The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  The three morning revelers began to circle the metal bin, kicking it in with the tips of their shoes. A loud battering noise. They shivered with the damp, rubbing their shirtsleeves to keep warm, blowing on their hands. They bellowed like a tribe of Indians on the rampage. I can’t remember how long the uproar lasted. They were very near. A scarce five feet away. I stood with my back to the wall. I heard their war cries. From time to time, the whistle of a garbage scow cut through the heavy air. The harbor, from the sound of boats in choppy waters, seemed no more than a stone’s throw from the barrier of hazy lights. Keelboats rocked gently against the pier planks before breaking free of their moorings. I kept my eyes open.

  Not long after. They were running past me, sliding on their heels, tumbling over the wet street bricks. I crept up to the garbage cans and, almost at once, realized my mistake. Black trousers with a satin stripe down the outer seams. Too well-dressed. It wasn’t Cappie. The one with the yellow panache, or one of his cohorts, had removed the shoes and socks from their unsuspecting victim.

  I searched my pockets.

  Still a few certificates that I hadn’t put in my lost bag. I took one out. Signed my name to it. The time of morning (an approximation). And tied it to the big toe of his right foot, where the police were sure to see it.

  The bricks laid out an uneven zigzag, sloping away from the middle of the street as rainwater flowed in rivulets toward the sunken gutters. Near the end of the block, two sets of worn-down tracks merged in a curving gantlet. It was coming back to me…I could not be far from the roundhouse.

  In the mirror, behind blue knickknack shelves, some of them are dancing. Others, off to one side, make do by the piano, rolling their eyes. Some stagger leeward through clouds, drawn as by a magnet toward the beading bucket of ice on a folding table piled with steadily diminishing cocktail napkins, tumblers, plastic cups and long-stemmed glasses, hidden, amid the glitter of clear and tinted bottles, in a confusion of labels from gin to seltzer. The last chords of music evaporate in perfume and smoke. The babble of voices, of liquid poured over ice, the crystalline clink of glass to bottle, build to a gradual roar, half suppressed when the pianist, lifting his foot from the legato pedal, crushes his cigarette in a pentagonal ashtray and, exhaling a blue haze over the butts, the uneven heaps of ashes laced with ribbons of cellophane and blackened match stubs, calmly walks out onto the landing, slamming the door behind him.

  Debris. Shards of a flowerpot upended in its mound of dirt on the stairs. The last flight rises under the remains of a wilting vine with fuzzy, purple-edged leaves and streamers of pleated crêpe flecked with sawdust. His hand grazes a balluster, with its hairs. He leans forward, peering into the dark of the well, down through the matrix of dizzying rectilinear spirals. Carpeted steps emerge from the blackness at different levels in pools of faintly colored light that skim the bannisters, touch the fringes of deep shadows and hang, unconnected, spanning the depths of a bottomless space. He can almost hear their slightest movements filtering up from the vestibule in irregular ticks that echo less and less of metal – that constant expansion and contraction in the heating ducts – as they approach the upper stories from the outside of the building. It’s cold. He has to take time to light another cigarette. After only a few quick puffs, he wants to let it drop. To watch the cinder fall away, tracing an orange spiral into the gloom. But afraid of starting a fire, he stubs it out on the mahogany railing. It burns a shallow crater into the polished wood. Still breathing smoke, the steam comes out of his nostrils. Evaporates. Gray wisps against the dark of the stairs. He turns and, passing the pale oval in the wallpaper with its nappy ruts from fingernail scrapings, walks to the window, aware of nothing more than that the ticks, after reaching their loudest pitch, have suddenly abated. A lull in the jabbering behind the door. The unexpected silence, cut by a few oddly stifled cries and the heavy tramp of feet on piano keys. A wild discord, shrieking, groaning, up and down the width of the sounding board.

  Horror. The prankster in his stocking feet, crouched with arms crossed like a mad Ukrainian dancer out of costume, struts across the ivories while his cohorts scramble in through the curtained window. Utilizing a free elbow to knock the prop out from under the piano lid – a thud followed by a resonant echo of overtones – he leaps off, touching down in the middle of the floor with time enough to make a hurried survey of the crowd he has driven back to three of the four walls. Even an amorous couple sprawled under the knickknack shelves, arms and legs askew on a crushed-velvet settee, has deemed it necessary to come up for air. The man snatches his sweaty palm from beneath the woman’s rucked-up skirt as she tugs mechanically at her garter, catching sight of the prankster in mid-flight, the yellow plume clenched between his uppers and lowers. He’s sailing toward her over an ocean of blurry faces. The button atop his scarlet beanie snags the tip of a streamer off the light fixture, plummeting a lime-green ribbon behind him. His arms stretch, casting a shadow over the rapidly vacated settee that sucks him into its hollowed cushions with a puff of dust and a rain of lacquered figurines. He manages a blind grab at the fleeing woman’s ankle, arresting her perpendicular momentum not long after she pitches forward into the canapés with a torsion sufficient to engender violent scatterings of cheese-dip flecks, a sudden but short-lived response to the centrifugal vortex of her imitation pearls. Taking full advantage of the lull – everyone frozen into position, glass in hand and glassy-eyed, wondering if they haven’t already passed beyond the limits of discreet alcoholic consumption – the prankster, shaking a porcelain panpipe from his ear, takes a sidereal bound off the cushions toward the crawling woman and giddyaps, legs astride her thrust-out hips, through a parting of skirts and trouser cuffs, into a nearby closet, slamming the door behind him.

  Consternation. The guests form a little group before the point of entry, leaving a semicircle of rug-space between their feet and the closet door which vibrates to a rumble of flailing arms and shoe-heels, tumbling boxes and desperate shrieks. The prankster, in a claustrophobic blackness of dust, mothballs and perfume, under a pummeling of bony fists, long fingernail scratches and platform heels, constructs a hasty barricade of umbrellas, galoshes and slippers, before lugging his recalcitrant partner behind hanging overcoats into the deepest recess of the closet, forgetting that the door opens outward.

  Silence. All wait breathlessly for the next sound. The other two make arm-in-arm for the master bedroom, stuffing hors d’œuvres – crusty remains of Swedish meatballs (toothpicks and all), sliced pickles and pimentoes – into their mouths, in the act of pocketing (solely by conditioned reflex) the plastic spoons, the forks and the last of the cocktail napkins. From the other side of the bed, a blue night-lamp throws its pool of ghoulish light across the pimpled ceiling. It’s so quiet they can hear the purr of the digital clock with its phosphenescing numbers, green diodes that seem to hover in the black space of the wall. The bed smells of wool and eiderdown with just the faintest trace of an aroma that might pass for vicuna buried in the heap of overcoats and furs. A patent-leather toe sticks out from under the box spring, and a blue-tinged hand. Someone sleeping it off. Someone wearing an expensive watch, a signet ring mounted with a black stone to tempt the prankster’s friends. Oblivious to the silence around them, to the barely audible pulsations of the clock, they burrow like moles, digging a tunnel into the pile of wraps, tossing one after another over their shoulders onto the floor, over the chairs, the dresser, the mirror wardrobe, the vanity, every which way until the four corners of the room seem littered with shadowy corpses. Blue owls, blue lizards, blue foxes. It’s been a long night. They’re ready to drop on the still-cluttered bed. Too tired to go on. Wanting nothing more than to sleep through the murky morning. With any luck the lull will hold a few hours of forgetfulness. No one will move from his place. They’ll close their eyes. Wait for sleep by looking into the blue pool on the ceiling. Switch off the night-lamp until, slowly, it begins to oscillate. So slowly, it intermeshes. Touches waves. Carries them through t
he tunnel of concentric rings. Into sleep.

  Sleep. It eludes them, passing dreary shadow-smoke across their eyes as they lie, shoulder to shoulder, on the bed, half submerged by rumpled sleeves, coattails and the vague perfume of ladies’ handbags. The curtains are drawn, but it makes no difference. Someone might enter, creeping around the foot of the bed to the window. An abrupt screech of metal rings across the curtain rod and their eyes would water, squeezing shut against the flood of light that would not come. Awake, yet paralyzed in all but the movement of their eyes. They pan slowly over the furniture tops, locked in a smooth leftward glide along the commissure of ceiling and wall, from the window – a gray, undulating haze – into the shadowed recess that vibrates in tune with the purr of the digital clock, and vanishes in the yellow behind a silhouette standing in the doorway. It walks toward the bed. Leans in close to their sweating faces. Is satisfied that they are not asleep. Then quietly tiptoes out, slamming the door. And its voice blends with other, louder voices. To the left of the mirror wardrobe, the closet is open. They can hear, without taking time to leave the bed and put an ear to the partition, a scuffling on the other side, as though fists, shoes and heads were knocking against the closet wall. It’s a long time before they can free their legs. Move enough to get out of bed. To follow the silhouette’s path to the door.

  Confusion. Standing pat like a head waiter in the smoke and crush of dewy bodies, a ripped pair of stretch-nylon panty briefs (garnished with lace and a fleece-lined gusset) draped over his arm with that casual elegance which bespeaks an impromptu retreat from the shallow depths of a closet, the prankster pays scant attention to the man of corpulence got up as a Roman Catholic bishop, who has just requested, in no uncertain terms, the prompt return of his skullcap. A voice in the crowd says meow. The prankster daubs his fevered brow with panty shreds. Another voice sobs and sneezes mothball dust behind the empty coats and dresses. A secret panel slides away, and the owner of this voice tumbles backward into blue light, just in time to hear a door close and footsteps shuffling up the L-shaped passage toward the party room. Crisping snippets of hatbox tissue adhere to her elbow as she crawls, knees and flattened palms sinking in the carpet nap, from the closet to a narrow space between the mirror wardrobe and the foot of the bed. A sleeper’s hand peeps out from under the springs, hair bristling on knuckles, camouflaged by a heap of fallen coats, each finger curled in direct ratio with its proximity to the thumb. If she were to put her cheek to the rug, she would almost be able to see his black form stretched out in the darkness. The hiss of his breath comes more and more like a welter of pebbles and shells washed onto the beach by an evening tide. The blue pool. Reflections. The ceiling, high in the wardrobe mirror. Softly, with a delicate creak to break the near silence, the bedroom gives a lurch and reels away behind her image into aromatic depths, blocked by a rack of plastic and cellophane shrouds. Her hand, pushed through heady cedar, gropes wildly between rasping coat hooks. The tips of her fingers brush the sticky inner wall in search of corners they never seem to reach. She closes the door. The room glides into place behind her reflection, delimited by the borders of the mirror. An oblong sheet of glass and silvering that begins less than a foot above the rug. In which she turns, limned by the blue of the night-lamp, hiking her tattered skirt above the waist to have a glance at her bruised posteriors. Head cocked over the shoulder. Damp curls falling into her bloodshot eyes.

  Departure. Propped against the wall, he teeters between them as they slip him into his herringbone coat, turning the collar up around his ears to cover one of the lobes, which trickles blood from a bite, fixing the yellow panache to his unctuous cowlick with a hairpin one of them has snatched up off the rug. Most of the food they will need, along with the pilfered utensils, the plastic cups and the bishop’s velvet cap, has already been stuffed into his pockets. Standing open-mouthed, swaying like a wooden Indian from one to the other of his tittering comrades, eyes closed, oblivious to the dowager who shakes a diamond-studded finger under his nose, shouting, ‘This is an outrage!’ the prankster has begun to keep his own counsel. He isn’t moving at all now. The two of them will have to carry him down the stairs, one taking him under the arms, the other under the knees. Someone who no longer thinks of saying meow has inched her way around the far side of the piano to close the window. It’s getting cold. The mist has begun to settle, leaving a vast expanse in its wake. Some rooftops, a few smokeless chimneys, the upper stories of tall buildings appear under an endless leaden cloud whose outer reaches merge with the haze in the distance. The sky of a snowy night. Without snow. Morning comes in a dead silence. Toward the middle space, amid the debris of what few landmarks remain, a massive dome covered in soot looms out of the fog. Where the tracks converge and are swallowed up.

  A little faster, while there’s still time. I had come to it then, the dead end of a long perspective of top-heavy roofs and gables, its massive dome lost above the haze of the lampposts, where the last ramshackle houses leaned over rain-swept cobbles. The roundhouse, at last. So black, so huge against the crumbling façades, that its sides could not be seen. I followed the yellow glow hovering near its base: a distant star, a faint streak on the tracks as I walked, before the stones and puddles sloped into deep shadow. Light spilled over the porch from a narrow doorway at the top of a flight of wooden steps. For the first time in what seemed like hours, I could make out voices, rumblings over the muted hum of a generator, sounds the fog or the mask turned into dense, echoless murmurs. The edges of the steps, where they hadn’t already been chipped away by time and rot, made a splintery pattern – wave-like depressions with gaps of darkness diminishing between them as they went up. I put my hand on the iron post at the bottom and looked up the side of the building, a wide, dizzying curve of sooted brickwork whose upper reaches vanished in the mist. In a house across the alley, where the street pitched and cobbles gave way to slabs of concrete splotched with tar and loose pebbles, a weak light flickered in a dormer window. A silhouette passed behind the curtains and lingered there. A man. A woman. Indistinct.

  From the porch at the top of the steps, peering down through iron balusters, I saw the beginning of a chain of dim lanterns, swaying as though moved by an unknown hand, strung out above the windless void. Sections of track passed in and out of the reddish pools they made, toward a crater hollowed out of smoke. No one could say where they led or whether they were broken. You had to imagine the dockside warehouse off in the distance, the old loading platforms, the silos at the end of the jetty, all long deserted. The open door beside me seemed to bristle with noise. Now the yellow light was brighter and would have fallen across my face, throwing my left eye into shadow. The sounds from within, though my ears were shrouded by oilcloth, lost their resonance in the groan of the generator, blending with its hum under the vast, domed space. For some reason the chain of lanterns, stretching into mist, held me. I couldn’t bring myself to leave the porch and go in, or even to turn my head toward the doorway. The light fell, a bit less yellow, across my gloved fingers and brought them into high relief against the dark. I tried, without success, to gauge the distance between my knuckles, bent over the iron railing, and the first of the red shunt lamps which seemed to meander, ever so slightly, in the immense perimeter of blackness beyond the roundhouse wall. The fog was driven back a little by the ashy light of a low-lying cloud, a morning light too pale to reach the ground. The misty hollow, which had camouflaged space and perspective, gave way to darkness. The more I looked, the more I sensed that the positions of the lanterns had somehow shifted. I could almost feel it happening under my eyes, without being able to pinpoint a movement which might have given the game away. I pictured a team of switchmen creeping from lamp to lamp, phantoms astray in the murk, bending to ring their subtle changes in the pattern, an inch here, an inch there.

  It comes to a matter of inches. Inside, the sulfurous light. The halo around a dangling bulb. Behind the lintel. Other haloes hovered in groups of two and three on shadeless floor la
mps to mark the edge of a thicket of tubes and hanging bottles. The center was in shadow. None of the lights could reach it. The massive dome, lost in a black gulf, echoed the breathing of those who slept beneath: men, women, children, laid out under bubbling IV tubes like spokes of a giant wheel, in concentric rings, each with a green number painted on the forehead. The numbers alone, where they glowed in the dark, gave indication of the true dimension of this circle of bodies. The floor was vast, at least a hundred yards in diameter. Less than ten feet remained between the outermost ring of sleepers and the rotunda wall. If you took away the upended glucose bottles, the flexible tubes, the phosphenescing numbers, there was nothing out of the ordinary. White faces. Their clothes had been left on them because of the cold. Those, here and there, who had been found in the nude were wrapped from chin to foot in heavy, olive-drab blankets. An armed guard made the long patrol around them, flashlights in hand, while others saw to it that the line of ‘witnesses,’ queued up to a makeshift office at the other end of the curve, kept close to the brick wall. Some had come hoping to identify a lost relative. Some wanted permission to admit a wife, a husband, a son, or a daughter who was lying motionless like all the others here, breathing imperceptibly on a couch, in a darkened bedroom, behind closed doors, somewhere in the city. The witnesses – many had turned up their coat collars against the damp – hid their faces in handkerchiefs doused with alcohol by the guards to kill the saccharine odor of urine passed off by the bodies in the course of their long sleep. There were small puddles wherever the floor sagged near the edge of the outer ring, pools reflecting the lights as I made my way past the first of the guards. The hiss I had taken for whispers was the sound of all these breathing bodies, asleep and awake; the hum of the ‘generator,’ an amalgam of snores which made a continuous drone. Diminishing circles. Pale, upturned faces gradually became blots. Green coals twinkling in a shadowy lagoon.