The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  ‘And even after white men came – what about the early writings of the old Dutch settlers, what about Jan Van der Rhees and Woulter Van Twiller? Even some of Washington Irving’s writings have a nasty twist to them, if you once realize it! And there are some mighty queer passages in “The History of the City of New York” – mention of guard patrols kept for no rational purpose in early streets at night, particularly in the region of cemeteries; of forays and excursions in the lightless dark, and flintlocks popping, and graves hastily dug and filled in before dawn woke the city to life…

  ‘And then the modern writers – Lord! There’s a whole library of them on the subject. One of them, a great student of the subject, had almost as much data on Them from his reading as I’d gleaned from my years of study down here. Oh, yes; I learned a lot from Lovecraft – and he got a lot from me, too! That’s where the – well, what you might call the authenticity came from in some of his yarns that attracted the most attention! Oh, of course he had to soft-pedal the strongest parts of it – just as you’re going to have to do if you ever mention this in your own writings! But even with the worst played down, there’s still enough horror and nightmare in it to blast a man’s soul, if he lets himself think on what goes on down there, below the blessed sanity of the earth’s mercifully concealing crust. Far below…

  ‘We’ve figured out – we who’ve been studying Them all this time, that They must have been pretty numerous once. No wonder the Indians sold this place so cheaply! You’d sell your home cheaply, too, if it were fairly overrun with monstrous noxious vermin that – but with civilization’s coming they were decimated, killed off, pogromed against, blasted with fire and steel by men whose utter ruthlessness sprang from soul-shuddering detestation, who slew and kept silent about their slaying, lest their fellowmen think them mad – until finally the blasted remnant of the Things went far underground, burrowed down like worms to charnel depths that – well, we daren’t conjecture just where, but we think that there’s some fault in the basic bedrock of the Island, some monstrous cavern whose edge this lowest of all the subway tunnels taps, and which lets them through somehow into the tubes…

  ‘Oh, it took us a long time to find all that out. At first we thought we had to patrol the whole subway system of the city! We had guards even out under the river, and over in Brooklyn and Queens. We were even afraid they’d get into upper levels of the tunnels, perhaps into the very deserted streets of Manhattan during the pre-dawn hours. We had half the police department down here in those days, even the mounted force. Yes, indeed; though God knows what even a trained police horse would do if it ever came face to face with one of those things! But horses were faster than the hand-cars we used then, and could cover more territory.

  ‘But as time went on we got things pretty well localized. It’s only in this one stretch of tunnel that the danger is, and only here in certain hours of the night. Don’t ask me why they never come up in daylight; for it’s always night down here, you know, hundreds of feet below the surface. Maybe it’s the constant passage of the trains – they shuttle by at two-minute intervals all day long, you know, and until the Broadway theatres close at night. Only for about four hours of the night is there a lull when long miles of tunnel are lifeless and deserted and silent, when anything could come and go at will in them and not be seen.

  ‘And so it’s only during these hours that we really worry, you see. It’s only now that we’re vigilant and ready. Although of course it’s no longer warfare, you understand. We hunt them now, they don’t hunt us any more! We run them down howling with terror, kill them or capture them as we will – oh yes, I said capture! A half-dozen times we’ve had a sort of mad “Bronx Zoo” of our own down here – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say a living “Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.” I have cages in my laboratory, and there have been times when it seemed judicious for influential people above ground to – well, to realize just how important is the work we’re doing down here! So when we have a really stubborn skeptic to our program we’d take him in there, hand him a flashlight and let him train it himself on what was prisoned there in total darkness – and then we’d stand by to catch him as he fainted! Oh, a lot of city officials and politicians have been down here. Why not? They couldn’t possibly speak of the experience afterward – they’d just be locked up as lunatics if they did! And it made them much more liberal about funds. Our menagerie was a great success, only we just couldn’t keep it going for very long at a time! We’d get so soul-sick at the very proximity of the creatures that we’d have to kill them finally. There was just no putting up with them for any length of time!

  ‘Oh, it’s not so much the appearance of the Things, or even what they eat – we got an unlimited supply of that from the city morgue; and to anyone who’s spent half his life in dissecting-rooms, as I have, it might be a lot worse. But there’s a sort of cosmic horror the Things exude that – well, it’s quite beyond description. You just can’t breathe the same air with them, live together in the same sane world! And in the end we’d have to gun them and throw them back underground to their friends and neighbors – who were waiting for them, apparently. At least we’ve opened the shallow graves a few days later and there’d be only a gnawed bone or two there.…

  ‘And then, of course, we kept them alive in order to study their habits. I’ve filled two volumes with notes for my successors who’ll carry on the fight when I’m gone – oh, yes, old boy! It’ll always have to be carried on, I fear! There’s no possibility of ever really wiping them out, you know. All we can do is hold our own. The fight will go on so long as this particular tunnel is occupied. And can’t you just see the City Fathers consenting to abandon twenty million dollars’ worth of subway tunnels for nothing? “I’m sorry, gentlemen; but, you see, the place is infested with–” God! What a laughing stock anyone would be who even suggested that – above ground! Why, even on our own furloughs, when we walk sunlit streets among our fellow men, with God’s own blue sky above and God’s own clean air about us – even we wonder whether all this foulness isn’t just a bad dream! It’s hard, up there, to realize what can go on down in the crepuscular earth, the mad gnawing eternal darkness far below – Hello!’

  The telephone was ringing.

  Somehow I didn’t listen as he spoke briefly into it, perhaps because I was listening to something else – to a faint crackling from that great blackboard on the wall, where one little light (no glowing worm this time, but only one minute spark) kept flicking oddly on and off and on again. ‘79th Street’ it marked, over and over. ‘79th Street – 79th–’

  My friend hung up the phone at length, and stood up. ‘Queer,’ he said softly. ‘Very queer indeed! The first in months; and tonight, now, while we were talking. It makes one wonder, you know – about those supernatural telepathic powers that they’re said to have…’

  Something went past in the tunnel outside, something that moved so fast that I could scarcely make it out; just a little low platform on four wheels, with no visible engine to propel it. Yet it scudded along with the speed of a racing car. Uniformed men rode the bucking thing, crouching with glinting objects in their hands.

  ‘Riot Car Number 1!’ my friend said, grimly. ‘Our own version of the “squad automobiles” above ground. Just one of the little electric hand-cars used in subway construction – but “souped up” by our engineers until it’ll do nearly eighty miles an hour. It could traverse the entire sector in less than five minutes, if it had to. But it doesn’t, of course. Another one, also with machine-gunners aboard, left 105th Street at the same time. They’ll meet somewhere along the tunnel’s length – with the – er, disturbance in between. Let’s listen to them!’

  He crossed the room to the strange apparatus, threw switches and adjusted dials. There was a burring and crackling from what looked like an old-fashioned radio amplifier that stood on one of the cabinets.

  ‘Microphones every hundred feet along the tunnel!’ said my friend. ‘Another small fort
une to install, of course; but another great step forward in our efficiency. A man listens all night long at a switchboard – and you’d be surprised to know what he hears sometimes! We have to change operators pretty often. Ah! there we are. Microphone Number 290 – approximately a thousand feet below one of the busiest corners, even at this hour of the night, in all a great metropolis. And – listen! Hear that?’

  ‘That’ was a sound that brought me out of my chair, a strange high tittering, blasphemously off key, that merged into a growl and a moan…

  ‘There we are!’ my friend grated. ‘One of them, certainly – perhaps more than one. Hear that scratching, and the rustle of the gravel? All unsuspecting, of course, that they’re broadcasting their presence; unaware that we modern human beings have got ourselves a few “supernatural” powers of our own, nowadays; and unaware that, from both directions, death is sweeping down upon them on truckling wheels. But a little moment more and – ah! hear that shriek? That howling? That means they’ve sighted one of the cars! They’re fleeing madly along the tunnel now – the voices get fainter. And now – yes! Now they double back. The other car! They’re trapped, caught between them. No time to dig, to burrow down into their saving Mother Earth like the vermin they are. No, no, you devils! We’ve got you! Got you! Hear ’em yell, hear ’em shriek in agony! That’s the lights, you know. Blazing searchlights trained on dark-accustomed bodies; burning, searing, withering them like actual blazing heat! And now “Brrr-rat-tat-tat!” That’s our machine-guns going into action – silenced guns, with Maxims on them so that the echoes won’t carry to upper levels and make men ask questions – but throwing slugs of lead, for all that, into cringing white bodies and flattened white skulls…Shriek! Shriek, you beasts from Hell! Shriek, you monsters from the charnel depths! Shriek on, and see what good it does you. You’re dead! Dead! DEAD – Well, you blasted fool, what are you staring at?’

  To save my life I couldn’t have answered him. I couldn’t look away from his blazing eyes, from his body crouched as if he would spring at me across the room, from his teeth bared in a bestial snarl…

  For a long moment that tableau held. Then suddenly he dropped into a chair, flung his hands up over his face. I stood regarding him, my mind sickly ticking off details. God! Why had I not seen them before. That lengthening of jaw, that flattening of forehead and cranium – no human head could be shaped like that!

  At last he spoke, not looking up. ‘I know!’ he said softly. ‘I’ve felt the change coming on me for a long time now. It’s coming over all of us, bit by bit, but on me the worst, for I’ve been here the longest. That’s why I almost never go above ground any more, even on leave. The lights are dim down here. But I wouldn’t dare let even you see my face in sunlight!

  ‘Twenty-five years, you see – twenty-five long dragging years down here in Hell itself. It was bound to leave a mark, of course. I was prepared for that. But, oh, Great Powers above! If I’d for one instant dreamed what it was to be! Worse, oh, how much worse than any mark of the beast!…

  ‘And it’s spiritual, you know, as well as physical. I get…cravings, sometimes, down here in the night’s loneliness; thought and charnel desires that would blast your very soul if I were to whisper them to you. And they’ll get worse, I know, and worse until at last I run mad in the tunnel like that poor devil I told you about and my men shoot me down like a dog as they already have orders to do if –

  ‘And yet the thing interests me, I’ll admit; it interests me scientifically, even though it horrifies my very soul, even though it damns me for ever. For it shows how They may have come about – must have come about, in fact, in the world’s dim dawn; perhaps never quite human, of course, perhaps never Neanderthal or even Piltdown; something even lower, closer linked to the primeval beast, but that when driven underground, into caves and then beneath them by Man’s coming, retrograded century by uncounted century down to the worm-haunted darkness – just as we poor devils are retrograding down here from very contact with them – until at last none of us will ever be able again to walk above in the blessed sunlit air among our fellow men–’

  With a roar and a howl the thing was upon us, out of total darkness. Instinctively I drew back as its headlights passed; every object in the little room rattled from the reverberation. Then the power-car was by, and there was only the ‘klackety-klack, klackety-klack’ of wheels and lighted windows flicking by like bits of film on a badly connected projection machine.

  ‘The Four-Fifteen Express,’ he said heavily, ‘from the Bronx. Safe and sound, you’ll notice, its occupants all unsuspecting of how they were safeguarded; of how they’ll always be safeguarded…but at what a cost! At what an awful cost!

  ‘The Four-Fifteen Express. That means it’s dawn, you know, in the city overhead. Rays of the rising sun are gilding the white skyscrapers of Manhattan; a whole great city begins to wake to morning life.

  ‘But there’s no dawn for us down here, of course. There’ll never be a dawn for poor lost souls down here in the eternal dark, far, far below…’

  Smoke Ghost

  Fritz Leiber

  Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) was an influential, award-winning American writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction. H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Graves, and Carl Jung all helped inspire his fiction. Although perhaps best-known for the swords-and-sorcery Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, Leiber also wrote several sui generis macabre novels and stories. Our Lady of Darkness (1977) is among the best-known of his horror novels and, like much of his later fiction, includes autobiography by way of his real-life struggles with depression and alcoholism. Along with such novels, stories like ‘The Girl with the Hungry Eyes’ (1949) and the classic reprinted here, ‘Smoke Ghost’ (1941), made Leiber a key forerunner of the urban weird of writers like Ramsey Campbell.

  Miss Millick wondered just what had happened to Mr. Wran. He kept making the strangest remarks when she took dictation. Just this morning he had quickly turned around and asked, ‘Have you ever seen a ghost, Miss Millick?’ And she had tittered nervously and replied, ‘When I was a girl there was a thing in white that used to come out of the closet in the attic bedroom when I slept there, and moan. Of course it was just my imagination. I was frightened of lots of things.’ And he had said, ‘I don’t mean that kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories on its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books.’ And she hadn’t known what to say.

  He’d never been like this before. Of course he might be joking, but it didn’t sound that way. Vaguely Miss Millick wondered whether he mightn’t be seeking some sort of sympathy from her. Of course, Mr. Wran was married and had a little child, but that didn’t prevent her from having daydreams. The daydreams were not very exciting, still they helped fill up her mind. But now he was asking her another of those unprecedented questions.

  ‘Have you ever thought what a ghost of our times would look like, Miss Millick? Just picture it. A smoky composite face with the hungry anxiety of the unemployed, the neurotic restlessness of the person without purpose, the jerky tension of the high-pressure metropolitan worker, the uneasy resentment of the striker, the callous opportunism of the scab, the aggressive whine of the panhandler, the inhibited terror of the bombed civilian, and a thousand other twisted emotional patterns. Each one overlying and yet blending with the other, like a pile of semi-transparent masks?’

  Miss Millick gave a little self-conscious shiver and said, ‘That would be terrible. What an awful thing to think of.’

  She peered furtively across the desk. Was he going crazy? She remembered having heard that there had been something impressively abnormal about Mr. Wran’s childhood, but she couldn’t recall what it was. If only she could do something – laugh at his mood or ask him what was really wrong. She shifted the extra pencils in her left hand and mechanically traced over some o
f the shorthand curlicues in her notebook.

  ‘Yet, that’s just what such a ghost or vitalized projection would look like, Miss Millick,’ he continued, smiling in a tight way. ‘It would grow out of the real world. It would reflect all the tangled, sordid, vicious, things. All the loose ends. And it would be very grimy. I don’t think it would seem white or wispy or favour graveyards. It wouldn’t moan. But it would mutter unintelligibly, and twitch at your sleeve. Like a sick, surly ape. What would such a thing want from a person, Miss Millick? Sacrifice? Worship? Or just fear? What could you do to stop it from troubling you?’

  Miss Millick giggled nervously. There was an expression beyond her powers of definition in Mr. Wran’s ordinary, flat-cheeked, thirtyish face, silhouetted against the dusty window. He turned away and stared out into the grey downtown atmosphere that rolled in from the railroad yards and the mills. When he spoke again his voice sounded far away.

  ‘Of course, being immaterial, it couldn’t hurt you physically – at first. You’d have to be peculiarly sensitive even to see it, or be aware of it at all. But it would begin to influence your actions. Make you do this. Stop you from doing that. Although only a projection, it would gradually get its hooks into the world of things as they are. Might even get control of suitably vacuous minds. Then it could hurt whomever it wanted.’

  Miss Millick squirmed and read back her shorthand, like the books said you should do when there was a pause. She became aware of the failing light and wished Mr. Wran would ask her to turn on the overhead. She felt scratchy, as if soot were sifting down on to her skin.

  ‘It’s a rotten world, Miss Millick,’ said Mr. Wran, talking at the window. ‘Fit for another morbid growth of superstition. It’s time the ghosts, or whatever you call them, took over and began a rule of fear. They’d be no worse than men.’