The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  A chuckle drifts up to the window. The ‘dogs’ are gone. A cat who says meow and pussypussypussy in falsetto has chased them off. She staggers from the sill to the wall and, with an eye to where the wall goes pale, her fingernail traces the fringe of an endless floral motif. The paper is rough and dry, with minute ridges numbing the tip of her finger. Near the top of the oval a rusty nail casts a sidewise shadow over the wall, contrasting with the catalogue of pits and scars, microscopic eruptions, pimples that make tiny dents in the skin and only seem to give a little when you press your finger to them. She notices spots. As she looks up, the specks float upward in their transparent film, just an instant behind the movement of her look. Whether from drink or because her eyes can fix on the gliding specks, she finds herself able to ‘track’ her gaze smoothly along the wainscot and the radiator pipes, from one wall to the other. Then it was the radiator, not the sill (the sill sits too high), that she leaned her weight on when the gray-haired man had spoken. She returns to the window, trying to picture the cat. Its color. Its form, crouched like a sphinx under the fog.

  – Meowrreoww?

  Her skirtfront pressed to the embossed pipes, she looks down, the mist cooling her face. Mouth open, licking her bottom lip, she waits for the cat to answer her invitation, purring a whisper only she can hear behind clenched teeth. A hiss flutters at the back of her tongue.

  Silence. An almost grayless gray in the coming down. Without sensation of movement or plummeting weight until, close to touching bottom, having left black, blue, red and green windows behind, a dark form emerges crouched against the pavement backdrop. A headless shirt with no visible legs. One bare arm reaches slowly for the glass stem. Suddenly the hand draws back, as though a spark had passed from the smoky helix through the tip of one of its fingers. He turns a huge grin toward the lost window. White cheshire teeth come almost halfway up before the murk closes over, plunging them down with the rest of the night’s debris.

  He scampers off on his hands and feet like a mad gorilla, the yellow ostrich plume trailing gracefully in his wake. The other two are chasing after him with echoing cries to stop. To wait. They’ve left their coats upstairs. It will be a chilly morning. She hears them. Running footsteps. Swallowed in fog.

  I couldn’t get used to it. Empty streets. It felt like rain. Once a thick mist has settled in, not even a morning downpour can drive it away. Blind men are wandering or keep to their houses, moving from room to room. Without light. Others can see at least the foreground. You almost had to feel your way. Familiar landmarks which never appeared, or loomed up suddenly. Less than a yard off. Vast truncated bases. Without background. Too huge to be taken in whole by the eye. Routes you thought you knew like the back of your hand. Unrecognizable. Your hand in front of your face. Nothing more. The ideal space in fragments. This narrow stretch from gray to gray. Deserted streets I carry in memory.

  Distances fell in upon themselves early on, until no distances were left. Impossible to go more than five paces without having to call forth all the minute details of what had passed under my shoes. Pieces that give the illusion of continuance. For now the streets were more of the head than at any previous time. Fragments. Without form. They were there, always. Just ahead, beyond my grasp. Or behind me, half remembered. Brick. Marble. Cement. Glass. Granite. Steel. And never enough to provide an assurance that I might come to the old roundhouse. Through my goggles the dim city came and went in macroscopic vignettes. One faded, giving way to another which passed to vapor in its turn. A city brought up close. All that went unseen became mammoth behind the cold, gray silence. Those of us who walked its streets. Floating islands. Without shadow. I was lost.

  Hoping to find the railroad tracks I had reached the top of the hill, turning left down one of the gravel alleyways beside a garage whose ramshackle doors were too far in to be visible. Loose pebbles sloped away from the walk. My heels crunched with each step down, sliding as the weight shifted to my ankles. The sun must have come up by then. What remained of its light spread thinner than the silver haze of the lampposts. I touched bottom. Grass began to appear in the gravel, thickening into clumps of weeds where the yellow garage doors should have been. A sun lost to the gray density. Sudden tunneling effects. Recessions in depth lasting no more than a few seconds. Hazel trees flattened in the middle distance beyond a footbridge whose planks crossed a gully hidden by an undergrowth of nettles and sand-colored weeds. Some older trees tipped toward one another from opposite banks. A vault of leaves. Motionless. Gnarled trunks in a tangle of shaggy molds the mist cloaked long before I had a chance to take my bearings. Pointing myself in what I thought to be the general direction of the bridge – there seemed no way for me to gauge the distance I had to cross before the first planks would come into view, if I moved too quickly I might miss them altogether and be swept into the gully – I took a few tentative steps forward, always with an eye to my mud-spattered shoes. The rim of the copper lining-ring cut into my neck. My goggles steamed. I stopped, breathing faintly, while a clear spot opened, blotting up the layer of condensation. And I began again.

  No tunnelings then. Pebbles gave way to grass, and grass to mud. Bridge planks came under my heels with a creaking and what would have been an odor of old wet wood. Mist, almost white in the gully. Tumbling rivers of smoke rolled in under the faint outline of a tree. What looked to be a tree, slanting in the haze, heavy with damp. If a stream trickled below over sand and rocks, the fog or the mask had blunted its noise. It was too far down to hear. Even from the middle of the footbridge. If the riverbed ran dry. I dropped a coin over the side and, waiting for its ping to break the silence, began yet again.

  Weak-kneed from having crouched so long near the edge. Silence. Staring down into the billowing white set diaphanous wing-flutters pulsing at the corners of my eyes. I stood up. No railing. My legs were wobbling. On either side the bridge planks extended less than three feet into blank space. Without top or bottom. I could put out my hand and still see fingers clearly spread against the neutral backdrop. Center depth. The footbridge seemed more and more to be hanging without supports over an unsoundable gulf. The grassy fringes of the pebble path had long since disappeared behind me, pushed back with the streets and the city buildings far into the dense atmosphere. From where I stood when the fog had opened up, the bridge looked to be little more than a few paces in length. Now I went on tiptoe, in fear that the rotted planks would drop out from under me. The slightest loss of balance might easily carry me over the edge. Faster. A sudden unevenness in the planks threw my rhythm off. As the other bank came into view between the end of the footbridge and the muddy fringe of grass, something like a fallen log rolled under me. Pitched me forward. Breathless. Hands thrust out. Grasping at air. Useless against the pull of gravity. Wet grass tilting up. Into black. Whatever was left of the ground-below-ground eddied back. Widening hollows of noiseless space drifted out into darkness. Something had caught my ankles. The sickness. The paralysis of the fall drew me even farther down.

  Curvatures of beading humidity. I closed my eyes. Reached out desperately for the bottom. My feet were lost in the tall grass. The log, or whatever had tripped me up, had vanished along with my bag. A mantis stuck its pinhead out between the grass blades and said a prayer for me until the first drops of rain knocked it back. I looked for it. It was gone. The rain came down sparsely at first. A light drizzle as I got to my feet. I wiped my hands off on my coat. A pattering ratatat. Something at least to break the monotonous silence. All track lost of where the gravel ended, where the grove of hazel trees began.

  Another surface crumbled away under my shoes. Wet asphalt guttered with cracks of pebbling. A pattern of faint lines. Pits full of muddy water cribbled by the rain. Gulfs without color or feeling of depth, emptied of images. One fillet of silver light, weakly, from the blind side of the gloom. Low starflickerings, close to the ground, with no reflection in the puddles. Vague forms cut the haze into bands of drifting shadow. Tinted globes emerged on birdbath pedestal
s. I watched a pinlike figure inch by on the crest of a shrunken ellipse. My image in a void that took color from the hollow spheres. Forms out of mist. Cupids teetering on eroded wings. Greco– Roman athletes. Tribunes and emperors brought down from the attic, spilling thin cascades off the tips of their noses. Painted jockeys in blackface – white corneas, thick ruby lips – proffering their brass rings. They crowded in. Frozen. Eyeless gazes toward the hanging light. Useless.

  Crouched amid this teeming mass of sandstone and granite, an enormous laughing faun, its ravaged features blackened under an intricate filigree of moss and verdigris, cradled a bowl of overflowing water between the hocks of its crusty knees.

  Statuary gave way to lawn mowers, put out to rust amid threadbare camp furniture and other looming hulks beneath a tarpaulin whose rucks and sagging hollows gushed waterfalls onto the charred casings of railroad lanterns behind a spidery crackwork of sooted panes. Two large metal bins, weighted with empty bottles, tin cans and heaps of rubbish, buzzed by flies in spite of the driving rain, stood sentry at the bottom of a narrow ramp tacked with canvas matting.

  The star was a pale moon. A lightbulb near the top of a shadowy recess. The sign swayed, crudely painted, on a plank hung from clinking chains above the doorway:

  ‘FLEA CIRCUS’.

  Edges of a ramshackle structure. Dimensions lost to fog. A shanty warehouse propped on granite brick-stacks. Slabs of rotted timber and black shingle thrown together over a mud-pool in the weeds.

  Outline. The lintel. Under the light. Swarming mosquitoes. Paunch swelling out the nether half of an undershirt beneath a sweat-stained crease. He leaned forward. Hair thinning from black to gray along the temples. Bifocal glints, lunar crescents across the bristles of an untrimmed goatee. Lips invisible. Ridge of a wide-hooked broken nose. The shelves going back behind him. Without having looked up. Arms thrust deep into a cardboard box.

  The rain, half drowned by the din of a huge ventilation fan, came down in torrents on the corrugated roof. He was straining over a load of weather-beaten paperbacks. One small gap left in the shelves. For the girl in white under the leaning oak by moonlight, with the mansion tilting its cavernous porches, ricketing back in the distance. His face, lit from below by the jaundiced flame of a cigarette lighter. An upper room. Confessions under the draftsman’s lamp. Unaccountable losses. Crosswords. Enough to fill the absences between the sound of a gravelly morning voice.

  – They’re three for a quarter.

  He cleared his throat.

  – You can look in this box, if you want. Got nowhere left to put them. Made it in here just in time, huh? Don’t think it’ll last long, though.

  You can tell?

  – I’m guessing. Anyway, we really need it. Can’t see a goddamn thing out there. Not even the far end of the ramp.

  …

  He pulled the cord under the lightbulb. The front of the warehouse went dark, the fog outside from black to gray.

  – Lucky you didn’t break your neck.

  How far to the old railroad tracks?

  – Can’t say as I know. I’m new here. Only had the business for a week or so. Don’t really know my way around yet. Got plenty of maps in the back, though.

  I’ve been walking for hours. Something tripped me up at the end of the footbridge. My bag must have fallen into the ravine.

  – Well, take a look around. You might find something.

  Do you have a bathroom?

  – All the way in the back. Make a left under the hot-air balloons. It’s really my brother-in-law’s place. But I had to take over. My sister called me up in the middle of the night. What could I say? You know how it is. What the hell, I was out of work, anyhow. Got some army-surplus stuff back there. Gas masks and things. All in working order. You want a towel?

  Don’t bother.

  With the front light out. The bookshelves, massive blocks of shadow against the center depth. A labyrinth. Cluttered aisles ran between counters buried in heaps of musty bric-a-brac under the bilious haze of low-hanging fluorescent tubes. The air was heavy. I walked past mounds of toy soldiers from all epochs. Whistles, noisemakers, gag and novelty items – monkeys pissing from an outhouse doorway, jello-molds the shape of dimpled buttocks, flesh-tinted salt and pepper shakers with porous nipples, ‘Hollywood game-cards,’ dissolving spoons, whoopie-cushions, counterfeit turds and vomit, pens you turn upside down for a comic effect – all banked against the filmy panes of antique breakfronts and porcelain cabinets. I turned the corner, groping my way through lianas of balloon rigging. A long table stretched into the shadows under piles of phonograph records (old 78s), coloring books, women’s compacts and empty lipstick cylinders, in the midst of which reposed an olive-drab tin box. I opened it.

  A vinyl oxygen mask sprang out on the end of a lamp-blacked bellows. Apart from the proprietor, there was only one other man in the warehouse. I tried to push the mask back into its case. He was lying on the floor. Hidden. Life-size painted statues of St. Theresa, the Baptist and the martyr Sebastian, his bleeding chest and legs shot full of arrows, perched on the tie-beam above my head. It wouldn’t go. Ikons. His shoes, covered in a fine layer of dust, peeked out from between an upturned box spring and an antiquated harmonium. Their enameled eyes turned to the heavens. He must have been asleep. Heads tilted back, almost grazing the laths under the iron ceiling with their noses. The full weight of my hands pressed down on the olive-drab lid. Unseen. Din of the rain above the last bellows-gasp. Collapsing inwards. Lost beyond the vaulting. Hidden. Forcing the mask back down. The upper reaches of darkness.

  Somewhere. The railroad tracks begin or end under a thicket of spurge and dandelion, bordering another lot at the foot of Promontory Wall. Movements. Houses lost above the leaning sycamores with only a glimmer to bring them out along the ridge of the cliff. Faint blemishes yellowing on the air, beyond clusters of sumac, creeping over the boulders. Traced in shadow. The other side of a narrow, winding lane. Picket fences. Crooked, wood-warped slats, all in a row, with gaps for privet hedges, where a track of ruts begins the driveway. A rectangle of feeble light, veined with gliding branches, in the mist above the porch, one of the turret windows with a silhouette staring, half asleep, into the gray beyond the edge of the veranda roof to eavesdrop on the rustle of an acorn falling through the wet leaves. The silhouette turns its back on the shadow. Recedes into a sulfurous veil of light. Which vanishes.

  Loose slabs on a bed of pebbles in the dark. The lane describes a wide horseshoe curve around the lot below. A flight of concrete steps runs under a tunnel-vault of hanging spiders. Crust. By one of the houses set deep in the face of the cliff. Odors of humus and mildew seep through the bricks. Short cuts to where the railroad tracks begin again. Stitched together by degrees. One piece to another. Old foundations you can hear crumble away. Softly in the distance. Gray on gray. Stacks of kindling. Pyramids. The abandoned churchyard. Half-devoured gravestones tilting out of the high grass, and the bones that lie beneath them. Underground. Behind the rockface, you go down with nothing but a cold brick wall between you and stratum after stratum of leathery cadavers given up to the age-old feasting of worms. Past terraces under the earth. Modes of dress, level by level, in greater or lesser degrees of tatters. Silken cravats. Rusted stickpins. One moth-eaten collar, a deeper shade of gray than the fog, curled over a hollow fringed with yellowed teeth and marrow where the lower jaw has dropped away and the head, up to the sockets of the eyes, is full of dust. The passage down, beneath a vault of ancient brick and cobwebs, masking empty eyes. To the charcoaled well-yard to feed the dogs asleep in their kennel, muzzles drooling foam over the dead, pulling the bones, with all their musteline gristle hanging off in shreds that make these crooked tracks in the dirt, out of Promontory Wall. The fierce dream of the dogs is no more than a soft creaking in the roof struts, for the living have finally let go of their mercurial insomnias. Eyelids fall of their own weight. They’ve cut holes in all the burlap sacks. As the sand comes pouring out with a long hiss
up to their necks, these eyes open on the desert. This is how you keep the vigil. To lie where the dogs lie on a bed of rotting mandibles. Part of a woman’s skull that they use as a basin for rainwater you use as a pillow to mark the well-yard in the mist. Into the gulf, the fall of an acorn. A silhouette comes back to its window, turns away from the shadow, recedes again into a vanishing rectangle of light behind the trees to keep itself going. A few minutes pass until it or he or she becomes a roving footfall in the room without light. Without light. The one who sits on the edge of the bed waiting for the alarm to go off. The one who listens to the springs squeak. Who will never appear to the extent of revealing either a face or the mask of a face with holes cut out for sleepy eyes. Above the ceiling blackness of this room near the edge of the cliff. Hanging by a thread.

  And so on into morning. Waiting for the sun to break through the haze, the shadow (still less-than-shadow in the dark) goes to the window and leans out over the grimy sill. Dead leaves cling to the slate roof amid sunbursts of bird dung and crusty pits where pieces of shingle have broken off. Down in the grass, the crickets rattle-bell their metallish whine to cover the sound of breathing. The leaves rustle, faintly. The wind is down. An animal rocks on its heels in the branches. Perhaps an animal, for when the less-than-shadow backs into the center of the room again with outstretched arms, knocking up against the furniture (it might already be floating above resinous exhalations of teak and polish, a lingering scent of mothballs, sweat and dust), the breath dies in the sycamore. He or she or it can no longer be sure that there was breathing at all, or that it died because what moved had stopped moving, because the occupant of the room, alias less-than-shadow, alias silhouette, alias one who knows that below the ceiling blackness in this room along the edge of the cliff everything hangs by a thread which, inasmuch as the noise of the rustling leaves is concerned, breaks because the owner of aliases has ceased to give it a thought above the cricketing rattle. A fly had come in. That’s what it was. It must have been a fly. The one who reinvents it. Having closed the window, the reinventor of aliases goes for a rolled-up newspaper to bat the fly, forgetting to forget. Just to keep awake a few minutes longer. Sitting on the edge of the bed, letting the fly dash itself to death against the filmy windowpanes. The low scaffolding under the weeds and crabgrass takes on the consistency of charcoal. Hollow (termites gnawing through the burl to the inner depths), it passes for what lies at the terminus of the old railroad, something which a man might want to pry open with the handle of a kitchen knife just to see if anything were really there beside the wall of tombs in the rocks. The fog makes it all too simple. One doesn’t need an abundance of small details to give the canvas life. A few discreet noises, stretched along a hypothetical line, with brief intervals of silence. Beyond that, if there really is a question of an upper room in a house somewhere above the cliff, one has first to imagine the cliff, the window (mist takes care of the rest of the house), and oneself in that upper room, sprawled on the bed, imagining or attempting to imagine the cliff, the window, a faceless alias – man, woman, puppet – hung by a thread to keep you awake by the glazed ashtray on a chair spotted with cigarette burns. One other piece of furniture. A faded walnut vanity, in shadows that drift toward the eye, whose mirror has turned almost white with neglect. Everything else had been given away or sold to the antiques dealer, piece by piece.