The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  Shivering now so that his teeth chattered, he started off down the path, and then was aware that he did not wish to leave the tarn. The tarn was friendly; the only friend he had in all the world. As he stumbled along in the dark, this sense of loneliness grew. He was going home to an empty house. There had been a guest in it last night. Who was it? Why, Foster, of course – Foster with his silly laugh and amiable, mediocre eyes. Well, Foster would not be there now. No, he never would be there again.

  And suddenly Fenwick started to run. He did not know why, except that, now that he had left the tarn, he was lonely. He wished that he could have stayed there all night, but because he was cold he could not, and now he was running so that he might be at home with the lights and the familiar furniture – and all the things that he knew to reassure him.

  As he ran the shale and stones scattered beneath his feet. They made a tit-tattering noise under him, and someone else seemed to be running too. He stopped, and the other runner also stopped. He breathed in the silence. He was hot now. The perspiration was trickling down his cheeks. He could feel a dribble of it down his back inside his shirt. His knees were pounding. His heart was thumping. And all around him, the hills were so amazingly silent, now like India-rubber clouds that you could push in or pull out as you do those India-rubber faces, grey against the night sky of a crystal purple upon whose surface, like the twinkling eyes of boats at sea, stars were now appearing.

  His knees steadied, his heart beat less fiercely, and he began to run again. Suddenly he had turned the corner and was out at the hotel. Its lamps were kindly and reassuring. He walked then quietly along the lake-side path, and had it not been for the certainty that someone was treading behind him he would have been comfortable and at his ease. He stopped once or twice and looked back, and once he stopped and called out ‘Who’s there?’ Only the rustling trees answered.

  He had the strangest fancy, but his brain was throbbing so fiercely that he could not think, that it was the tarn that was following him, the tarn slipping, sliding along the road, being with him so that he should not be lonely. He could almost hear the tarn whisper in his ear: ‘We did that together, and so I do not wish you to bear all the responsibility yourself. I will stay with you, so that you are not lonely.’

  He climbed the road towards home, and there were the lights of his house. He heard the gate click behind him as though it were shutting him in. He went into the sitting-room, lighted and ready. There were the books that Foster had admired.

  The old woman who looked after him appeared.

  ‘Will you be having some tea, sir?’

  ‘No, thank you, Annie.’ ‘Will the other gentleman be wanting any?’

  ‘No; the other gentleman is away for the night.’

  ‘Then there will be only one for supper?’

  ‘Yes, only one for supper.’

  He sat in the corner of the sofa and fell instantly into a deep slumber.

  VI

  He woke when the old woman tapped him on the shoulder and told him that supper was served. The room was dark save for the jumping light of two uncertain candles. Those two red candlesticks – how he hated them up there on the mantelpiece! He had always hated them, and now they seemed to him to have something of the quality of Foster’s voice – that thin, reedy, piping tone.

  He was expecting at every moment that Foster would enter, and yet he knew that he would not. He continued to turn his head towards the door, but it was so dark there that you could not see. The whole room was dark except just there by the fireplace, where the two candlesticks went whining with their miserable twinkling plaint.

  He went into the dining-room and sat down to his meal. But he could not eat anything. It was odd – that place by the table where Foster’s chair should be. Odd, naked, and made a man feel lonely.

  He got up once from the table and went to the window, opened it and looked out. He listened for something. A trickle as of running water, a stir, through the silence, as though some deep pool were filling to the brim. A rustle in the trees, perhaps. An owl hooted. Sharply, as though someone had spoken to him unexpectedly behind his shoulder, he closed the window and looked back, peering under his dark eyebrows into the room.

  Later on he went up to bed.

  VII

  Had he been sleeping, or had he been lying lazily as one does, half-dozing, half-luxuriously not-thinking? He was wide awake now, utterly awake, and his heart was beating with apprehension. It was as though someone had called him by name. He slept always with his window a little open and the blind up. Tonight the moonlight shadowed in sickly fashion the objects in his room. It was not a flood of light nor yet a sharp splash, silvering a square, a circle, throwing the rest into ebony blackness. The light was dim, a little green, perhaps, like the shadow that comes over the hills just before dark.

  He stared at the window, and it seemed to him that something moved there. Within, or rather against the green-grey light, something silver-tinted glistened. Fenwick stared. It had the look, exactly, of slipping water.

  Slipping water! He listened, his head up, and it seemed to him that from beyond the window he caught the stir of water, not running, but rather welling up and up, gurgling with satisfaction as it filled and filled.

  He sat up higher in bed, and then saw that down the wallpaper beneath the window water was undoubtedly trickling. He could see it lurch to the projecting wood of the sill, pause, and then slip, slither down the incline. The odd thing was that it fell so silently.

  Beyond the window there was that odd gurgle, but in the room itself absolute silence. Whence could it come? He saw the line of silver rise and fall as the stream on the window-ledge ebbed and flowed.

  He must get up and close the window. He drew his legs above the sheets and blankets and looked down.

  He shrieked. The floor was covered with a shining film of water. It was rising. As he looked it had covered half the short stumpy legs of the bed. It rose without a wink, a bubble, a break! Over the sill it poured now in a steady flow, but soundless. Fenwick sat back in the bed, the clothes gathered to his chin, his eyes blinking, the Adam’s apple throbbing like a throttle in his throat.

  But he must do something, he must stop this. The water was now level with the seats of the chairs, but still was soundless. Could he but reach the door!

  He put down his naked foot, then cried again. The water was icy cold. Suddenly, leaning, staring at its dark unbroken sheen, something seemed to push him forward. He fell. His head, his face was under the icy liquid; it seemed adhesive and in the heart of its ice hot like melting wax. He struggled to his feet. The water was breast-high. He screamed again and again. He could see the looking-glass, the row of books, the picture of Durer’s ‘Horse,’ aloof, impervious. He beat at the water and flakes of it seemed to cling to him like scales of fish, clammy to his touch. He struggled, ploughing his way, towards the door.

  The water now was at his neck. Then something had caught him by the ankle. Something held him. He struggled, crying, ‘Let me go! Let me go! I tell you to let me go! I hate you! I hate you! I will not come down to you! I will not–’

  The water covered his mouth. He felt that someone pushed in his eyeballs with bare knuckles. A cold hand reached up and caught his naked thigh.

  VIII

  In the morning the little maid knocked and, receiving no answer, came in, as was her wont, with his shaving water. What she saw made her scream. She ran for the gardener.

  They took the body with its staring, protruding eyes, its tongue sticking out between the clenched teeth, and laid it on the bed.

  The only sign of disorder was an overturned water-jug. A small pool of water stained the carpet.

  It was a lovely morning. A twig of ivy idly, in the little breeze, tapped the pane.

  Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

  Bruno Schulz

  Translated into English by Celina Wieniewska

  Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) was a Polish writer of stories that share
some affinity with the work of Alfred Kubin, Franz Kafka, Leonora Carrington, and Michael Cisco, among others. He was shot dead by a Nazi officer when he ventured into an ‘Aryan’ section of his town during World War II. A great prose stylist, Schulz created a mythical childhood in his fiction that centered on surreal, sometimes grotesque, events. English-language translations include The Street of Crocodiles (1963) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1988). The title story from the latter collection, first published in 1937, is the tale of a strange sojourn by the narrator in which the weird seeps through in quiet but unsettling ways.

  The journey was long. The train, which ran only once a week on that forgotten branch line, carried no more than a few passengers. Never before had I seen such archaic coaches; withdrawn from other lines long before, they were spacious as living rooms, dark, and with many recesses. Corridors crossed the empty compartments at various angles; labyrinthine and cold, they exuded an air of strange and frightening neglect. I moved from coach to coach, looking for a comfortable corner. Drafts were everywhere: cold currents of air shooting through the interiors, piercing the whole train from end to end. Here and there a few people sat on the floor, surrounded by their bundles, not daring to occupy the empty seats. Besides, those high, convex oilcloth-covered seats were cold as ice and sticky with age. At the deserted stations no passengers boarded the train. Without a whistle, without a groan, the train would slowly start again, as if lost in meditation.

  For a time I had the company of a man in a ragged railwayman’s uniform – silent, engrossed in his thoughts. He pressed a handkerchief to his swollen, aching face. Later even he disappeared, having slipped out unobserved at some stop. He left behind him the mark of his body in the straw that lay on the floor, and a shabby black suitcase he had forgotten.

  Wading in straw and rubbish, I walked shakily from coach to coach. The open doors of the compartments were swinging in the drafts. There was not a single passenger left on the train. At last, I met a conductor, in the black uniform of that line. He was wrapping a thick scarf around his neck and collecting his things – a lantern, an official logbook.

  ‘We are nearly there, sir,’ he said, looking at me with washed-out eyes.

  The train was coming slowly to a halt, without puffing, without rattling, as if, together with the last breath of steam, life were slowly escaping from it. We stopped. Everything was empty and still, with no station buildings in sight. The conductor showed me the direction of the Sanatorium. Carrying my suitcase, I started walking along a white narrow road toward the dark trees of a park. With some curiosity, I looked at the landscape. The road along which I was walking led up to the brow of a gentle hill, from which a wide expanse of country could be seen. The day was uniformly gray, extinguished, without contrasts. And perhaps under the influence of that heavy and colorless aura, the great basin of the valley, in which a vast wooded landscape was arranged like theatrical scenery, seemed very dark. The rows of trees, one behind the other, ever grayer and more distant, descended the gentle slopes to the left and right. The whole landscape, somber and grave, seemed almost imperceptibly to float, to shift slightly like a sky full of billowing, stealthily moving clouds. The fluid strips and bands of forest seemed to rustle and grow with rustling like a tide that swells gradually toward the shore. The rising white road wound itself dramatically through the darkness of that woody terrain. I broke a twig from a roadside tree. The leaves were dark, almost black. It was a strangely charged blackness, deep and benevolent, like restful sleep. All the different shades of gray in the landscape derived from that one color. It was the color of a cloudy summer dusk in our part of the country, when the landscape has become saturated with water after a long period of rain and exudes a feeling of self-denial, a resigned and ultimate numbness that does not need the consolation of color.

  It was completely dark among the trees of the parkland. I groped my way blindly on a carpet of soft needles. When the trees thinned, the planks of a footbridge resounded under my feet. Beyond it, against the blackness of the trees, loomed the gray walls of the many-windowed hotel that advertised itself as the Sanatorium. The double glass door of the entrance stood open. The little footbridge, with shaky handrails made of birch branches, led straight to it.

  In the hallway there was semidarkness and a solemn silence. I moved on tiptoe from door to door, trying to see the numbers on them. Rounding a corner, I at last met a chambermaid. She had run out of a room, as if having torn herself from someone’s importuning arms, and was breathless and excited. She could hardly understand what I was saying. I had to repeat it. She was fidgeting helplessly.

  Had my telegram reached them? She spread her arms, her eyes moved sideways. She was only awaiting an opportunity to leap back behind the half-opened door, at which she kept squinting.

  ‘I have come a long way. I booked a room here by telegram,’ I said with some impatience. ‘Whom shall I see about it?’

  She did not know. ‘Perhaps you could wait in the restaurant,’ she babbled. ‘Everybody is asleep just now. When the doctor gets up, I shall announce you.’

  ‘They are asleep? But it is daytime, not night.’

  ‘Here everybody is asleep all the time. Didn’t you know?’ she said, looking at me with interest now. ‘Besides, it is never night here,’ she added coyly.

  She had obviously given up the idea of escape, for she was now picking fussily at the lace of her apron. I left her there and entered the half-lighted restaurant. There were some tables, and a large buffet ran the length of one wall. I was now feeling a little hungry and was pleased to see some pastries and a cake on the buffet.

  I placed my suitcase on one of the tables. They were all unoccupied. I clapped my hands. No response. I looked into the next room, which was larger and brighter. That room had a wide window or loggia overlooking the landscape I already knew, which, framed by the window, seemed like a constant reminder of mourning, suggestive of deep sorrow and resignation. On some of the tables stood the remains of recent meals, uncorked bottles, half-empty glasses. Here and there lay the tips, not yet picked up by the waiters. I returned to the buffet and looked at the pastries and cake. They looked most appetizing. I wondered whether I should help myself; I suddenly felt extremely greedy. There was a particular kind of apple flan that made my mouth water. I was about to lift a piece of it with a silver knife when I felt somebody behind me. The chambermaid had entered the room in her soft slippers and was touching my back lightly.

  ‘The doctor will see you now,’ she said looking at her fingernails.

  She stood facing me and, conscious of the magnetism of her wriggling hips, did not turn away.

  She provoked me, increasing and decreasing the distance between our bodies as, having left the restaurant, we passed many numbered doors. The passage became ever darker. In almost complete darkness, she brushed against me fleetingly.

  ‘Here is the doctor’s door,’ she whispered. ‘Please go in.’

  Dr. Gotard was standing in the middle of the room to receive me. He was a short, broad-shouldered man with a dark beard.

  ‘We received your telegram yesterday,’ he said. ‘We sent our carriage to the station, but you must have arrived by another train. Unfortunately, the railway connections are not very good. Are you well?’

  ‘Is my father alive?’ I asked, staring anxiously into his calm face.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he answered, calmly meeting my questioning eyes. ‘That is, within the limits imposed by the situation,’ he added, half closing his eyes. ‘You know as well as I that from the point of view of your home, from the perspective of your own country, your father is dead. This cannot be entirely remedied. That death throws a certain shadow on his existence here.’

  ‘But does Father himself know it, does he guess?’ I asked him in a whisper.

  He shook his head with deep conviction. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said in a low voice. ‘None of our patients know it, or can guess. The whole secret of the operation,’ he added, ready
to demonstrate its mechanism on his fingers, ‘is that we have put back the clock. Here we are always late by a certain interval of time of which we cannot define the length. The whole thing is a matter of simple relativity. Here your father’s death, the death that has already struck him in your country, has not occurred yet.’

  ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘my father must be on his deathbed or about to die.’ ‘You don’t understand me,’ he said in a tone of tolerant impatience. ‘Here we reactivate time past, with all its possibilities, therefore also including the possibility of a recovery.’ He looked at me with a smile, stroking his beard. ‘But now you probably want to see your father. According to your request, we have reserved for you the other bed in your father’s room. I shall take you there.’

  When we were out in the dark passage, Dr. Gotard spoke in a whisper. I noticed that he was wearing felt slippers, like the chambermaid. ‘We allow our patients to sleep long hours to spare their vitality. Besides, there is nothing better to do.’

  At last, we stopped in front of one of the doors, and he put a finger to his lips. ‘Enter quietly. Your father is asleep. Settle down to sleep, too. This is the best thing for you to do. Goodbye for now.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ I whispered, my heart beating fast.

  I pressed the handle, and the door opened, like unresisting lips that part in sleep. I went in. The room was almost empty, gray and bare. Under a small window, my father was lying on an ordinary wooden bed, covered by a pile of bedding, fast asleep. His breathing extracted layers of snoring from the depths of his breast. The whole room seemed to be lined with snores from floor to ceiling, and yet new layers were being added all the time. With deep emotion, I looked at Father’s thin, emaciated face, now completely engrossed in the activity of snoring – a remote, trancelike face, which, having left its earthly aspect, was confessing its existence somewhere on a distant shore by solemnly telling its minutes.