The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  ‘Hello,’ Lipsitz whispers idiotically, feeling no horror any more but emotion of a quite other kind. The big warm presence before him surveys him. Will he be found innocent? He licks his lips. They have come at last, he thinks. They have risen; they are going to wipe all this out. Me, too? But he does not care; a joy he can’t possibly control rises in him as he sees gold glinting on the broad chest fur. He licks his dry lips again, swallows.

  ‘Welcome. Your Majesty.’

  The Beast-King makes no response; the eyes leave him and go gravely toward the aisles beyond. Involuntarily Lipsitz backs aside. The King’s vibrissae are fanning steadily, bringing the olfactory news, the quiet tooth-click starts. When the apparition comes forward a pace Lipsitz is deeply touched to see the typical half-hop, the ratly carriage. The King’s coat is lustrous gray-brown, feral pelage. Of course. It is a natural male, too; he smiles timidly, seeing that the giant body has the familiar long hump, the heavy rear-axle loading. Is old Snedecor translated into some particle of this wonder? The cellar is unbreathing, hushed except for the meditative click-click from the King.

  ‘You, you are going to…’ Lipsitz tries but is struck dumb by the sense of something happening all around him. Invisible, inaudible – but tangible as day. An emergence, yes! In the rooms beyond they are emerging, coming out from the score upon score of cages, boxes, pens, racks, shackles and wires – all of them emerging, coming to the King. All of them, blinded rabbits, mutilated hamsters, damaged cats and rats and brain-holed rhesus quietly knuckling along, even the paralyzed dogs moving somehow, coming toward their King.

  And at this moment Lipsitz realizes the King is turning too, the big brown body is wheeling, quite normally away from him, going away toward the deeper darkness in the end of the coal bay. They are leaving him!

  ‘Wait!’ He stumbles forward over the dead rat pie; he cannot bear to lose this. ‘Please…’

  Daring all, he reaches out and touches the flank of the magical beast, expecting he knows not what. The flank is warm, is solid! The King glances briefly back at him, still moving away. Boldly Lipsitz strides closer, comes alongside, his hand now resting firmly on the withers as they go.

  But they are headed straight at what he knows is only wall, though he can see nothing. The cellar ends there. No matter – he will not let go of the magic, no, and he steps out beside the moving King, thinking, I am an animal too! – And finds at the last instant that his averted, flinching head is moving through dark nothing, through a blacker emptiness where the King is leading – they are going, going out.

  Perhaps an old sewer, he thinks, lurching along beside the big benign presence, remembering tales of forgotten tunnels under this old city, into which the new subway has bored. Yes, that’s what it must be. He is finding he can see again in a pale ghostly way, can now walk upright. His left hand is tight on the shoulders of the calmly pacing beast, feeling the living muscles play beneath the fur, bringing him joy and healing. Where are the others?

  He dares a quick look back and sees them. They are coming. The dim way behind is filled with quiet beasts, moving together rank on rank as far as he can sense, animals large and small. He can hear their peaceful rustling now. And they are not only the beasts of his miserable lab, he realizes, but a torrent of others – he has glimpsed goats, turtles, a cow, raccoons, skunks, an opossum and what appears as a small monkey riding on a limping spaniel. Even birds are there, hopping and fluttering above!

  My God, it is everything, he thinks. It is Hamlin in reverse; all the abused ones, the gentle ones, are leaving the world. He risks another glance back and thinks he can see a human child too and maybe an old person among the throng, all measuredly, silently moving together in the dimness. An endless host going, going out at last, going away. And he is feeling their emanation, the gentleness of it, the unspeaking warmth. He is happier than he has been ever in his life.

  ‘You’re taking us away,’ he says to the King-Beast beside him. ‘The ones who can’t cut it. We’re all leaving for good, isn’t that it?’

  There is no verbal answer; only a big-stemmed ear swivels to him briefly as the King goes gravely on. Lipsitz needs no speech, no explanation. He simply walks alongside letting the joy rise in him. Why had it always been forbidden to be gentle? he wonders. Did they really see it as a threat, to have hated us so? But that is all over now, all over and gone, he is sure, although he has no slightest idea where this may be leading, this procession into chthonian infinity. For this moment it is enough to feel the silent communion, the reassurance rising through him from his hand on the flank of the great spirit-beast. The flank is totally solid; he can feel all the workings of life; it is the body of a real animal. But it is also friendship beyond imagining; he has never known anything as wonderful as this communion, not sex or sunsets or even the magic hour on his first bike. It is as if everything is all right now, will be all right forever – griefs he did not even know he carried are falling from him, leaving him light as smoke.

  Crippled, he had been; crippled from the years of bearing it, not just the lab, the whole thing. Everything. He can hardly believe the relief. A vagrant thought brushes him: Who will remain? If there is anything to care for, to be comforted, who will care? He floats it away, concentrating on the comfort that emanates from the strange life at his side, the myth-beast ambling in the most ordinary way through this dark conduit, which is now winding down, or perhaps up and down, he cannot tell.

  The paving under his feet looks quite commonplace, damp and cracked. Beside him the great rat’s muscles bunch and stretch as each hind leg comes under; he glances back and smiles to see the King’s long ring-scaled tail curve right, curve left, carried in the relaxed-alert mode. No need for fluffy fur now. He is, he realizes, going into mysteries. Inhuman mysteries, perhaps. He doesn’t care. He is among his kind. Where they are going he will go. Even to inhumanity, even alone.

  But he is not, he realizes as his eyes adapt more and more, alone after all! A human figure is behind him on the far side of the King, quietly threading its way forward, overtaking him. A girl – is it a girl? Yes. He can scarcely make her out, but as she comes closer still he sees with growing alarm that it is a familiar body – it could be, oh God, it is! Sheila.

  Not Sheila, here! No, no.

  But light-footed, she has reached him, is walking even with him, stretching out her hand, too, to touch the moving King.

  And then to his immense, unspeakable relief he sees that she is of course not Sheila – how could it be? Not Sheila at all, only a girl of the same height, with the same dove-breasted close-coupled curves that speak to his desire, the same heavy dark mane. Her head turns toward him across the broad back of the King, and he sees that, although her features are like Sheila’s, the face is wholly different, open, informed with innocence. An Eve in this second morning of the world. Sheila’s younger sister perhaps, he wonders dazedly, seeing that she is looking at him now, that her lips form a gentle smile.

  ‘Hello,’ he cannot help whispering, fearful to break the spell, to inject harsh human sound into his progress. But the spell does not break; indeed, the girl’s face comes clearer. She puts up a hand to push him back, the other firmly on the flank of the King.

  ‘Hello.’ Her voice is very soft but in no way fragile. She is looking at him with the eyes of Sheila, but eyes so differently warmed and luminous that he wants only to gaze delighted as they pass to whatever destination; he is so overwhelmed to meet a vulnerable human soul in those lambent brown eyes. A soul? he thinks, feeling his unbodied feet step casually, firmly on the way to eternity, perhaps. What an unfashionable word. He is not religious, he does not believe there are any gods or souls, except as a shorthand term denoting – what? – compassion or responsibility, all that. And so much argument about it all, too; his mind is momentarily invaded by a spectral horde of old debating scholars, to whom he had paid less than no attention in his classroom days. But he is oddly prepared to hear the girl recite conversationally, ‘There is no
error more powerful in leading feeble minds astray from the straight path of virtue than the supposition that the soul of brutes is of the same nature as our own,’

  ‘Descartes,’ he guesses.

  She nods, smiling across the big brown shape between them. The King’s great leaflike ears have flickered to their interchange, returned to forward hold.

  ‘He started it all, didn’t he?’ Lipsitz says, or perhaps only thinks. ‘That they’re robots, you can do anything to them. Their pain doesn’t count. But we’re animals too,’ he adds somberly, unwilling to let even a long-dead philosopher separate him from the flow of this joyous River. Or was it that? A faint disquiet flicks him, is abolished.

  She nods again; the sweet earnest woman-face of her almost kills him with love. But as he stares the disquiet flutters again; is there beneath her smile a transparency, a failure of substance – even a sadness, as though she was moving to some inexorable loss. No; it is all right. It is.

  ‘Where are we going, do you know?’ he asks, against some better judgment. The King-Beast flicks an ear; but Lipsitz must know, now.

  She smiles, unmistakably mischievous, considering him.

  ‘To where all the lost things go,’ she says. ‘It’s very beautiful. Only…’ She falls silent.

  ‘Only what?’ He is uneasy again, seeing she has turned away, is walking with her small chin resolute. Dread grows in him, cannot be dislodged. The moments of simple joy are past now; he fears that he still has some burden. It is perhaps a choice? Whatever it is, it’s looming around him or in him as they go – an impending significance he wishes desperately to avoid. It is not a thinning out nor an awakening; he clutches hard at the strong shoulders of the King, the magical leader, feels his reassuring warmth. All things are in the lotus.…But loss impends.

  ‘Only what?’ he asks again, knowing he must and must not. Yes; he is still there, is moving with them to the final refuge. The bond holds. ‘The place where lost things go is very beautiful, only what?’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’ she asks him with the light of the world in her face.

  It is a choice, he realizes, trembling now. It is not for free, it’s not that simple. But can’t I just stop this, just go on? Yes, he can – he knows it. Maybe. But he hears his human voice persist.

  ‘Only what?’

  ‘Only it isn’t real,’ she says. And his heart breaks.

  And suddenly it is all breaking too – a fearful thin wave of emptiness slides through him, sends him stumbling, his handhold lost. ‘No! Wait!’ He reaches desperately; he can feel them still near him, feel their passage all around. ‘Wait…’ He understands now, understands with searing grief that it really is the souls of things, and perhaps himself, that are passing, going away forever. They have stood it as long as they can and now they are leaving. The pain has culminated in this, that they leave us – leave me, leave me behind in a clockwork Cartesian world in which nothing will mean anything forever.

  ‘Oh, wait,’ he cries in dark nowhere, unable to bear the loss, the still-living comfort, passing away. Only it isn’t real, what does that mean? Is it the choice, that reality is that I must stay behind and try, and try?

  He doesn’t know, but can only cry, ‘No, please take me! Let me come too!’ staggering after them through unreality, feeling them still there, still possible, ahead, around. It is wrong; he is terrified somewhere that he is failing, doing wrong. But his human heart can only yearn for the sweetness, for the great benevolent King-Beast so surely leading, to feel again their joy. ‘Please, I want to go with you–’

  – And yes! For a last instant he has it; he touches again the warmth and life, sees the beautiful lost face that is and isn’t Sheila – they are there! And he tries with all his force crazily to send himself after them, to burst from his skin, his life if need be – only to share again that gentleness. ‘Take me!’

  But it is no good – he can’t; they have vanished and he has fallen kneeling on dank concrete, nursing his head in empty shaking hands. It was in vain, and it was wrong. Or was it? his fading thought wonders as he feels himself black out. Did something of myself go too, fly to its selfish joy? He does not know.

  …And will never know, as he returns to sodden consciousness, makes out that he is sprawled like a fool in the dirt behind his rat cages with the acid taste of wormwood sickly in his mouth and an odd dryness and lightness in his heart.

  What the hell had he been playing at? That absinthe is a bummer, he thinks, picking himself up and slapping his clothes disgustedly. This filthy place, what a fool he’d been to think he could work here. And these filthy rats. There’s something revolting back here on the floor, too. Leave it for posterity; he drags the rack back in place.

  All right, get this over. Humming to himself, he turns the power hose on the messy floor, gives the stupid rats in their cages a blast too for good measure. There are his jars – but whatever had possessed him, trying to kill them individually like that? Hours it would take. He knows a simpler way if he can find a spare garbage can.

  Good, here it is. He brings it over and starts pulling out cage after cage, dumping them all in together, Nests, babies, carrots, crap and all. Shrieks, struggling. Tough tit, friends. The ether can is almost full; he pours the whole thing over the crying mess and jams on the lid, humming louder. The can walls reverberate with teeth. Not quite enough gas, no matter.

  He sits down on it and notices that a baby rat has run away hiding behind his shoe. Mechanical mouse, a stupid automaton. He stamps on its back and kicks it neatly under Sheila’s hamster rack, wondering why Descartes has popped into his thoughts. There is no error more powerful – Shit with old D., let’s think about Sheila. There is no error more powerful than the belief that some cunt can’t be had. Somehow he feels sure that he will find that particular pussy-patch wide open to him any day now. As soon as his project gets under way.

  Because he has an idea. (That absinthe wasn’t all bad.) Oh yes. An idea that’ll pin old Welch’s ears back. In fact it may be too much for old Welch, too, quotes, commercial. Well, fuck old Welch, this is one project somebody will buy, that’s for sure. Does the Mafia have labs? Ho ho, far out.

  And fuck students too, he thinks genially, wrestling the can to the entrance, ignoring sounds from within. No more Polinskys, no more shit, teaching is for suckers. My new project will take care of that. Will there be a problem getting subjects? No – look at all the old walking carcasses they sell for dogfood. And there’s a slaughterhouse right by the freeway, no problem at all. But he will need a larger lab.

  He locks up, and briskly humming the rock version of ‘Anitra’s Dance,’ he goes out into the warm rainy dawnlight, reviewing in his head the new findings on the mid-brain determinants of motor intensity.

  It should be no trick at all to seat some electrodes that will make an animal increase the intensity of whatever it’s doing. Like say, running. Speed it right up to max, run like it never ran before regardless of broken legs or what. What a natural! Surprising someone else hasn’t started already.

  And just as a cute hypothesis, he’s pretty sure he could seal the implants damn near invisibly; he has a smooth hand with flesh. Purely hypothetical, of course. But suppose you used synthetics with, say, acid-release. That would be hard to pick up on X rays. H’mmm.

  Of course, he doesn’t know much about horses, but he learns fast. Grinning, he breaks into a jog to catch the lucky bus that has appeared down the deserted street. He has just recalled a friend who has a farm not fifty miles away. Wouldn’t it be neat to run the pilot project using surplus Shetland ponies?

  The Beak Doctor

  Eric Basso

  Eric Basso (1947–) is an American poet, novelist, playwright, and critic, born in Baltimore, Maryland. ‘The Beak Doctor’ novella reprinted herein has had a cult following among avant-garde Gothic writers since it was first published by the Chicago Review in 1977. Since then he has published a novel, several plays, many poetry collections, and a book of non
fiction. In part, ‘The Beak Doctor’ reads like a modern, more Joycean version of the first selection in this anthology, Alfred Kubin’s ‘The Other Side,’ in that the nameless city is plagued by a strange sleeping sickness. Despite being criminally overlooked, Basso is an important part of the landscape of weird fiction.

  Now I will try to keep awake. The fog. They must have come for me before morning. Empty streets. Across a dimly lit room. She lay in the shadows. The steps. One at a time. Not that I’m old. It was the mask. Plaster chipped off the walls. She lay asleep on a couch. A network of cracks and branching veins like the surface of an antique painting. Chiaroscuro. Figures half formed. And she was naked. Little water-blots the color of rust. An odor of disinfectant emanated from the bannisters. Mothballs. The smell on my hands as I return there. From the bottom of the rickety stairs I could make out the febrile glow of a bulb screwed into the pitted ceiling on the landing. Step-shadows dwindling over the tips of my shoes as I neared the top.

  No corners. I had to turn my head from side to side to see what lay around me. The eyeholes were a shade too narrow. My own fault. In cutting them I hadn’t followed the pattern closely. They made a dark vignette. The goggles were fogging up. Darkness around a darkness where I came into the room. I was suffocating.

  The women backed away. They seemed a bit startled at first, muttering to themselves.

  Something too low for me to hear. I told them they would have to speak up. A lamp burned by the mantelpiece clock. An oval scatter rug in the center of the floor, just out of reach of a faded pool of light. I remember now. In the lull you could hear a ticking. Maybe I only imagined that the women had spoken. It might have been a rumbling on the floor above coupled with the random movements of their lips. The father took me by the hand. He was old. The skin of his palms was dry, his fingers soft and lifeless. He didn’t want to talk. A door closed behind me. The two of us were left alone with the body.