Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5

by Robert Shearman

  There had been no doubt in Peter’s mind that there’d be nothing he wanted to see at the cinema, and even Maggie had to admit that the selection didn’t justify having come. Insisting that they make the best of it, however, she chose a film and watched while Peter slept.

  On coming home, both were more agitated than when they had left, but rather than argue in the car or niggle at each other, the two of them just sat in silence, listening to the windscreen wipers scrape away the rain. Pulling into the driveway, Peter saw that their neighbour had gone inside but had left something on their front doorstep. It must have been him, because Maggie held her chest in delight and said that only the other day they’d been talking about his garden, which he’d taken pains to fill with plants from his home country. He’d left one as a present. How sweet of him.

  Peter watched Maggie heave it inside and release it from its plastic bag, spilling dirt all over the carpet. Moving some photographs and an antique clock that had been his grandfather’s, Peter placed the shrub on a cabinet in the hallway, and Maggie went to write a thank you note for him to go and slide under the anteater’s door.

  *

  Sunday came quick because the week had been uneventful. There had not been much news in the papers, and nothing so terrible as to spend a whole evening tutting about. The husbands still got drunk though and railed again at the news that never died away. The state of the world, the peril their way of life was in, how they wished they could go back to the fifties when life was good: taxes, migration and bad television.

  The anteater hadn’t shown up, for some reason or other, and Peter felt more relaxed. Every so often someone asked where he had got to, but no one knew and after getting well and truly sozzled no one cared. At half past midnight they all went home, propping each other up until they reached their respective houses.

  When Peter walked into his front room, Maggie was still up, reading a book on the sofa.

  “Not in bed?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Had a good evening?”

  “You stink of wine. You smell like a brewery.”

  “That would be beer then. Not wine.”

  She turned a page and didn’t reply.

  “Has the kettle boiled recently?” he said for something to say, and she shook her head. Peter went into the kitchen and while he waited for the kettle to boil he tried to shift some of the drunken fuzz in his head by opening his eyes wide and blinking hard. When he got back to the front room, Maggie had gone and before long he heard her brushing her teeth in the upstairs bathroom.

  Settling into his chair, Peter forced the tea down his throat, swishing it around in his cheeks. It didn’t mix well with the wine that coated the inside of his mouth, but it did go some way towards clearing his head. The next thing he knew it was morning. Sunlight was shining through the French windows. Birds trilling sliced through his unconsciousness like a drill sergeant’s insults. He felt sweaty and his mouth was dry and sticky.

  Before anything else, he wanted to wash himself and so staggered upstairs. Hanging his clothes over the edge of the bath, he went to turn the shower on, thinking a blast of hot water would wake him up, when he noticed a crack in the bottom of the bathtub. That hadn’t been there before. He ran his fingers over it, testing to see how deep it was, and jumped when the crack moved and stuck to his hand. It wasn’t a crack at all, he noticed, but a brittle spike of some sort. Like a fishbone. The fog cleared and his eyes narrowed as he realised what it was, and what the same thing had been in the pub that night. It was a tail hair from the anteater next door. Checking the seat of his trousers, he found more, of varying length and thickness. The anteater had been sat in his chair downstairs and left a wig’s worth behind of himself.

  Before taking time to wonder about the connotations, or to put his clothes back on, he walked to his bedroom, brandishing the hair like a detective holding a fake suicide note up to the true murderer. Peter drew in a breath, ready to shout, but saw that not only was his wife not there, but that the bed had been made, the curtains opened. The bedside clock said eleven-thirty. The day had already started.

  *

  Maggie couldn’t be outside gardening in this weather, nor was she at the neighbour’s. The view from the bathroom window showed that the car was gone. What day was it? Monday. Did she have anything she usually did on Mondays? No, but then again, she liked to do the big shop on a Monday, so perhaps she had simply gone out to the supermarket. Peter placed the hair carefully on the sink edge and showered, picking it back up once he was done and taking it downstairs with him.

  Even as he walked out of the front door, he wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do. The air was cold still and recent flurries of snow had left the ground slippery. It was a wonder he’d made it home at all the night before without falling on the icy tarmac or catching a cold. The route to the anteater’s was all gravel, though, so he stepped with confidence until he reached his neighbour’s door and knocked on it, still holding the needle of hair between his fingers.

  A dark figure appeared behind the frosted glass of the doorway and the anteater’s claws fumbled with the key until Peter heard a click and the door opened as far as the chain would allow. A foot above Peter’s eye line, the anteater’s own eye, black and shiny like a marble, looked down at him. The tongue snuck out a couple of inches and crept around the doorframe. The door shut, and Peter was about to knock again when he heard the chain slide back and the door opened fully. The anteater gestured to the front room. Following him in there, Peter found a long sofa and an armchair, and took a seat on the former, assuming the anteater, like himself, preferred the comfort of his own chair. Before he had had time to think through his reason for being there, he was sitting, admiring the décor and watching the blackbirds in the anteater’s garden.

  The anteater sat in his chair, which was on the other side of the room to the sofa, giving away nothing with his teddy bear eyes and not making a sound. Peter thought he should perhaps explain himself, and so held up the hair.

  “Look here,” he said. “I have good reason to suspect you’ve been meeting privately with my wife, and I wanted to know what your designs on her are.”

  Only the tongue of his host moved. Peter hadn’t been offered a drink or even greeted with a how do you do? which was rude. The silence, however, was unsettling. As the anteater’s tongue reached closer to the ground, Peter held in his amazement at how long it was, and felt his own tongue growing drier. Perhaps out of thirst, or perhaps due to the dehydrating amount of alcohol he had consumed the night before and the poor night’s sleep he’d had.

  “Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”

  The fur on the anteater’s back bristled and rattled like dry grass in the wind.

  “There’s no use in denying it,” Peter said, leaning forward as far as he could. “I found this—and a good deal more—on my chair this morning. Not to mention the fact that she’s been all out of sorts.”

  Like a retreating tortoise head, his neighbour’s tongue withdrew and as Peter was about to stand and take the fishbone hair over to him, the anteater lifted itself up and dropped forwards on all fours. He seemed bigger. Not only longer, but wider and more muscular in this position. Stretched out like this, Peter suspected the anteater was three, maybe four times heavier than himself. The animal’s front claws were bent over so that it was resting on its knuckles. Its tail fanned out, and was almost as long as the anteater’s body, reaching back to the armchair and hiding a great portion of it. Peter had to stop himself climbing onto the sofa as if he’d seen a mouse as the anteater lumbered across the room toward him.

  “Now then, calm down. What are you doing?”

  Still the anteater lurched forward, his thin, heavy head lolling from side to side and his tongue sliding in and out of his mouth.

  “I’m warning you.”

  The gap between them became no more than a metre, and feeling his heart thump in his chest and panic spread through his aching body, Pe
ter grabbed a lamp from the table next to him and brought it down on the anteater’s forehead. His neighbour fell on his chin, his legs having given out underneath him, but still he continued to crawl forwards. With adrenaline still coursing through his body, Peter brought the lamp down another time, hitting the anteater between the eyes. He had pulled his feet up on the sofa now and was leaning over, lamp in hand, looking down at his neighbour, inspecting the fresh wound he had made. The fur around it turned purple and red.

  There were a few seconds in which the only thing Peter could hear was the blood pumping in his ears. The anteater gurgled for a few seconds and Peter lifted his weapon, ready to strike again. Reaching his front leg forward and stabbing his claw into the carpet, the anteater managed to pull himself forwards an inch, but it was obvious, with the direction he had dragged his head and the way he was trying to throw his leg, that he was not trying to reach Peter, but trying to get around the side of the sofa. He pulled himself another half-metre or so before he had to stop. The rise and fall of his body slowed. His tongue poked out and didn’t wind back in.

  Noise filled the room all of a sudden. The ticking clock seemed to be firing off gun salutes, the blackbirds screeched for the help of the emergency services, the wind beat at the door, calling for anyone inside to open up or it’d batter it down. A fringe of white noise started to creep into Peter’s vision. He needed water. He went to the kitchen, filled a glass and downed it in one go. Back in the front room he found the body unmoved. His mouth was still dry so he refilled his glass. Before he entered the front room again, something made him stop on the threshold.

  Covering the anteater’s snout in a neat line were hundreds of tiny insects, all following one another, beginning at the skirting board around the side of the sofa and ending at the smatter of blood between the anteater’s eyes. Ants. They were organised things, Peter noted, waiting their turn, following the leader, turning back once they’d got their fill and marching back towards their nest around the side of the sofa. It was not a steadily moving line, however, because by the time the crowd on the anteater’s forehead had busied themselves doing whatever it was they were doing at that drying patch of open skin, tens, hundreds more perhaps, had joined in at the end of the queue. Soon there were multiple queues, then no less than a plague. Within five minutes Peter’s neighbour’s head was unrecognisable as anything but a pulsing, baseball-bat shape of tiny bodies, all as black as their meal’s eyes, which they had by now taken apart and shared amongst themselves.

  Going back to the kitchen Peter opened the dishwasher. Finding it full, he left his glass on the countertop. But that seemed rude, so he rinsed it, dried it and put it back in the cupboard.

  *

  Over the garden wall, he saw that Maggie was not back yet. She often took a long time shopping, so it was no real surprise, and besides, he could do with a bit of peace and quiet for an hour or so. Sinking back into his chair, Peter realised that he was still holding the strand of hair and heaved himself back up, opened the window, and put it outside. It drifted away, disappearing in the hedgerow. Peter knew there were still a lot on the chair and his trousers, but those could be ignored for now. He’d deal with them after his nap.

  Did something move? Scanning the carpet, he couldn’t see anything, so thought it must just be his hangover playing its dirty tricks.

  Sleepiness came and went, and more than once he jerked his head up, having nodded off in an uncomfortable position. After a heavy ten minutes of sleeping, Peter jumped up with such energy that it brought consciousness fully back to him, and after coming to his senses he became aware of an itch on his leg. Pinching a tuft of his trousers, he scratched through the material until he was satisfied. A moment later the itch was back, so he scratched it again. Soon the itch had not only grown in intensity, but was running all the way down his leg, and scratching with both hands did nothing.

  Peter realised that it was not just itchy, but painful.

  Lifting his trouser leg, he saw what looked like an open wound or raspberry jam. He was covered in some kind of red paste. Bending towards it, he felt his stomach lurch. A line of ants were making their way from the rim of his sock up towards his knee. The red was not a wound, or jam, but the blood of hundreds of squashed ants. The inside of his trousers were covered too.

  Jumping up from his chair, Peter brushed the insects from his leg and stepped away from the army that had gathered around his feet. There was no distinct beginning or end to them, like there had been next-door. Just thousands, in groups all around the room, darting every which way. Peter took off his shoes and socks and threw them at a couple of the vague patches of ants, closed the door and retreated to the front garden. There he stood, trying to figure out where they could have come from. Out here there was no sign of the swarm within. But he could hear them, climbing over his furniture and in his shoes.

  A shout came from across the road.

  “You too?”

  “All over!” their neighbour replied.

  Choruses of horror were springing up all down the road. Everyone was rushing out into their gardens to check if their neighbours were similarly overrun with the plague of ants. Peter’s feet were freezing on the cold grass. He just wanted to be back inside in his chair, reading the paper, sipping his tea, watching the clouds pass over his little village.

  JENNI FAGAN

  When Words Change the Molecular Composition of Water

  As she watches her life back, the thing that strikes her most is the number of times she’s been saved. She is on her belly. Watching. One screen. She is in a long, slim pod and it reminds her of the capsule hotel she once slept in in Japan, for a whole week; it was $30 per night and felt like a well-lit coffin. This pod doesn’t feel quite the same. The screen takes up the entire end wall and she has to be careful to focus on exactly what she’s seeing or fast forward or replay or return is activated and it all becomes too confusing. What she is aiming for is chronological order.

  She is trying not to get upset anymore. It does not help one bit that this is not how she expected it to be. There was no white light. No familiar faces greeted her, just a small dog walking ahead, leading the way, nodding her toward the pod and her climbing in and the door mercifully staying open and that is how it begins.

  She is naked. More comfortable naked now than she ever was, although she is still lumpy and bumpy and the L-smile scar across her tummy is still there, where they took the baby. She hasn’t watched that bit yet. Not yet. Not that bit.

  What is striking her again and again as she watches herself is how many times she only just avoids death, or being raped, or walking in front of a car, or choking on Spam (it was a trip to South Korea) or the time she has a pencil jabbed just to the side of her ear and it misses her brain by millimetres. Her younger cousin, the culprit, is in the footage now, crying and crying, and her bleeding, and later she is walking through a meadow. Later still, through a park with trees, it is 5.37am and cherry blossom falls and she is still moderately high after a party, a first date, and two streets away there are four men who do not turn down the alley where she would have bumped into them. She is wearing a loose, full-length skirt and she looks happy and free.

  Outside the pod, light does not appear to change; she does not know if she has been here for a day, a year, or something in between. She has no hunger. She cannot blink. It’s not that she cannot remember how to blink, it is just the case that blinking doesn’t happen here. She senses this naked body is just a way for her to feel more comfortable until she can accept something that is too big for her mind, or heart, or soul.

  Her pod is in a row of pods and when she steps out and looks along them, it is not possible to see where they end—they trail off into an apparent infinity. There are skies. There are grassy hills on either side. Feet hang out of the ends of some of the pods, and in the one next to her, on the right, a pair of legs, black, with pins in the knees. When the legs step out, they turn white at the thigh and the lower area appears as a bruise,
as if the legs themselves died but only up to the thigh. The man looks at her.

  On the screen she is waving to herself. A silly thing to do, but once she’d had the idea, every so often on a street corner or in bed or walking along the beach, she would wave. To a stranger she would appear to be waving at nothing, but what she was waving at was her future self, who would one day sit down and watch her entire life back—she thought that might be an arduous process, so a wave might help. At this exact moment she is stood at the top of a castle in Bodrum; she is waving from the parapet. She waves and her hair blows in her eyes and behind her there is a large stone penis. It is pretending not to be a penis, but nobody is convinced.

  She begins to file how long she spent in life doing each activity. 789 hours spent watching home-improvement shows.

  1836 hours watching reality programmes about people much wealthier or better looking than she ever would be.

  9 years waiting for things, for letters, wages, people, love, stuff, health, hope—waiting to become something she could tolerate living with.

  That didn’t happen.

  She climbs out of her pod and looks along the row. Tonight the sky is pink and there is a moon slim as a fingernail. It is nice to sit outside and take in the breeze. The man in the pod on the right is twitching his feet. Sound out here in the open air is muted; she hears nothing. The volume has been turned off, as if by parents who know their children will only sleep, or concentrate, when all extrasensory stimulation is removed.

  She is in the aisle of B&Q looking at the expensive paint and wondering which colour to pick. Once she has chosen, she will find a member of staff and give them the expensive shade—so they can mix up the exact same colour in the cheaper house brand. A toddler in a trolley gums a mobile phone; his mother picks up some colour samples then turns out of the aisle. She is on her own again and eventually she decides on bowler-hat grey, then a chapel green for her bathroom. This footage calms her. Sensible hours spent changing the colour and tone of her world. She picks up some solar lights. They soak up the sun, and even though the sun only arrives occasionally in winter, she buys them. They are dragonflies and during the daytime clear glass will soak up sunlight and at night they will glow red, green and blue—a little loud, but she needs something cheerful when she looks into the back garden at night and all she can see is black.