The Weird

by Ann

  ‘There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.’

  ‘Now, goddamn it,’ Darren says, and the coin slips so easily through her fingers.

  ‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance…’

  She watches it sink, taking a living part of her down with it, drowning some speck of her soul. Because it isn’t only the woman on the rock that holds back the sea; it’s all of them, the crows, and now she’s burned as black as the rest, scorched feathers and strangled hearts, falling from the sun into the greedy maelstrom.

  And the moon can see her now.

  ‘I told them you were strong,’ Darren whispers, proud of her, and he wipes the tears from her face. The crows are dancing on the boardwalk, circling them, clomp clomp clomp, while the woman on the rock slips silently away into a stinging anemone-choked crevice on her island.

  ‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?’

  Tara wakes up shivering, lying in the grass beneath a wide gray sky spitting cold raindrops down at her, the wind and the roar of the breakers in her ears. She lies there for a few more minutes, remembering what she can about the night before. She has no recollection of making her way back up the stairs from the sea cave, from the phosphorescent pool below the house. No memory of leaving the house, either, but here she is, staring up at the leaden sky and the faint glow where the sun is hiding itself safe behind the clouds.

  Someone’s left her purse nearby, Darren or some other thoughtful crow, and she reaches for it, sitting up in the wet grass, staring back towards the house. Those walls and shuttered windows, the spires and gables, no less severe for this wounded daylight; more so, perhaps. The house wears the bitter face of anything that has to keep such secrets in its bowels, that has to hide the world’s shame beneath its floors. The house is dark, all the other cars have gone, and there’s no sign of the one hundred and eleven jack-o’-lanterns.

  She stands and looks out to sea for a moment, watching a handful of white birds buffeted by the gales and whitecaps. Next year, she thinks, next year she’ll be here a week before Halloween to help carve the lighthouse faces, and next year she’ll know to dress in black. She’ll know to drop the silver coin quickly and turn quickly away.

  One of the gulls dives suddenly and pulls something dark and wriggling from the seething, storm-tossed ocean. Tara looks away, wiping the rain from her eyes, rain that could be tears, and wet bits of grass from her skirt. And then she begins the walk that will carry her past the house and down the sandy road to her car.

  The God of Dark Laughter

  Michael Chabon

  Michael Chabon (1963–) is a celebrated American writer who has written in several different genres, although best-known for novels of mainstream realism with elements of fantasy. His novels include Wonder Boys (1995), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and the alternative history mystery The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007). Chabon has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Hugo Award, Sidewise Award, and the Nebula Award. A fan of the weird tale, Chabon has written several stories in that mode including ‘The God of Dark Laughter,’ which contains references to Lovecraft and a nod to the work of Edgar Allan Poe. The story was first published in 2001 in the New Yorker.

  Thirteen days after the Entwhistle-Ealing Bros. circus left Ashtown, beating a long retreat toward its winter headquarters in Peru, Indiana, two boys out hunting squirrels in the woods along Portwine Road stumbled on a body that was dressed in a mad suit of purple and orange velour. They found it at the end of a muddy strip of gravel that began, five miles to the west, as Yuggogheny County Road 22A. Another half mile farther to the east and it would have been left to my colleagues over in Fayette County to puzzle out the question of who had shot the man and skinned his head from chin to crown and clavicle to clavicle, taking ears, eyelids, lips, and scalp in a single grisly flap, like the cupped husk of a peeled orange. My name is Edward D. Satterlee, and for the last twelve years I have faithfully served Yuggogheny County as its district attorney, in cases that have all too often run to the outrageous and bizarre. I make the following report in no confidence that it, or I, will be believed, and beg the reader to consider this, at least in part, my letter of resignation.

  The boys who found the body were themselves fresh from several hours’ worth of bloody amusement with long knives and dead squirrels, and at first the investigating officers took them for the perpetrators of the crime. There was blood on the boys’ cuffs, their shirttails, and the bills of their gray twill caps. But the county detectives and I quickly moved beyond Joey Matuszak and Frankie Corro. For all their familiarity with gristle and sinew and the bright-purple discovered interior of a body, the boys had come into the station looking pale and bewildered, and we found ample evidence at the crime scene of their having lost the contents of their stomachs when confronted with the corpse.

  Now, I have every intention of setting down the facts of this case as I understand and experienced them, without fear of the reader’s doubting them (or my own sanity), but I see no point in mentioning any further anatomical details of the crime, except to say that our coroner, Dr. Sauer, though he labored at the problem with a sad fervor, was hard put to establish conclusively that the victim had been dead before his killer went to work on him with a very long, very sharp knife.

  The dead man, as I have already mentioned, was attired in a curious suit – the trousers and jacket of threadbare purple velour, the waistcoat bright orange, the whole thing patched with outsized squares of fabric cut from a variety of loudly clashing plaids. It was on account of the patches, along with the victim’s cracked and split-soled shoes and a certain undeniable shabbiness in the stuff of the suit, that the primary detective – a man not apt to see deeper than the outermost wrapper of the world (we do not attract, I must confess, the finest police talent in this doleful little corner of western Pennsylvania) – had already figured the victim for a vagrant, albeit one with extraordinarily big feet.

  ‘Those cannot possibly be his real shoes, Ganz, you idiot,’ I gently suggested. The call, patched through to my boarding house from that gruesome clearing in the woods, had interrupted my supper, which by a grim coincidence had been a Brunswick stew (the specialty of my Virginia-born landlady) of pork and squirrel. ‘They’re supposed to make you laugh.’

  ‘They are pretty funny,’ said Ganz. ‘Come to think of it.’ Detective John Ganz was a large-boned fellow, upholstered in a layer of ruddy flesh. He breathed through his mouth, and walked with a tall man’s defeated stoop, and five times a day he took out his comb and ritually plastered his thinning blond hair to the top of his head with a dime-size dab of Tres Flores.

  When I arrived at the clearing, having abandoned my solitary dinner, I found the corpse lying just as the young hunters had come upon it, supine, arms thrown up and to either side of the flayed face in a startled attitude that fuelled the hopes of poor Dr. Sauer that the victim’s death by gunshot had preceded his mutilation. Ganz or one of the other investigators had kindly thrown a chamois cloth over the vandalized head. I took enough of a peek beneath it to provide me with everything that I or the reader could possibly need to know about the condition of the head – I will never forget the sight of that monstrous, fleshless grin – and to remark the dead man’s unusual choice of cravat. It was a giant, floppy bow tie, white with orange and purple polka dots.

  ‘Damn you, Ganz,’ I said, though I was not in truth addressing the poor fellow, who, I knew, would not be able to answer my question anytime soon. ‘What’s a dead clown doing in my woods?’

  We found no wallet on the corpse, nor any kind of identifying objects. My men, along with the better part of the Ashtown Police Department, went over and over the woods east of town, hourly widening the radius of their search. That day, when not attending to my other duties (I was then in the process of breaking up the Dushnyk cigarette-smuggling ring), I managed to work my way back along a chain of inferences to the Entwh
istle-Ealing Bros. Circus, which, as I eventually recalled, had recently stayed on the eastern outskirts of Ashtown, at the fringe of the woods where the body was found.

  The following day, I succeeded in reaching the circus’s general manager, a man named Onheuser, at their winter headquarters in Peru. He informed me over the phone that the company had left Pennsylvania and was now en route to Peru, and I asked him if he had received any reports from the road manager of a clown’s having suddenly gone missing.

  ‘Missing?’ he said. I wished that I could see his face, for I thought I heard the flatted note of something false in his tone. Perhaps he was merely nervous about talking to a county district attorney. The Entwhistle-Ealing Bros. Circus was a mangy affair, by all accounts, and probably no stranger to pursuit by officers of the court. ‘Why, I don’t believe so, no.’

  I explained to him that a man who gave every indication of having once been a circus clown had turned up dead in a pinewood outside Ashtown, Pennsylvania.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Onheuser said. ‘I truly hope he wasn’t one of mine, Mr. Satterlee.’

  ‘Is it possible you might have left one of your clowns behind, Mr. Onheuser?’

  ‘Clowns are special people,’ Onheuser replied, sounding a touch on the defensive. ‘They love their work, but sometimes it can get to be a little, well, too much for them.’ It developed that Mr. Onheuser had, in his younger days, performed as a clown, under the name of Mr. Wingo, in the circus of which he was now the general manager. ‘It’s not unusual for a clown to drop out for a little while, cool his heels, you know, in some town where he can get a few months of well-earned rest. It isn’t common, I wouldn’t say, but it’s not unusual. I will wire my road manager – they’re in Canton, Ohio – and see what I can find out.’

  I gathered, reading between the lines, that clowns were high-strung types, and not above going off on the occasional bender. This poor fellow had probably jumped ship here two weeks ago, holing up somewhere with a case of rye, only to run afoul of a very nasty person, possibly one who harbored no great love of clowns. In fact, I had an odd feeling, nothing more than a hunch, really, that the ordinary citizens of Ashtown and its environs were safe, even though the killer was still at large. Once more, I picked up a slip of paper that I had tucked into my desk blotter that morning. It was something that Dr. Sauer had clipped from his files and passed along to me. Coulrophobia: morbid, irrational fear of or aversion to clowns.

  ‘Er, listen, Mr. Satterlee,’ Onheuser went on. ‘I hope you won’t mind my asking. That is, I hope it’s not a, well, a confidential police matter, or something of the sort. But I know that when I do get through to them, out in Canton, they’re going to want to know.’

  I guessed, somehow, what he was about to ask me. I could hear the prickling fear behind his curiosity, the note of dread in his voice. I waited him out.

  ‘Did they – was there any – how did he die?’

  ‘He was shot,’ I said, for the moment supplying only the least interesting part of the answer, tugging on that loose thread of fear. ‘In the head.’

  ‘And there was…forgive me. No…no harm done? To the body? Other than the gunshot wound, I mean to say.’

  ‘Well, yes, his head was rather savagely mutilated,’ I said brightly. ‘Is that what you mean to say?’

  ‘Ah! No, no, I don’t –’

  ‘The killer or killers removed all the skin from the cranium. It was very skillfully done. Now, suppose you tell me what you know about it.’

  There was another pause, and a stream of agitated electrons burbled along between us.

  ‘I don’t know anything, Mr. District Attorney.

  I’m sorry. I really must go now. I’ll wire you when I have some –’

  The line went dead. He was so keen to hang up on me that he could not even wait to finish his sentence. I got up and went to the shelf where, in recent months, I had taken to keeping a bottle of whiskey tucked behind my bust of Daniel Webster. Carrying the bottle and a dusty glass back to my desk, I sat down and tried to reconcile myself to the thought that I was confronted – not, alas, for the first time in my tenure as chief law-enforcement officer of Yuggogheny County – with a crime whose explanation was going to involve not the usual amalgam of stupidity, meanness, and singularly poor judgment but the incalculable intentions of a being who was genuinely evil. What disheartened me was not that I viewed a crime committed out of the promptings of an evil nature as inherently less liable to solution than the misdeeds of the foolish, the unlucky, or the habitually cruel. On the contrary, evil often expresses itself through refreshingly discernible patterns, through schedules and syllogisms. But the presence of evil, once scented, tends to bring out all that is most irrational and uncontrollable in the public imagination. It is a catalyst for pea-brained theories, gimcrack scholarship, and the credulous cosmologies of hysteria.

  At that moment, there was a knock on the door to my office, and Detective Ganz came in. At one time I would have tried to hide the glass of whiskey, behind the typewriter or the photo of my wife and son, but now it did not seem to be worth the effort. I was not fooling anyone. Ganz took note of the glass in my hand with a raised eyebrow and a schoolmarmish pursing of his lips.

  ‘Well?’ I said. There had been a brief period, following my son’s death and the subsequent suicide of my dear wife, Mary, when I had indulged the pitying regard of my staff. I now found that I regretted having shown such weakness. ‘What is it, then? Has something turned up?’

  ‘A cave,’ Ganz said. ‘The poor bastard was living in a cave.’

  The range of low hills and hollows separating lower Yuggogheny from Fayette County is rotten with caves. For many years, when I was a boy, a man named Colonel Earnshawe operated penny tours of the iridescent organ pipes and jagged stone teeth of Neighborsburg Caverns, before they collapsed in the mysterious earthquake of 1919, killing the Colonel and his sister Irene, and putting to rest many strange rumors about that eccentric old pair. My childhood friends and I, ranging in the woods, would from time to time come upon the root-choked mouth of a cave exhaling its cool plutonic breath, and dare one another to leave the sunshine and enter that world of shadow – that entrance, as it always seemed to me, to the legendary past itself, where the bones of Indians and Frenchmen might lie moldering. It was in one of these anterooms of buried history that the beam of a flashlight, wielded by a deputy sheriff from Plunkettsburg, had struck the silvery lip of a can of pork and beans. Calling to his companions, the deputy plunged through a curtain of spiderweb and found himself in the parlor, bedroom, and kitchen of the dead man. There were some cans of chili and hash, a Primus stove, a lantern, a bedroll, a mess kit, and an old Colt revolver, Army issue, loaded and apparently not fired for some time. And there were also books – a Scout guide to roughing it, a collected Blake, and a couple of odd texts, elderly and tattered: one in German called ‘Über das Finstere Lachen,’ by a man named Friedrich von Junzt, which appeared to be religious or philosophical in nature, and one a small volume bound in black leather and printed in no alphabet known to me, the letters sinuous and furred with wild diacritical marks.

  ‘Pretty heavy reading for a clown,’ Ganz said.

  ‘It’s not all rubber chickens and hosing each other down with seltzer bottles, Jack.’

  ‘Oh, no?’

  ‘No, sir. Clowns have unsuspected depths.’

  ‘I’m starting to get that impression, sir.’

  Propped against the straightest wall of the cave, just beside the lantern, there was a large mirror, still bearing the bent clasps and sheared bolts that had once, I inferred, held it to the wall of a filling-station men’s room. At its foot was the item that had earlier confirmed to Detective Ganz – and now confirmed to me as I went to inspect it – the recent habitation of the cave by a painted circus clown: a large, padlocked wooden makeup kit, of heavy and rather elaborate construction. I directed Ganz to send for a Pittsburgh criminalist who had served us with discretion in the horrific Primm case,
reminding him that nothing must be touched until this Mr. Espy and his black bag of dusts and luminous powders arrived.

  The air in the cave had a sharp, briny tinge; beneath it there was a stale animal musk that reminded me, absurdly, of the smell inside a circus tent.

  ‘Why was he living in a cave?’ I said to Ganz. ‘We have a perfectly nice hotel in town.’

  ‘Maybe he was broke.’

  ‘Or maybe he thought that a hotel was the first place they would look for him.’

  Ganz looked confused, and a little annoyed, as if he thought I were being deliberately mysterious.

  ‘Who was looking for him?’

  ‘I don’t know, Detective. Maybe no one. I’m just thinking out loud.’

  Impatience marred Ganz’s fair, bland features. He could tell that I was in the grip of a hunch, and hunches were always among the first considerations ruled out by the procedural practices of Detective John Ganz. My hunches had, admittedly, an uneven record. In the Primm business, one had very nearly got both Ganz and me killed. As for the wayward hunch about my mother’s old crony Thaddeus Craven and the strength of his will to quit drinking – I suppose I shall regret indulging that one for the rest of my life.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me, Jack…’ I said. ‘I’m having a bit of a hard time with the stench in here.’

  ‘I was thinking he might have been keeping a pig.’ Ganz inclined his head to one side and gave an empirical sniff. ‘It smells like pig to me.’

  I covered my mouth and hurried outside into the cool, dank pinewood. I gathered in great lungfuls of air. The nausea passed, and I filled my pipe, walking up and down outside the mouth of the cave and trying to connect this new discovery to my talk with the circus man, Onheuser. Clearly, he had suspected that this clown might have met with a grisly end. Not only that, he had known that his fellow circus people would fear the very same thing – as if there were some coulrophobic madman with a knife who was as much a part of circus lore as the prohibition on whistling in the dressing room or on looking over your shoulder when you marched in the circus parade.