Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three

by Simon Strantzas

  Violet woke up with the bruises. Outside, the sky had turned dark. A hushed grey filled with pinpricks of blue fire, and the world tipped forward, a great dome that would suffocate her if she breathed too deep. This was how it had always been.

  Six this time. Six places where the blood pooled too close to the surface, the sick, purpled mottling blooming across pale flesh. She was hungry, but she would not eat. Beneath, her bones pushed against wasted meat. It didn’t like when she went without food.

  Her palm pressed tight against her chest, she traced her fingertips along her sternum, let them drift across the protruding rib bones. She counted them, wondered if with enough pressure, she could draw them out, release them from her thin cage of skin. If she did this, would it finally stop? Or would the marking linger on her decomposing body, a reminder even to the dirt that she was different, a thing separate?

  Once, when she was a girl and the bruising had just begun, she’d found a slug and carried it home, her fingers aching from such a delicate touch. Later, she would eat it, taking small, neat bites. If she could fill her body with something else, something distinctly not Violet, perhaps the marking would pass over her, but the next morning the bruises had multiplied, and her mother smiled to see them.

  How old had she been the first time? Five? Six? There were flashes of dark woods, the trees stretching jagged limbs against blackened sky, and the moon always absent. She could not remember it all. Hushed whispers, grunting. A great slab laid out before a hulking figure carved from stone. It would be years before she knew the correct word. Altar.

  “Marked,” her mother said each time, her fingers tracing the marred flesh. Over the years, Violet learned to hate her mother’s touch, but she willed her body to hold still, to curl into itself, a small quiet thing in the face of her mother’s fever bright eyes.

  At first she had asked questions, but her mother would go silent, her eyes twitching away, searching for something beyond the physical space they occupied. But at night Violet listened. She tiptoed through shadow to her mother’s room, pressed her ear against the door, and waited. If her mother ever dreamed of it, of the thing, its name never manifested. There was only silence in the great house, the rooms too large and menacing in their emptiness.

  She would think of the woods then, those dark trees pressing down against her as she looked into the ancient stone face of something that had once worn the flesh of humans. But it had never been human. Even in her faded memory, Violet had the sense that it was much, much older than man. Older perhaps, than even her mother had ever imagined.

  But she wasn’t a girl any more. Had not been, in fact, for many years. She had moved out of her mother’s house at seventeen, worked double shifts down at Fast Eddie’s to cover rent on a shitty one-bedroom apartment that smelled of cooked cabbage and cigarettes. Somehow, fifteen years passed, but the marking never stopped. Starving herself seemed to keep it at bay, but the markings had begun coming closer together. What had once happened once or twice a year was now happening once a month. Fear curved like a hard stone in her belly.

  Outside her bedroom window, the dark gathered, stars blinking out one by one, until there was only moonlight, and then that too was gone. In the corner, a darker mass formed, and then the sound of fingernails scuttling across hardwood floors.

  “Violet.” The voice filled the room, came from both beneath and above her. The shadow was on the ceiling now. Had it come from the window, or had it always been there, watching, waiting for her to finally notice its slow, calculated creeping?

  “Hello, Mother,” Violet said, and the voice chuckled, a deep, rasping wheeze.

  “Never could fool you. Always watching me with those big eyes. Like you were drinking the whole world with them.”

  “I haven’t eaten, Mother. For a long, long time.” She offered up an emaciated arm.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore. Be a good girl and take off the blanket.”

  For a moment Violet considered not obeying, thought about running from the room to her car and driving until the tank ran empty or until her organs finally shut down. Flesh and bone mangled up with steel and rubber. But it didn’t matter in the past. Certainly, it wouldn’t matter now, and there was so little of her left. She had made sure.

  She kicked at the quilt that covered her, pushed it down so that her naked form lay exposed. Warm, fetid air wormed over the soles of her feet, up and across her thighs, the concave bowl of her belly.

  “Flesh of my own. Blood of my own,” her mother said. The shadow was no more. Only her mother pressing against her, stretching her form to fit into Violet’s. Her dark hair flowing across Violet’s chest, spilling over her face. Their palms flat against one another, and then her mother’s mouth forcing her lips apart. She smelled of earth, something that had come from beneath the ground.

  “Feed me. This last time,” she said.

  ###

  They were in the forest. Breath coming in shallow bursts as they ran through the trees, branches tearing at their calves as they moved under a black expanse. Beneath them, stars burned, and Violet wondered if the world had come undone, if they had tumbled into the sky. Great white forms flitted in and out of the periphery, and the air lay heavy and damp in her mouth.

  Her mother ran on all fours, her arms and legs impossibly long, the joints crooking upward. Violet wanted to scream, but she feared that if she did her mother would turn back, would look at her from a face that she didn’t recognize. The thought terrified her. She kept moving. She knew the way.

  The great stone loomed ahead of them, and her mother slowed. She turned away. She did not want to see its face.

  “Look at Her, Violet.”

  Some animal cried out into the night, a long screaming that set her skin crawling.

  “The Great Worm,” her mother whispered and crept forward, curled herself against its feet, ran her fingers between her legs.

  The statue leered down, the body and face of a woman, the mouth opening impossibly large, rows and rows of pointed teeth crammed into the space. A vortex of razor blades that went on and on. It was a mouth of violence. A mouth that hunted out soft flesh and attached itself there, suckled until it was satiated.

  “From the beginning, She wanted you. Marked you as Her own, and She paid me for bringing you. She let me see things.”

  “Please. Don’t,” Violet said. She was so tired. She lay down, pressed her hands against the hard earth.

  “There is a hole in the bottom of the world,” her mother panted, writhed under that gaping mouth.

  “You know that moment right before you fall asleep? That moment where you can feel yourself falling? All that solid earth beneath you suddenly dropping away into nothingness? That’s the hole opening. You’re feeling Her move,” she said.

  The stars blazed, a piercing white light that bored into Violet’s skull, burned ghostly images against her retinas. She clawed at her eyes, and her stomach heaved.

  “And now, it’s time.” Her mother grasped at her, dirty fingernails pressing into pale flesh.

  “Feed me, my love. My little daughter. Feed me now,” her mother said, pressed her mouth to her abdomen. An unnatural heat that pulsated in time with her heart grew under her mother’s tongue.

  “It was you, wasn’t it? It was always you. The marking,” Violet said and wrapped her fingers in her mother’s hair, tried to pull her away. Her arm was so heavy, and her mother was too strong. There was only the movement of her mother’s mouth, the baring of teeth as she suckled, the burning as blood rose to the surface.

  “She’ll take me now. And the hole will open once more. Will open wide, and She’ll take it all, everything tumbling into that great void until She’s the only thing left. The way it once was. The way it should be. And I’ll stand with Her as the world implodes.”

  Above them, the great stone eyes stared down, blank, unseeing orbs, and around them, all had fallen silent. Deep down, in the places where shadows slept, the world shifted, something great and po
werful coming awake. Violet closed her eyes and let her hand fall from her mother’s hair. Her mouth tasted of blood.

  “These are the small ways we die, Violet. Every day, another part of us rotting. Bags of meat and bone. But you have fed me, have fed Her,” her mother said, traced her tongue against Violet’s skin.

  The mouth opened then, the rows of teeth gleaming an unnatural white against the grey stone. The eyes looked down at them, examined the two women lying in the dirt. One crouched before the other, arms and legs tangled together.

  When the entire world began to scream, Violet opened her mouth to add her own cry in the dark. Everything slipping away, land bleeding into sky, and something vast creeping toward the surface. She did not want to see, so she shut her eyes, closed them tight as she had when she was a child.

  “It was always you. I didn’t even know to hate you for it,” Violet whispered.

  Violet’s heart fluttered against her ribs, a frenetic, broken pumping that hitched her breathing, left her gasping, her head a light, airy thing. For a moment, she floated, her body untethered from the earth, and she opened her eyes and saw.

  Everything She had ever wanted. The large eyes of a small girl, her pale, fragile body stretched before Her, a vessel to fill. Rebirth. A doorway. And the dark haired woman so willing, so eager. She brought the girl, weakened her, marked her as Her own. And now, She would use the girl one last time.

  “She never wanted you, Mother” she said and laughed. Whispered it again and again. She never wanted you. She wanted me.

  “Of course She wanted you. From the very beginning,” her mother said, but Violet shook her head, the effort knifing through her.

  “No. It was only me. Only me. I can see now,” she said. Above them, the blank orbs stared down, and the mouth opened impossibly wider.

  “Too late. Too late,” Violet said, and her heart shuddered, the speed too much to bear. Once. Twice. As the moment came, she smiled. There would not be enough left. Only a pile of skin and bone, a smeared reminder of what she had once been.

  And then there was nothing remaining. Only a mother clutching her daughter to her chest as she screamed into a world fallen silent.

  Robert Aickman

  THE STRANGERS

  When I dropped in to the Club some years ago, as I usually do when in London, I found that a man was about to read a paper called “The Strangers of Hilltop”. It was the usual “Talk and Discussion”. I wandered in and sat down discreetly in the back row.

  I could not help supposing that I had more reason to be there than most of the other thirty or forty men present. I had perhaps gleaned for myself how very far from sure one can ever be as to where particular people stand in that particular context. It is not something people talk about very much. Not even in Hilltop itself, I fancy; the centre of the disturbance, though, as I had seen for myself, the centre only.

  I know perfectly well, and knew then, that a solitary seat in the back row makes one at once invisible and conspicuous, but that was a trifle, all in the spirit of the evening. My real point was that I had no wish to exchange reminiscences and pleasantries on the subject before us with any other member.

  In any case, I had learned from experience that the regular Club meetings often provided little more than confused anecdotes and indisputable small talk. To me it often seemed unnecessary to have engaged a speaker at all. People in general do not attend meetings primarily in order to listen to the speaker.

  However, that particular meeting was not a case in point. The fellow on the dais asserted many wild things about the commercial cemeteries which sprawl across the high places, and which are now far gone in closure and decay, having been promoted, I have always supposed, upon the assumption that the world would end before the entire vast acreage could possibly be filled. What the promoters could not of course be expected to foresee was the increase of population during the last hundred years or so. It has thrown their entire timescale out of joint.

  Our speaker had arrayed himself in black and white, and his face was very chalky indeed: made up like that, I am fairly sure. His hair was blacker than Malcolm Sargent’s, but thicker. It looked as if it had to be kept in position with really heavy oil. The words came out of his mouth like pink confectionary bubbles blown by children, only denser. He claimed to have participated personally in the most preposterous ceremonies with stakes, relics, and all that; all perfectly traditional in their way.

  I myself had difficulty in deciding what to think, but I could not but notice the total stillness and silence of the entire audience from first to last. I noticed this, first, because at the Club it was so unusual; but, second, because the talk brought so much back to me.

  At the Club that night, there was not a single question. I had never known such a thing. The members, pretty well every one of them, like to have their say on almost any topic, if given the least rope; and even to tie the speaker up in statements from his own lips. They make no secret of aiming to do that; though there are points given for tact and courtesy, as well as for drive and force. That evening there were no takers, apart from one youngish man I did not know, who leapt to his feet, bubbling almost as much as the lecturer, but then slowly subsided, suddenly speechless. The Deputy-Chairman of the Club, old Doddrell Rankin, ignoring the youngish man, said “No questions?”; allotted about a second-and-a-half to a possible response; and then moved the vote of thanks, prepared, as usual, in advance, and therefore always and inevitably a trifle off the mark from time to time. The Chairman of the Club had had to apologise for absence, owing to a crisis at his home.

  There had been no discussion. None at all. Possibly for the first time ever in the Club’s history. I was fairly certain that was the case. Afterwards, as I sat in the bar, no-one was speaking at all. I admit that only a few were present. So many men are no longer able to stay away from home in the evening, no matter what attractions the Club, or any other club, can contrive to dig out. The person who suffers most is the Club Secretary, as we all know. That evening, I myself was unable to cope with my usual couple of game sandwiches, splendid though they were. I live by myself; possibly for reasons not unconnected with what follows. So I can usually take my time and avoid too much in the way of fretting. But not that night.

  That night I verily believe that I ate nothing more before going to bed at my quiet hotel. Even in bed, I couldn’t slumber. I began to write almost like one of these automatists we hear about. There have been papers by and about them at the Club also. Naturally. Inevitably. However, I do not claim that some discarnate entity was writing through me. Almost certainly not. It was merely that I was at last writing what I had never cared or dared to write before, and certainly not to talk about. “The Case of Ronnie Cassell” I may call it; though I daresay it is properly my own case. I had a wad of sales sheets, and I wrote on the backs of them. My writing grew larger and larger.

  I wrote all night and all through the following day, living on cups of coffee brought up to my room and on corners of meat (mainly mutton) produced as I called for them. It was not a moment in one’s life for the ordinary set meals. Nor was the hotel the sort of place that fusses about an unmade bed. I should not have stayed there if it had been. I come to Town for a rest from demands of that kind. Nowadays a man with a business of his own needs to flake out completely at fairly regular intervals.

  There was more to relate than I had supposed, even though I had previously gained considerable experience writing brochures about aspects of my business. I may come back to that later. That second evening I had to dash home, even though by one of the last trains. I remember buying all the galantine that was left in the refreshment room.

  I am not sure when I finished writing. This was partly because I immediately put it all away for a spell. I daresay my readers will understand why I did that. I am sure they will.

  But the matter could not be allowed to rest, and one quiet weekend I unlocked the compartment at the back of my safe. I set about the task of making everything
more accurate, more coherent.

  After all, the whole business goes far to explain the pattern of my life. Perhaps it may warn, or at least notify, others too. I hope so. We all need to believe there are reasons for what happens to us.

  Cassell and I at the time were juniors in a firm of chartered accountants. We were neither of us yet qualified, but we were both above the usual age for our situation. This brought us more together than might otherwise have happened. Cassell had been in much difficulty at home and at school, which had all ended in a very long nervous breakdown. The reasons why I had been late in starting my own professional studies are immaterial to the present narrative. I had wanted to look around first. The firm was called Bream and Ladywell. The office was outside the City boundary; well to the north of Old Street. None the less, most of the work was City work.

  Poor Ronnie was always in difficulties with girls; mainly the difficulty that he couldn’t find one, even when he needed one more desperately than most. I must state that I had no real trouble of that kind, and never have had. Perhaps it is partly a matter of not being too absurdly demanding. I do not know. At the time now in question, I had a girlfriend named Clarinda Bowman. She plays a part in what happened.

  She was still one among several, as you might expect, but I knew very well that she was already becoming special. She had pale hair, and looked generally fragile, but she knew how to make me chuckle, which is always the main thing with a woman.

  She was also a great-niece and ward of old Caius Julius Ladywell, who was then the head of the firm. Of course that was important too. In fact, I had actually first met Clarinda at a sort of Christmas party to the assistants and staff, which the partners gave every year, though they themselves were all observing Jews. Because they were Jews, and really cared about our enjoying ourselves, they invited other young people too, from outside, and every time the upshot was quite unlike the usual office gathering. Each year, I am sure that most of us actually looked forward to it. None the less, I deemed it a considerable plume in my bonnet that upon such an occasion I appeared to have involved the head of the firm’s great-niece and ward. I took it for confirmation that I really appealed, and that is something one can never have confirmed too often.