The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  Duke____,1 known as Jellewyn.

  When I returned to my cabin, shaken by that extraordinary farewell and cursing the shameful drunkenness that had probably prevented my valiant companion from awakening me, I no longer heard Steevens’ irregular breathing. I leaned over his poor, contorted face. He, too, was gone.

  I took two cans of gasoline from the little engine room, and, moved by some sort of providential instinct, I started the engine and turned it up to full speed.

  I went back to the helm, piled the books on the deck, and poured gasoline on them.

  A high, pale flame arose.

  At that moment, there was a cry from the sea, and I heard someone call my name. Then I, too, cried out, in surprise and fear: in the wake of the Mainz Psalter, a hundred feet back, swam the schoolmaster.

  The flames crackled; the books were rapidly being transformed into ashes.

  The infernal swimmer shouted curses and supplications.

  ‘Ballister! I’ll make you rich, richer than all men on earth put together! I’ll make you die, you imbecile, in horrible tortures that are unknown on your accursed planet! I’ll make you a king, Ballister, king of a formidable kingdom! Ah, you swine, hell would be sweeter to you than what I have in store for you!’

  He swam desperately, but made little progress in overtaking the ship.

  Suddenly the schooner made a few strange movements and was shaken by dull blows. I saw the water rising toward me: the ship was being pulled toward the bottom of the sea.

  ‘Ballister, listen to me!’ howled the schoolmaster.

  He was quickly drawing closer. His face was horribly impassive, but his eyes were burning with unbearable brightness.

  Then, in the middle of a mass of hot ashes, I saw a piece of parchment curl up and reveal a sparkling object. I remembered Jellewyn’s words. The specially constructed book had been hiding the crystal box he had mentioned to me.

  ‘The crystal box!’ I exclaimed.

  The schoolmaster heard me. He shrieked like a madman, and I saw an incredible sight: he stood on the water with his hands outstretched like threatening claws.

  ‘It’s knowledge, the greatest knowledge of all, that you’re about to destroy, you damned fool!’ he roared.

  Shrill yodels were now coming toward me from all points of the horizon.

  The first waves broke over the deck.

  I leapt into the flames and smashed the crystal box with my heel.

  I had a feeling of collapse, and terrible nausea. Sky and water blended in a flashing chaos, an immense clamor shook the air. I began a frightful fall into darkness…

  And here I am. I’ve told you everything now. I woke up on your ship. I’m going to die. Have I been dreaming? I wish I could believe it.

  But I’m going to die among men, on my own earth. Ah, how happy I am!

  It was Briggs, the cabin boy of the North Caper, who had first sighted Ballister. The boy had just stolen an apple from the galley and was about to eat it, huddled among some coils of cable, when he saw Ballister swimming sluggishly a few yards from the ship.

  Briggs began shouting at the top of his lungs, for he saw that the swimmer was about to be drawn into the wash of the propeller.

  Ballister was pulled out of the water. He was unconscious: his swimming movements had been automatic, as sometimes happens with very strong swimmers.

  There was no ship in sight and no trace of wreckage on the water. But the cabin boy said that he had seen a ship as transparent as glass – those are his own words – rise up off the port beam, then sink below the surface. This earned him a slap from Captain Cormon, to teach him not to tell such wild stories.

  We managed to pour a little whisky down Ballister’s throat. Rose, the engineer, gave him his bunk, and we covered him warmly.

  He soon passed from unconsciousness into deep, feverish sleep. We were waiting, with curiosity, for him to awaken when a terrible incident took place.

  This is now being told by John Copeland, first mate of the North Caper. It was I, who, with Seaman Jolks, saw the mystery and terror that came out of the night.

  The last bearing taken during the day had located the North Caper at longitude 22º west and latitude 60º north.

  I took the helm myself, having decided to spend the night on deck, because the night before we had seen long ice floes glittering in the moonlight on the northwest horizon.

  Jolks hung up the running lights, and since he had a violent toothache that was made worse by the warmth of the forecastle, he came to smoke his pipe beside me. I was glad, because a lonely watch can be terribly monotonous when it lasts all night.

  I must tell you that, while the North Caper is a good, sturdy ship, she is not a trawler of the latest model, even though she has been equipped with radio. The spirit of fifty years ago still weighs down on her, leaving her with sails that supplement the limited power of her steam engine. She does not have the tall, enclosed, ungainly cabin that is perched in the middle of the deck on most modern trawlers like a ludicrous little cottage. Her helm is still on the stern, facing the sea, the wind, and the spray.

  I am giving you this description so that you will know that we witnessed the incomprehensible scene not from a glassed-in observation post, but from the deck itself. Without this explanation, my story would not seem believable to those familiar with the design of steam trawlers.

  There was no moonlight because the sky was too overcast; only the diffused glow of the clouds and the phosphorescence of the wave crests made it possible to see anything.

  It was somewhere around ten o’clock. The men were sunk deep in their first sleep. Jolks, absorbed in his toothache, was softly moaning and swearing. The binnacle light made his tense face stand out from the surrounding darkness.

  Suddenly I saw his grimace of pain change to an expression of astonishment, then of genuine terror. His pipe fell from his open mouth. This struck me as so comical that I made a mocking remark to him. His only reply was to point to the starboard light.

  My pipe joined his when I saw what he was pointing to: clutching the shrouds a few inches below the light, two wet hands were emerging from the darkness.

  Suddenly the hands let go and a dark form leapt onto the deck. Jolks quickly stepped aside, and the binnacle light shone on the intruder’s face. To our indescribable amazement, we saw a kind of clergyman, wearing a black tail-coat and streaming with sea water. He had a small head with eyes like glowing coals that were staring straight at us.

  Jolks made a move to take out his fishing knife, but he did not have time: the apparition leapt on him and knocked him down. At the same time, the binnacle light was shattered. A few moments later there was a shrill cry from the forecastle, where the cabin boy had been sitting up with Ballister:

  ‘He’s killing him! Help!’

  Ever since I had had to stop some serious brawls among members of the crew, I had made it a habit to carry my revolver at night. It was a powerful weapon, and I shot well with it. I cocked it.

  The ship was filled with a confused clamor.

  A short time after this series of events, a gust of wind ripped a gash in the clouds and a beam of moonlight followed the ship like a spotlight.

  I could already hear the captain’s swearing above Briggs’s cries of alarm when to my right I heard soft footsteps and saw the clergyman leap over the side and into the water.

  I saw his small head rise on the crest of a wave. I calmly aimed at it and fired. He uttered a strange howl, and the wave carried him toward the side of the ship.

  Jolks appeared beside me. Although he was still a little dazed, he was wielding a grappling iron. The body was now floating alongside the ship, bumping against it. The grappling iron bit into the clothes and pulled up its prey with surprising ease.

  Jolks dropped a shapeless wet bundle on the deck, saying that it felt as light as a feather. Captain Cormon came out of the forecastle, holding a lighted lantern.

  ‘Someone tried to kill our shipwreck victim!’ he said.r />
  ‘We’ve got the bandit,’ I said. ‘He came out of the sea…’

  ‘You’re crazy, Copeland!’

  ‘Look at him, captain. I shot him and…’

  We leaned over the pitiful remains, but we immediately straightened up again, shouting like madmen.

  The clothes were empty; two artificial hands and a wax head were attached to them. My bullet had gone through the wig and broken the nose.

  You already know Ballister’s story. He told it to us when he woke up toward the end of that infernal night. He spoke serenely, with a kind of happiness.

  We took devoted care of him. There were two holes in his left shoulder, as though he had been stabbed twice, but we would have saved him if we had been able to stop his bleeding, because no essential organs had been damaged.

  After having talked so much, he lapsed into a coma. When he came out of it later, he asked how he had been injured. Briggs was the only one with him at the time. Glad to have a chance to make himself interesting, he replied that in the middle of the night he had seen a dark shape rush into the forecastle and strike Ballister. He then told him about the shot and showed him the grotesque remains.

  At this sight, Ballister cried out in terror.

  ‘The schoolmaster! The schoolmaster!’

  He fell into a painful fever and did not regain consciousness until six days later, in the maritime hospital in Galway, where he kissed the image of Christ and died.

  The tragic mannequin was taken to Reverend Leemans, a worthy ecclesiastic who has been all over the world and knows many of the secrets of savage lands and the sea.

  He examined it for a long time.

  ‘What can have been inside it?’ asked Archie Reines. ‘There surely was something in it. It was alive.’

  ‘Yes, it was alive all right, I can tell you that,’ grumbled Jolks, rubbing his red, swollen neck.

  Reverend Leemans sniffed the thing like a dog, then cast it aside with disgust.

  ‘I thought so,’ he said.

  We also sniffed it.

  ‘It smells of formic acid,’ I said.

  ‘And phosphorus,’ added Reines.

  Captain Cormon reflected for a moment, then his lips quivered a little when he said, ‘It smells like an octopus.’

  Leemans stared at him.

  ‘On the last day of Creation,’ he said, ‘it is from the sea that God will cause the Blasphemous Beast to appear. Let us not try to anticipate destiny with impious inquiries.’

  ‘But…,’ began Reines.

  ‘ “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?”’

  Before the Holy Word, we bowed our heads and gave up trying to understand.

  The Shadowy Street

  Jean Ray

  Translated into English by Lowell Blair

  Jean Ray (1887–1964) was a Belgian writer of classic weird tales sadly unknown to most contemporary English-language readers. He also wrote one novel, Malpertuis (1943), which was subsequently made into a film by Harry Kümel during 1971 (starring Orson Welles). In addition to ‘The Mainz Psalter’ reprinted earlier in this volume, Jean Ray wrote the chilling ‘The Shadowy Street’ (1931) during a stint in prison, just as H. P. Lovecraft was publishing some of his most classic tales. Later in the 1930s, Ray would have four stories published in Weird Tales. He is considered by many the Poe, or Lovecraft, of the French language.

  On a Rotterdam dock, winches were fishing bales of old paper from the hold of a freighter. The wind was fluttering the multicolored streamers that hung from the bales when one of them burst open like a cask in a roaring fire. The longshoremen hastily scooped up some of the rustling mass, but a large part of it was abandoned to the joy of the little children who gleaned in the eternal autumn of the waterfront.

  There were beautiful Pearsons engravings, cut in half by order of Customs; green and pink bundles of stocks and bonds, the last echoes of resounding bankruptcies; pitiful books whose pages were still joined like desperate hands. My cane explored that vast residue of thought, in which neither shame nor hope was now alive.

  Amid all that English and German prose I found a few pages of France: copies of Le Magasin Pittoresque, solidly bound and somewhat scorched by fire.

  It was in looking through those magazines, so adorably illustrated and so dismally written, that I found the two manuscripts, one in German, the other in French. Their authors had apparently been unaware of each other, and yet the French manuscript seemed to cast a little light on the black anguish that rose from the German one like a noxious vapor – insofar as any light can be shed on that story which appears to be haunted by such sinister and hostile forces!

  The cover bore the name Alphonse Archipetre, followed by the word Lehrer. I shall translate the German pages:

  The German Manuscript

  I am writing this for Hermann, when he comes back from sea.

  If he does not find me here, if I, along with my poor friends, have been swallowed up by the savage mystery that surrounds us, I want him to know our days of horror through this little notebook. It will be the best proof of my affection that I can give him, because it takes real courage for a woman to keep a journal in such hours of madness. I am also writing so that he will pray for me, if he believes my soul to be in peril…

  After the death of my Aunt Hedwige, I did not want to go on living in our sad Holzdamm house. The Rückhardt sisters offered to let me stay with them. They lived in a big apartment on the Deichstrasse, in the spacious house of Councillor Hühnebein, an old bachelor who never left the first floor, which was littered with books, paintings, and engravings.

  Lotte, Eleonore, and Meta Rückhardt were adorable old maids who used all their ingenuity in trying to make life pleasant for me. Frida, our maid, came with me; she found favor in the eyes of the ancient Frau Pilz, the Rückhardts’ inspired cook, who was said to have turned down ducal offers in order to remain in the humble service of her mistresses.

  That evening…

  On that evening, which was to bring unspeakable terror into our calm lives, we had decided against going to a celebration in Tempelhof, because it was raining in torrents. Frau Pilz, who liked to have us stay home, had made us an outstanding supper: grilled trout and a guinea-hen pie. Lotte had searched the cellar and come up with a bottle of Cape brandy that had been aging there for over twenty years. When the table had been cleared, the beautiful dark liquor was poured into glasses of Bohemian crystal. Eleonore served the Lapsang Souchong tea that an old Bremen sailor brought back to us from his voyages.

  Through the sound of the rain we heard the clock of Saint Peter’s strike eight. Frida was sitting beside the fire. Her head drooped over her illustrated Bible; she was unable to read it, but she liked to look at the pictures. She asked for permission to go to bed. The four of us who remained went on sorting colored silks for Meta’s embroidery.

  Downstairs, the councillor noisily locked his bedroom door. Frau Pilz went up to her room, bade us good night through the door, and added that the bad weather would no doubt prevent us from having fresh fish for dinner the next day. A small cascade was splattering loudly on the pavement from a broken rain gutter on the house next door. A strong wind came thundering down the street; the cascade was dispersed into a silvery mist, and a window slammed shut on one of the upper stories.

  ‘That’s the attic window,’ said Lotte. ‘It won’t stay closed.’ She raised the garnet-red curtain and looked down at the street. ‘I’ve never seen it so dark before. I’m not sleepy, and I certainly have no desire to go to bed. I feel as though the darkness of the street would follow me, along with the wind and the rain.’

  ‘You’re talking like a fool,’ said Eleonore, who was not very gentle. ‘Well, since no one is going to bed, let’s do as men do and fill our glasses again.’

  She went off to get three of those beautiful Sieme candles that burn with a pink flame and give off a delightful smell of flowers and incense.

  I felt that we all wanted to give a f
estive tone to that bleak evening, and that for some reason we were unsuccessful. I saw Eleonore’s energetic face darkened by a sudden shadow of ill-humor. Lotte seemed to be having difficulty in breathing. Only Meta was leaning placidly over her embroidery, and yet I sensed that she was attentive, as though she were trying to detect a sound in the depths of the silence.

  Just then the door opened and Frida came in. She staggered over to the armchair beside the fire and sank into it, staring wild-eyed at each of us in turn.

  ‘Frida!’ I cried. ‘What’s the matter?’

  She sighed deeply, then murmured a few indistinct words.

  ‘She’s still asleep,’ said Eleonore.

  Frida shook her head forcefully and made violent efforts to speak. I handed her my glass of brandy and she emptied it in one gulp, like a coachman or a porter. Under other circumstances we would have been offended by this vulgarity, but she seemed so unhappy, and the atmosphere in the room had been so depressing for the past few minutes, that it passed unnoticed.

  ‘Fräulein,’ said Frida, ‘there’s…’ Her eyes, which softened for a moment, resumed their wild expression. ‘I don’t know…’

  Eleonore uttered an impatient exclamation.

  ‘What have you seen or heard? What’s wrong with you, Frida?’

  ‘Fräulein, there’s…’ Frida seemed to reflect deeply. ‘I don’t know how to say it…There’s a great fear in my room.’

  ‘Oh!’ said all three of us, reassured and apprehensive at the same time.