The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  This innocuous scene was so reassuring that I called aloud:

  ‘Hello! Is there anyone upstairs?’

  A powerful resonance rumbled, but no presence cared to manifest itself.

  I must admit that at no time did the silence and absence of life surprise me; it was as though I had expected it. In fact, from the time when I first perceived the existence of the enigmatic street, I had not thought for one moment of any possible inhabitants. And yet I had just entered it like a nocturnal thief.

  I took no precautions when I ransacked the drawers containing silverware and table linen. My footsteps clattered freely in the adjoining rooms furnished like convent visiting-rooms, and on a magnificent oak staircase that.…Ah, there was something surprising in my visit! That staircase led nowhere! It ran into the drab wall as though it continued on the other side of it.

  All this was bathed in the whitish glow of the frosted glass that formed the ceiling. I saw, or thought I saw, a vaguely hideous shape on the rough plaster wall, but when I looked at it attentively I realized that it was composed of thin cracks and was of the same order as those monsters that we distinguish in clouds and the lace of curtains. Furthermore, it did not trouble me, because when I looked a second time I no longer saw it in the network of cracks in the plaster.

  I went back to the kitchen. Through a barred window, I saw a shadowy little courtyard that was like a pit surrounded by four big, mossy walls.

  On a sideboard there was a heavy tray that looked as though it ought to have some value. I slipped it under my coat. I was deeply disappointed: I felt as though I had just stolen a few coins from a child’s piggy bank, or from an old-maid aunt’s shabby woolen stocking.

  I went to Gockel, the antique dealer.

  The three little houses were identical. In all of them, I found the same clean, tidy kitchen, the same sparse, gleaming furniture, the same dim, unreal light, the same serene quietness, the same senseless wall that ended the staircase. And in all three houses, I found identical candlesticks and the same heavy tray.

  I took them away, and…and the next day I always found them in their places again. I took them to Gockel, who smiled broadly as he paid me for them.

  It was enough to drive me mad; I felt my soul becoming monotonous, like that of a whirling dervish. Over and over again, I stole the same objects from the same house under the same circumstances. I wondered whether this might not be the first vengeance of that unknown without mystery. Might not damnation be the unvarying repetition of sin for all eternity?

  One day I did not go. I had resolved to space out my wretched incursions. I had a reserve of gold; Anita was happy and was showing wonderful tenderness toward me.

  That same evening, Gockel came to see me, asked me if I had anything to sell, and, to my surprise, offered to pay me even more than he had been paying. He scowled when I told him of my decision.

  ‘You’ve found a regular buyer, haven’t you?’ I said to him as he was leaving.

  He slowly turned around and looked me straight in the eyes.

  ‘Yes, Herr Doktor. I won’t tell you anything about him, just as you never speak to me of…your friend, the seller.’ His voice became lower: ‘Bring me objects every day; tell me how much gold you want for them, and I’ll give it to you, without bargaining. We’re both tied to the same wheel, Herr Doktor. Perhaps we’ll have to pay later. In the meantime, let’s live the kind of life we like: you with a pretty girl, I with a fortune.’

  We never broached the subject again. But Anita suddenly became very demanding, and Gockel’s gold slipped between her little fingers like water.

  Then the atmosphere of the street changed, if I may express it that way. I heard melodies. At least it seemed to me that it was marvelous, faraway music. Summoning up my courage again, I decided to explore the street beyond the bend and go on toward the song that vibrated in the distance.

  When I passed the third door and entered a part of the street where I had never gone before, I felt a terrible tightening in my heart. I took only three or four hesitant steps.

  I turned around. I could still see the first part of the street, but it looked much smaller. It seemed to me that I had moved dangerously far away from my world. Nevertheless, in a surge of irrational temerity, I ran a short distance, then knelt, and, like a boy peering over a hedge, ventured to look down the unknown part of the street.

  Disappointment struck me like a slap. The street continued its winding way, but again I saw nothing except three little doors in a white wall, and some viburnum bushes.

  I would surely have gone back then if the wind of song had not passed by, like a distant tide of billowing sound.…I surmounted an inexplicable terror and listened to it, hoping to analyze it if possible.

  I have called it a tide: it was a sound that came from a considerable distance, but it was enormous, like the sound of the sea.

  As I listened to it, I no longer heard the harmonies I had thought I discerned in it at first; instead, I heard a harsh dissonance, a furious clamor of wails and hatred.

  Have you ever noticed that the first whiffs of a repulsive smell are sometimes soft and even pleasant? I remember that when I left my house one day I was greeted in the street by an appetizing aroma of roast beef. ‘Someone’s doing some good cooking early in the morning,’ I thought. But when I had walked a hundred paces, this aroma changed into the sharp, sickening smell of burning cloth: a draper’s shop was on fire, filling the air with sparks and smoky flames. In the same way, I may have been deceived by my first perception of the melodious clamor.

  ‘Why don’t I go beyond the next bend?’ I said to myself. My apprehensive inertia had almost disappeared. Walking calmly now, I covered the space before me in a few seconds – and once again I found exactly the same scene that I had left behind.

  I was overwhelmed by a kind of bitter fury that engulfed my broken curiosity. Three identical houses, then three more identical houses. I had plumbed the mystery merely by opening the first door.

  Gloomy courage took possession of me. I walked forward along the street, and my disappointment grew at an incredible rate.

  A bend, three little yellow doors, a clump of viburnum bushes, then another bend, the same three little doors in the white wall, and the shadow of spindle trees. This repetition continued obsessively while I walked furiously, with loud footsteps.

  Suddenly, when I had turned one more bend in the street, this terrible symmetry was broken. There were again three little doors and some viburnum bushes, but there was also a big wooden portal, darkened and worn smooth by time. I was afraid of it.

  I now heard the clamor from much closer, hostile and threatening. I began walking back toward the Mohlenstrasse. The scenes went by like the quatrains of a ballad: three little doors and viburnum bushes, three little doors and viburnum bushes…

  Finally I saw the first lights of the real world twinkling before me. But the clamor had pursued me to the edge of the Mohlenstrasse. There it stopped abruptly, adapting itself to the joyous evening sounds of the populous streets, so that the mysterious and terrible shouting ended in a chorus of children’s voices singing a roundelay.

  The whole town is in the grip of an unspeakable terror.

  I would not have spoken of it in these brief memoirs, which concern only myself, if I had not found a link between the shadowy street and the crimes that steep the town in blood every night.

  Over a hundred people have suddenly disappeared, a hundred others have been savagely murdered.

  I recently took a map of the town and drew on it the winding line that must represent Saint Beregonne’s Lane, that incomprehensible street that overlaps our terrestrial world. I was horrified to see that all the crimes have been committed along that line.

  Thus poor Klingbom was one of the first to disappear. According to his clerk, he vanished like a puff of smoke just as he was entering the room containing his stills. The seed merchant’s wife was next, snatched away while she was in her sad garden. Her husband w
as found in his drying-room with his skull smashed.

  As I traced the fateful line on the map, my idea became a certainty. I can explain the victims’ disappearance only by their passage into an unknown plane; as for the murders, they are easy for invisible beings.

  All the inhabitants of a house on Old Purse Street have disappeared. On Church Street, six corpses have been found. On Post Street, there have been five disappearances and four deaths. This goes on and on, apparently limited by the Deichstrasse, where more murders and disappearances are taking place.

  I now realize that to talk about what I know would be to place myself in the Kirchhaus insane asylum, a tomb from which no Lazarus ever arises; or else it would give free rein to a superstitious crowd that is exasperated enough to tear me to pieces as a sorcerer.

  And yet, ever since the beginning of my monotonous daily thefts, anger has been welling up inside me, driving me to vague plans of vengeance.

  ‘Gockel knows more about this than I do,’ I thought. ‘I’m going to tell him what I know: that will make him more inclined to confide in me.’

  But that evening, while Gockel was emptying his heavy purse into my hands, I said nothing, and he left as usual with polite words that made no allusion to the strange bargain that had attached us to the same chain.

  I had a feeling that events were about to leap forward and rush like a torrent through my tranquil life. I was becoming more and more aware that Saint Beregonne’s Lane and its little houses were only a mask concealing some sort of horrible face.

  So far, fortunately for me, I had gone there only in broad daylight, because for some reason I dreaded to encounter the shadows of evening there. But one day I lingered later than usual, stubbornly pushing furniture around, turning drawers inside out, determined to discover something new. And the ‘new’ came of itself, in the form of a dull rumble, like that of heavy doors moving on rollers. I looked up and saw that the opalescent light had changed into an ashy semi-darkness. The panes of glass above the staircase were livid: the little courtyards were already filled with shadow.

  My heart tightened, but when the rumbling continued, reinforced by the powerful resonance of the house, my curiosity became stronger than my fear, and I began climbing the stairs to see where the noise was coming from.

  It was growing darker and darker, but before leaping back down the stairs like a madman and running out of the house, I was able to see.…There was no more wall! The staircase ended at the edge of an abyss dug out of the night, from which vague monstrosities were rising.

  I reached the door; behind me, something was furiously knocked over.

  The Mohlenstrasse gleamed before me like a haven. I ran faster. Something suddenly seized me with extreme savagery.

  ‘What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see where you’re going?’

  I found myself sitting on the pavement of the Mohlenstrasse, before a sailor who was rubbing his sore skull and looking at me in bewilderment. My coat was torn, my neck was bleeding.

  I immediately hurried away without wasting any time on apologies, to the supreme indignation of the sailor, who shouted after me that after colliding with him so brutally I should at least buy him a drink.

  Anita is gone, vanished!

  My heart is broken; I collapse, sobbing, on my useless gold.

  And yet her house is far from the zone of danger. Good God! I failed through an excess of prudence and love! One day, without mentioning the street, I showed her the line I had drawn on the map and told her that all the danger seemed to be concentrated along that sinuous trail. Her eyes glowed strangely at that moment. I should have known that the great spirit of adventure that animated her ancestors was not dead in her.

  Perhaps, in a flash of feminine intuition, she made a connection between that line and my sudden fortune.…Oh, how my life is disintegrating!

  There have been more murders and disappearances. And my Anita has been carried off in the bloody, inexplicable whirlwind!

  The case of Hans Mendell has given me a mad idea: those vaporous beings, as he described them, may not be invulnerable.

  Although Hans Mendell was not a distinguished man, I see no reason not to believe his story. He was a scoundrel who made his living as a mountebank and a cutthroat. When he was found, he had in his pocket the purses and watches of two unfortunate men whose corpses lay bleeding on the ground a few paces away from him.

  It would have been assumed that he was guilty of murder if he himself had not been found moaning with both arms torn from his body.

  Being a man with a powerful constitution, he was able to live long enough to answer the feverish questions of the magistrates and priests.

  He confessed that for several days he had followed a shadow, a kind of black mist, and robbed the bodies of the people it killed. On the night of his misfortune, he saw the black mist waiting in the middle of Post Street in the moonlight. He hid in an empty sentry-box and watched it. He saw other dark, vaporous, awkward forms that bounced like rubber balls, then disappeared.

  Soon he heard voices and saw two young men coming up the street. The black mist was no longer in sight, but he suddenly saw the two men writhe on their backs, then lie still.

  Mendell added that he had already observed the same sequence in those nocturnal murders on seven other occasions. He had always waited for the shadow to leave, then robbed the bodies. This shows that he had remarkable self-control, worthy of being put to a better use.

  As he was robbing the two bodies, he saw with alarm that the shadow had not left, but had only risen off the ground, interposing itself between him and the moon. He then saw that it had a roughly human shape. He tried to go back to the sentry-box but did not have time: the figure pounced on him.

  Mendell was an extraordinarily strong man. He struck an enormous blow and encountered a slight resistance, as though he were pushing his hand through a strong current of air.

  That was all he was able to say. His horrible wound allowed him to live only another hour after telling his story.

  The idea of avenging Anita has now taken root in my brain. I said to Gockel, ‘Don’t come any more. I need revenge and hatred, and your gold can no longer do anything for me.’

  He looked at me with that profound expression that was familiar to me by now.

  ‘Gockel,’ I said, ‘I’m going to take vengeance.’

  His face suddenly brightened, as though with great joy:

  ‘And…do you believe…Herr Doktor, that they will disappear?’

  I harshly ordered him to have a cart filled with fagots and casks of oil, raw alcohol and gunpowder, and to leave it without a driver early in the morning on the Mohlenstrasse. He bowed low like a servant, and as he was leaving he said to me, ‘May the Lord help you! May the Lord come to your aid!’

  I feel that these are the last lines I shall write in this journal.

  I piled up the fagots, streaming with oil and alcohol, against the big door. I laid down trails of gunpowder connecting the nearby small doors with other oil-soaked fagots. I placed charges of powder in all the cracks in the walls.

  The mysterious clamor continued all around me. This time I discerned in it abominable lamentations, human wails, echoes of horrible torments of the flesh. But my heart was agitated by tumultuous joy, because I felt around me a wild apprehension that came from them. They saw my terrible preparations and were unable to prevent them, for, as I had come to realize, only night released their frightful power.

  I calmly struck a light with my tinderbox. A moan passed, and the viburnum bushes quivered as though blown by a sudden stiff breeze. A long blue flame rose into the air, the fagots began crackling, fire crept along the trails of gunpowder.…

  I ran down the winding street, from bend to bend, feeling a little dizzy, as though I were going too fast down a spiral staircase that descended deep into the earth.

  The Deichstrasse and the whole surrounding neighborhood were in flames. From my window, I could see the sky turning yellow above
the rooftops. The weather was dry and the town’s water supply was nearly exhausted. A red band of sparks and flames hovered high above the street.

  The fire had been burning for a day and a night, but it was still far from the Mohlenstrasse. Saint Beregonne’s Lane was there, calm with its quivering viburnum bushes. Explosions rumbled in the distance.

  Another cart was there, loaded and left by Gockel. Not a soul was in sight: everyone had been drawn toward the formidable spectacle of the fire. It was not expected here.

  I walked from bend to bend to bend, sowing fagots, pools of oil and alcohol, and the dark frost of gunpowder. Suddenly, just as I had turned another bend, I stopped and stared. Three little houses, the everlasting three little houses, were burning calmly with pretty yellow flames in the peaceful air. It was as though even the fire respected their serenity, for it was doing its work without noise or ferocity. I realized that I was at the red edge of the conflagration that was destroying the town.

  With anguish in my soul, I moved back from that mystery that was about to die.

  I was near the Mohlenstrasse. I stopped in front of the first of the little doors, the one I had opened, trembling, a few weeks earlier. It was there that I would start the new fire.

  For the last time, I saw the kitchen, the austere parlor, and the staircase, which now ended at the wall, as before; and I felt that all this had become familiar, almost dear to me.

  On the big tray, the one I had stolen so many times before only to find it waiting for me again the next day, I saw some sheets of paper covered with elegant feminine handwriting.

  I picked them up. This was going to be my last theft on the shadowy street.

  Vampires! Vampires! Vampires!

  So ends the French manuscript. The last words, evoking the impure spirits of the night, are written across the page in sharp letters that cry out terror and despair. Thus must write those who, on a sinking ship, want to convey a last farewell to the families they hope will survive them.