it seemed to Gilson that there was something wrong with her torso, as well as with her mouth. She turned and appeared to shout toward the house.

  In a moment they all came rushing out, mother, father, little boy, and granny, all naked, all undergoing that hideous transformation of the mouth. Without pause or diminution of speed they scuttled to the body, crouched around it, and frenziedly tore off its clothes. Then, squatting on the lawn in the morning sunshine, the fine little family began horribly to feed.

  Krantz’s babbling had changed its tenor: ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us…’ The soldier with the stopwatch was noisily sick. Someone emptied a clip of a machine pistol into the interface, and the colonel cursed luridly. When Gilson could no longer bear to watch the grisly feast, he looked away and found himself staring at the dog, which sat happily on the porch, thumping its tail.

  ‘By God, it just can’t be!’ Krantz burst out. ‘It would be in the histories, in the newspapers, if there’d been people like that here. My God, something like that couldn’t be forgotten!’

  ‘Oh, don’t talk like a fool!’ Gilson said angrily. ‘That’s not the past. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not the past. Can’t be. It’s – I don’t know – someplace else. Some other – dimension? Universe? One of those theories. Alternate worlds, worlds of If, probability worlds, whatever you call ’em. They’re in the present time, all right, that filth over there. Culvergast’s damn spell holed through to one of those parallels. Got to be something like that. And, my god, what the hell was its history to produce those? They’re not human, Krantz, no way human, whatever they look like. “Jolly bicycle tours.” How wrong can you be?’

  It ended at last. The family lay on the grass with distended bellies, covered with blood and grease, their eyelids heavy in repletion. The two little ones fell asleep. The large male appeared to be deep in thought. After a time he rose, gathered up Reeves’ clothes, and examined them carefully. Then he woke the small female and apparently questioned her at some length. She gestured, pointed, and pantomimed Reeves’ headlong arrival. He stared thoughtfully at the place where Reeves had materialized, and for a moment it seemed to Gilson that the pitiless eyes were glaring directly into his. He turned, walked slowly and reflectively to the house, and went inside.

  It was silent in the clearing except for the thump of the machine. Krantz began to weep, and the colonel to swear in a monotone. The soldiers seemed dazed. And we’re all afraid, Gilson thought. Scared to death.

  On the lawn they were enacting a grotesque parody of making things tidy after a picnic. The small ones had brought a basket and, under the meticulous supervision of the adult females, went about gathering up the debris of their feeding. One of them tossed a bone to the dog, and the timekeeper vomited again. When the lawn was once again immaculate, they carried off the basket to the rear, and the adults returned to the house. A moment later the male eme
rged, now dressed in a white linen suit. He carried a book.

  ‘A Bible,’ said Krantz in amazement. ‘It’s a Bible.’

  ‘Not a Bible,’ Gilson said. ‘There’s no way those – things could have Bibles. Something else. Got to be.’

  It looked like a Bible; its binding was limp black leather, and when the male began to leaf through it, evidently in search of a particular passage, they could see that the paper was the thin, tough paper Bibles are printed on. He found his page and began, as it appeared to Gilson, to read aloud in a declamatory manner, mouthing the words.

  ‘What the hell do you suppose he’s up to?’ Gilson said. He was still speaking when the window ceased to exist.

  House and lawn and white-suited declaimer vanished. Gilson caught a swift glimpse of trees across the clearing, hidden until now by the window, and of a broad pit between him and the trees. Then he was knocked off his feet by a blast of wind, and the air was full of dust and flying trash and the wind’s howl. The wind stopped, as suddenly as it had come, and there was a patter of falling small objects that had momentarily been wind-borne. The site of the house was entirely obscured by an eddying cloud of dust.

  The dust settled slowly. Where the window had been there was a great hole in the ground, a perfectly square hole a hundred feet across and perhaps ten feet deep, its bottom as flat as a table. Gilson’s glimpse of it before the wind had rushed in to fill the vacuum had shown the sides to be as smooth and straight as if sliced through cheese with a sharp knife; but now small landslides were occurring all around the perimeter, as topsoil and gravel caved and slid to the bottom, and the edges were becoming ragged and irregular.

  Gilson and Krantz slowly rose to their feet. ‘And that seems to be that,’ Gilson said. ‘It was here and now it’s gone. But where’s the prefab? Where’s Culvergast?’

  ‘God knows,’ Krantz said. He was not being irreverent. ‘But I think he’s gone for good. And at least he’s not where those things are.’

  ‘What are they, do you think?’

  ‘As you said, certainly not human. Less human than a spider or an oyster. But, Gilson, the way they look and dress, that house–’

  ‘If there’s an infinite number of possible worlds, then every possible sort of world will exist.’

  Krantz looked doubtful. ‘Yes, well, perhaps. We don’t know anything, do we?’ He was silent for a moment. ‘Those things were pretty frightening, Gilson. It didn’t take even a fraction of a second for her to react to Reeves. She knew instantly that he was alien, and she moved instantly to destroy him. And that’s a baby one. I think maybe we can feel safer with the window gone.’

  ‘Amen to that. What do you think happened to it?’

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? They know how to use the energies Culvergast was blundering around with. The book – it has to be a book of spells. They must have a science of it – tried-and-true stuff, part of their received wisdom. That thing used the book like a routine everyday tool. After it got over the excitement of its big feed, it didn’t need more than twenty minutes to figure out how Reeves got there, and what to do about it. It just got its book of spells, picked the one it needed (I’d like to see the index of that book) and said the words. Poof! Window gone and Culvergast stranded, God knows where.’

  ‘It’s possible, I guess. Hell, maybe even likely. You’re right, we don’t really know a thing about all this.’

  Krantz suddenly looked frightened. ‘Gilson, what if – look. If it was that easy for him to cancel out the window, if he has that kind of control of telekinetic power, what’s to prevent him from getting a window on us? Maybe they’re watching us now, the way we were watching them. They know we’re here, now. What kind of ideas might they get? Maybe they need meat. Maybe they – my God.’

  ‘No,’ Gilson said. ‘Impossible. It was pure, blind chance that located the window in that world. Culvergast had no more idea what he was doing than a chimp at a computer console does. If the Possible-Worlds Theory is the explanation of this thing, then the world he hit is one of an infinite number. Even if the things over there do know how to make these windows, the odds are infinite against their finding us. That is to say, it’s impossible.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Krantz said, gratefully. ‘Of course. They could try forever and never find us. Even if they wanted to.’ He thought for a moment. ‘And I think they do want to. It was pure reflex, their destroying Reeves, as involuntary as a knee jerk, by the look of it. Now that they know we’re here, they’ll have to try to get at us; if I’ve sized them up right, it wouldn’t be possible for them to do anything else.’

  Gilson remembered the eyes. ‘I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,’ he said. ‘But now we both better–’

  ‘Dr. Krantz!’ someone screamed. ‘Dr. Krantz!’ There was absolute terror in the voice.

  The two men spun around. The soldier with the stopwatch was pointing with a trembling hand. As they looked, something white materialized in the air above the rim of the pit and sailed out and downward to land beside a similar object already lying on the ground. Another came; then another, and another. Five in all, scattered over an area perhaps a yard square.

  ‘It’s bones!’ Krantz said. ‘Oh, my God, Gilson, it’s bones!’ His voice shuddered on the edge of hysteria. Gilson said, ‘Stop it, now. Stop it! Come on!’ They ran to the spot. The soldier was already there, squatting, his face made strange by nausea and terror. ‘That one,’ he said, pointing. ‘That one there. That’s the one they threw to the dog. You can see the teeth marks. Oh, Jesus. It’s the one they threw to the dog.’

  They’ve already made a window, then, Gilson thought. They must know a lot about these matters, to have done it so quickly. And they’re watching us now. But why the bones? To warn us off? Or just a test? But if a test, then still why the bones? Why not a pebble – or an ice cube? To gauge our reactions, perhaps. To see what we’ll do.

  And what will we do? How do we protect ourselves against this? If it is in the nature of these creatures to cooperate among themselves, the fine little family will no doubt lose no time in spreading the word over their whole world, so that one of these days we’ll find that a million million of them have leaped simultaneously through such windows all over the earth, suddenly materializing like a cloud of huge, carnivorous locusts, swarming in to feed with that insensate voracity of theirs until they have left the planet a desert of bones. Is there any protection against that?

  Krantz had been thinking along the same track. He said, shakily, ‘We’re in a spot, Gilson, but we’ve got one little thing on our side. We know when the damn thing opens up, we’ve got it timed exactly. Washington will have to go all out, warn the whole world, do it through the U.N. or something. We know right down to the second when the window can be penetrated. We set up a warning system, every community on earth blows a whistle or rings a bell when it’s time. Bell rings, everybody grabs a weapon and stands ready. If the things haven’t come in five seconds, bell rings again, and everybody goes about his business until time for the next opening. It could work, Gilson, but we’ve got to work fast. In fifteen hours and, uh, a couple of minutes it’ll be open again.’

  Fifteen hours and a couple of minutes, Gilson thought, then five seconds of awful vulnerability, and then fifteen hours and twenty minutes of safety before terror arrives again. And so on for – how long? Presumably until the things come, which might be never (who knew how their minds worked?), or until Culvergast’s accident could be duplicated, which, again, might be never. He questioned whether human beings could exist under those conditions without going mad; it was doubtful if the psyche could cohere when its sole foreseeable future was an interminable roller coaster down into long valleys of terror and suspense and thence violently up to brief peaks of relief. Will a mind continue to function when its only alternatives are ghastly death or unbearable tension endlessly protracted? Is there any way, Gilson asked himself, that the race can live with the knowledge that it has no assured future beyond the next fi
fteen hours and twenty minutes?

  And then he saw, hopelessly and with despair, that it was not fifteen hours and twenty minutes, that it was not even one hour, that it was no time at all. This window was not, it seemed, intermittent. Materializing out of the air was a confusion of bones, and rent clothing, a flurry of contemptuously flung garbage that clattered to the ground and lay there in an untidy heap, noisome and foreboding.

  The Brood

  Ramsey Campbell

  Ramsey Campbell (1946–) is an award-winning horror-fiction author from Liverpool, England, mentored by Lovecraft protégé August Derleth. In his stories, largely evoking working- or middle-class settings, Campbell manages to update the weird tale and apply his keen ability to evoke both subtle supernatural horror and portraits of modern life in England. One of the preeminent writers of his generation, Campbell has also edited influential supernatural fiction anthologies; three of his top ten favorite stories are reprinted in The Weird (‘The Willows’ by Blackwood, ‘Smoke Ghost’ by Leiber and ‘The Hospice’ by Aickman). ‘The Brood’ (1980), as noted by the anthologist when first published, ‘has the cumulative effect of a nightmare from which one cannot awake’.

  He’d had an almost unbearable day. As he walked home his self-control still oppressed him, like rusty armour. Climbing the stairs, he tore open his mail: a glossy pamphlet from a binoculars firm, a humbler folder from the Wild Life Preservation Society. Irritably he threw them on the bed and sat by the window, to relax.

  It was autumn. Night had begun to cramp the days. Beneath golden trees, a procession of cars advanced along Princes Avenue, as though to a funeral; crowds hurried home. The incessant anonymous parade, dwarfed by three stories, depressed him. Faces like these vague twilit miniatures – selfishly ingrown, convinced that nothing was their fault – brought their pets to his office.