The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  I probably had to help him get across the room, he was so weak. His eyes were bad. He stopped a few times on the way to take his bearings and scratched at his eyebrows as though he too were trying to remember that even in this subdued lighting her flank was visible, pale against the black hulk of the couch. Her face was turned away or hidden under a mass of long dark hair, or in a shadow. No one had thought to cover her with a blanket. We listened to her breathing between ticks of the little porcelain clock; a miniature pendulum swung in its oblong window, a low click sounded the whir of a grinding mechanism from within – the hour chimed out slowly at the bottom of the mirror.

  Her diaphragm rose and fell. Her ribs contoured faintly, intermittently stretching and relaxing the expanse of whitish skin above the broad swell of her belly. I would have made her anywhere between thirty and forty-five in age, but the light was weak. And her father babbled incoherently before he managed to get something out about having found her on his way home from a walk.

  – She was lying on her side…curled up like a ball by the curb.

  He scratched again at his bushy eyebrows. The women had carried her up the stairs and laid her on the sofa. Fast in a deep sleep, she showed no signs of waking.

  The old man held her legs for me and looked down through the red-white traces my penlight etched in the dark. The slight movements of my hand left an afterimage of knotted lines on his retina. He seemed to be still trying to remember, leaning forward, thrown a bit off kilter with his daughter’s feet a dead weight crossed behind his head, fanning his white hair out as the brass links of his watch chain glittered in a double loop that swayed above the peaks of her breasts. His spectacles slid down to the tip of his nose.

  It was just after five. Scratches. Contusions. A few deep welts cut purple stripes along the back of her thighs like claw-marks left by a wild animal. And between. I didn’t need to use a speculum. The genitals already formed a swollen mass in the darkness. Blackened labia puffed out around the area of inflammation. The mucous lining was raw to the point of turning blue. A trail of dried blood flaked off the skin at the touch of my finger. I felt a crust under the back of my hand as I probed for internal lesions. A brown discharge had had enough time to spread to the cushion and congeal there.

  How long had she been lying here like this?

  – I…no, I was just…

  The old man looked as though he were about to pass out. He let go of one of the legs and put his hand on the arm of the couch. Something hard struck the crown of my mask. I dropped to my knees. The penlight flew out of my hand and I heard it roll under the sofa. Another weight came down heavily on the middle of my back. I saw a gray moon plummet toward the couch, into eclipse. My gasps rushed hot air up through the inside of the mask. I heard the wind roar. It knocked the breath out of me.

  I lay there on the floor, trying to readjust the eyeholes, my goggles clouded with steam. He stood over me, the father, crossed by the broad diagonal silhouette of a bare leg. The ceiling, dark gray melting into black with swarms of gilt-edged cobalt blue.

  Another minute passed. The gray would have been white in the daylight. The curtains were drawn, the blinds closed. A few branching cracks hung jagged shapes like pieces of stalactites. The old man had me by the hands. He wanted to pull me up.

  – What about something to drink? You must be stifling. Or perhaps a face cloth soaked in cold water?

  Wait. Lift her leg back onto the couch. I can’t manage it alone.

  – It’s gotten foggier than ever. You can’t even see across the street. I’ll just switch off the lamp.

  No. I have to give her an injection. Help me turn her over. Grab her under the knees. That’s it. Gently now.

  Penicillin, 10cc. No reaction to the prick of the needle. She simply lay there on her stomach, her open mouth drooling into the cushion. It was too soon for dehydration to have set in. The father fished a pack of cigarettes out of his vest pocket. He tapped it and held it out to me.

  – Are you sure? I don’t like to smoke alone.

  I had gone to the window and was about to pull the blinds when the lamp on the mantelpiece went out, pitching the two of us into total darkness with nothing but the sound of her breathing and the tick of the clock. I should have turned her on her back again. But it didn’t matter. She seemed comfortable enough. I made a chink in the blinds with two fingers and peered out into the fog. The old man was right.

  – This is what I know. Don’t ask me why I waited so long. If my wife and sister had had their way she’d still be lying out there stark naked and, well, let’s just say I thought it best to wait until the fog lifted…and when it didn’t lift, you know the rest…she was lying by the curb under a lamppost, otherwise I wouldn’t have seen her at all, my eyes aren’t what they used to be, if she had been on the sidewalk I might have tripped right over her and broken my neck; to tell the truth, I wasn’t even sure I was on the right block…the fog…couldn’t see my hand in front of my face…no, if I were you I’d wait a bit before going back out there…something to drink perhaps?…you see I’ve put out the light so there’s nothing to worry about…I can grow accustomed to almost anything, but this fog! when I think of how things used to be and what they are now – rumors, the streets deserted – I’m really afraid to go out, even in the daytime…I used to take the bus to go shopping down by the Olde Market, now I have to walk the streets alone like all the others…but why don’t you sit down? I’ll have Duma – that’s my wife – bring us out something to eat…what do you say to some pretzels and a nice bottle of beer? it’s the last we have left, the pretzels I mean, but this is something of an occasion…haven’t had anyone in the house for years since my brother-in-law passed on…he was forty-one…did you notice her face?…maybe we ought to close her mouth, unless you think that would interfere with her breathing…didn’t know what the hell to do at first. I thought I hadn’t seen right…had to get up almost on top of her before I realized it was a woman and not a pile of garbage someone had heaped under the lamppost…she’s not from around here – at least I think she’s not – I’ve never seen her, not that I would remember…she was lying there all crumpled up like a ball…I thought she was dead…now what about that beer? I won’t turn on the lamp.

  Through a small crack in the blinds – nothing. Flat gray up from where the street lights were diffused without contour. Lost haloes in a soundless fog. Not even a muted echo. Something had moved inside. Everything became absorbed in that one brief movement. It might have been on the floor below or in an outside corridor, or on one of the landings. A footfall. The latch-click of a closing door. Who knew what it was or where it came from? It brought me back to her breathing. The old man had finished his monologue. He may have taken a step forward. It may have been him. I couldn’t tell. It was too dark.

  – What now?

  Pardon?

  – I mean what are we supposed to do with her?

  The police will take care of everything.

  – Are you hot?

  Why?

  – Nothing, I just wondered.

  Let the women put some clothes on her. And if you can find a driver’s license or any sort of identity card, poke a hole through it and tie it around her neck with a piece of string. Don’t use a rubber band or anything elastic that might affect her breathing.

  – That’s no good…you see her just as I found her…without a stitch.

  Maybe there’s something in her room. In one of the drawers. You could ask your wife.

  –?

  Or, here. Take this and fill it out later. I’ve already signed it. If you want, you can turn the light back on. I have to be going.

  – What is it, a prescription?

  No, it’s for the police. Give it to them when they come for the girl. And don’t forget to fill it out. I’ll go on ahead to make the necessary arrangements. Don’t try to move her. Get her dressed as best you can. They’ll take her to the roundhouse.

  – The roundhouse? You mean the old railroa
d museum? That hasn’t been open for years.

  Somehow he managed to get to the door without knocking against the furniture. An amber light filtered in from the corridor, framing his bent silhouette with a dull nimbus. He took off his glasses.

  – I’d like to get rid of these…can’t see a thing with them any more…try them on…see how they fit.

  I have to go. When you find my penlight, you can send it to me care of the roundhouse. The address is at the top of the certificate. Or you can always get me at the office. You have my number.

  The old man scratched his eyebrows and, shrugging his shoulders, pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket. He breathed on the lenses, smiling.

  – I’d save myself a lot of breath just by sticking them out the window.

  He called down after me.

  – Be careful. One of the steps has a loose mat.

  I came down slowly, out of the amber light, squeak by squeak on the stairs. That odor. I could smell it later on my hands. I heard the tenants shutting their doors before me. All the way to the bottom. Into the mist.

  Into the night. Night into dawn. The sun comes up the other side of what remains unseen: a cloud at the bottom of shadowy buildings, fuzzy lights along a lost itinerary of upper rooms, the map he carries in his head. Gunmetal haloes, one pole to another, a double row up the hill in moveless smoke. Less and less distinct. You can never get too close or keep too far away from this mesh of blind spaces; they coalesce at the top of the street, whittling the map down to a cold stretch of pavement two or three yards across the one remaining hollow. Each step is a push against the fog, but never enough, even though you take it step by step, to give a proper clue to the mask. The middle distance vanishes behind neutral gray, and if a muted noise were to find its way back to the father – killing time beyond reach of the lampposts, he looks down out of his open window on nothing – it would only come to linger, an invisible blot he might almost feel the weight of on his eyes, crossing what he knows to be the street somewhere below, a subtle rumor of dislocation hovering in the doctor’s wake: the doctor who has left him, who has left them all (wife/sister, brother-in-law/husband, sister-in-law/sister, and the daughter/the niece/the unknown) to their darkness and the ticking of the clock. The doctor is in footsteps, sounding dulled claps of heel and sole off a sidewalk that tilts upward out of its center of gravity.

  If roofs are up above, birds are asleep on the roofs. But those who walk the streets have felt the tilt of everything that is lost in the fog. A pair of cat’s eyes comes floating, paw by paw, before its black head becomes visible. Dense air, close to the asphalt of the street, a blind alley, a dead-end room without walls, where noxious odors drift. Within this compass of a few cubic yards the scavenger picks its way through a heap of empty liquor bottles, old newspapers stained with grease and coffee grounds, tatters of oilcloth wrapped around moth-eaten books, foxed page-ends curling in the damp.

  The steps, paw by noiseless paw, driving the hollow back a little, as in a footloose vignette, toward a crash of shattering glass. Muffled bursts of laughter come in waves, now louder, now softer, as the bricks glide by, covered with graffiti: carved initials that almost seem to have been burned in between the lumpy strips of mortar, stick figures in colored chalk, telephone numbers, obscene witticisms, marmalade men on a span of crossing ladders, the outline of a hand, eyes the shape of fish, a rudimentary phallus-on-wheels pointing the way. Nothing but this wall of bricks and the sidewalk. A horizon lost in the gray blur a few feet beyond a manhole cover. Tarred cracks in the pavement squares. Curbs half eaten away, with drainage holes tunneling into their sides. A labyrinth of pipes runs beneath the city in old blueprints – if you stop to listen, a faint gurgle of metalized water comes to you from below the street, no matter where you may have happened to wander. Black paws creep gingerly over flattened wads of chewing gum, brown cigarette butts crushed in a smear of ashes, ticket stubs bleached white by rain, odd bits of rubbish, wire coils twisted by chance into numberless abstract shapes that will skitter across the cement if a breeze comes up, old rubber bands blackened with filth. Spittle and piss have corroded the lamppost bases: pod-like disks at the bottom of fluted columns, a coat of green paint pitted with rust. Each pole rises into a hazy cataract of light. Before it comes to the next street lamp, the cat passes the remains of a sawed-off tree trunk lost in a circle of weeds behind some wrought-iron palings.

  It stops at the very end of the graffiti maze, where bricks become a brownstone wall, paws on the cold grating above a cellar window. Eyes, black lozenges dilating almost to the corners of their lid-slits, discern the form of a vise clamped to the edge of a workbench near a heap of planks. Traces of movement in the murk below. The mice are out of their holes, sniffing for breadcrumbs or a pellet of cheese amid the wood shavings. Elsewhere, a distant clatter of furniture rumbling down, shaking the inner walls of the old townhouse from top to bottom. A tremoring echo falls through the empty stairwell and throws a shudder into the mice that sends them scurrying off to the four corners of their pitch-dark cellar.

  Past the door and its stucco pediment to where the light dies gradually away. The first window, less sooted than the one beneath the street, gives on a corridor lit by green pools to the foot of the stairs. Someone glides into the darkness on tiptoe, a fat man with plaid suspenders hanging in a double loop from his belt. He has waddled out of his room, where one of the green lamps glows above the door in a leafy sconce of brass, to put his foot on the bottom step and give an ear to the stairwell laughter – a hollow echoing beside him, where the steps go down to blackness under their rubber mats. Yet the source is higher, beyond the reddish haze of a second corridor much like the first but with no man, fat or lean, to do the listening. Here you can almost see the tops of the radiator pipes glint on the landing under the curtained window. In the third corridor a deep blue light catches eyes through the taut chain of a half-open doorway. Bleak fluorescences, cast in flickers on a wall behind the silhouettes, indicate someone must have turned the sound quite low. They wait, between the door and the jamb, in rapt silence as another laugh filters down amid what seems to be the clamor of a wild stampede. Two men in shirtsleeves, ties askew, are tumbling arm in arm out of the upper reaches, a blur of somersaulting legs and heads head-over-heels, thundering into the corridor. The metalodious squawk of an irate pheasant announces from on high the descent of a third reveler by way of slippage down the mahogany bannister – a prankster appears, more disheveled than the rest, nose and lips hidden behind an outrageous chrome-yellow panache held by a bronze clasp the shape of butterfly wings encrusted with costume jewelry to a button at the apex of a mauve skullcap which reposes, albeit somewhat precariously, upon his occipital peak. He comes bellytobogganing down, a blind swimmer flailing his arms with the hickory squawker in his mouth, blowing sqwahnk! sqwahnk! to disperse a sudden traffic in the corridor which, at present, assumes the collective form of his two associates lying crosswise in eclipse, bloodshot eyes turned to the ceiling, gasping for air as he lands pfoomph! on their cushioned paunches, bouncing off to make the rounds of the bare walls, blowing his quacker while they struggle to reinflate their lungs.

  One floor above, it is completely dark. The corridor, littered with confetti and streamers, comes little by little under the weakening beam of a flashlight. Someone says Shit! and feels the crunch of broken picture-glass beneath his heel, sundering the calm of what had begun, inauspiciously, as an unhurried inventory of the debris. He quickly sees his mistake. The xix-century sporting print continues its suspension from the wall, unmolested, beside the thermostat (reset to 9ºF). In truth, the querent has put his foot through glass and silvering. A gulf opens. Behind his fractured silhouette – fragments of a body viewed from the ground up, swaying in the depths of the oval mirror – a second ceiling comes to light in pieces, below the floor. A soundless image, faint if he aims his flashlight directly into it, much brighter if he tilts it to the ceiling above, toward a noise of scuffing heels that grows
at the landing, a left turn up the last flight of stairs under the ruins: shards of a flowerpot upended in its mound of dirt, a twisted vine with fuzzy purple leaves, streamers of pleated crêpe speckled with confetti. The last passage. From here you need a ladder to get to the roof. The birds are asleep.

  Now, almost in silence, they listen for the sound of sleeping birds. Where have they gone? The men loosen their ties beneath a pale oval in the wallpaper. The women are bending forward in front of them, their heads out the window, still in a daze. It’s useless. They can only hear the revelers coming out onto the street below. Normally an amber light would cast dwindling shadows across the walk from the bottom of the stoop. But the fog leaves everything to a confusion of half-smothered rumors, blunting the dickory sqwahnk! sqwahnk! with an echo of cowbells as the prankster and his cohorts roll out onto the pavement over the jagged slivers of a champagne glass tossed from one of the high windows. The stem alone is intact, a thick helix of smoked crystal with a tinge of blue. The remains glitter like stardust against the flinty texture of the concrete.

  Silence. Then all three of them begin to howl like dogs.

  The crowd is thinning out in the hallway. Under the pale oval, an old gent with graying hair wets his moustache in a last swig of bourbon. Frosted cubes tinkle at the sides of the glass through which faceless people, no bigger than pins, kaleidoscope behind the melting ice.

  – Disgusting.

  The only woman left at the window turns as if to answer him, eyes glazed from drink, buttocks propped on the sill to keep her balance. But the gray-haired gent has his back to her now, one patent-leather shoe poised over the apartment’s threshold, then another, before the door closes and all the noises of the party – voices in the smoke, clinking bottles and glasses – are swallowed up.