The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  1.0ml. Behind the tree, the window. Fog too thick, at first, to cast even a faint reflection in the clouded glass. There, above the porch roof. Slate tiles toward a rusty gutter with the creak of something that rocks in the lower branches, no guttering water, not a sign of rain, though the air was leaden and damp. He waited, stretched out in his bed with the light off, for her footfall on the stair. He must have been down there, the old man, the antiquarian, leaning back, his cane chair squeaking from across the green of the tabletop the night the landlady died. The canaries had gone to sleep. Then, by degrees, the mist swallows up the image with its shifting forms and hidden noises. It comes back to me.

  No one dies of the plague. One simply never wakes. When they first began to nod off in the streets, I took them for dead. The fog had not yet settled like a pall over the city.

  1.5ml. I could almost see him then, the Ancient Wanderer, walking out among the sleepers. He had thrown a veil over the dark pools of his eyes and went from one to another with lamp in hand, or as an undulating shadow on a wall of water. The narcolept. Their faces turned up to him. In the empty streets. From the stairs I heard him breathing white smoke under the lampposts, down to the docks where keelboats and schooners were no longer even silhouettes. He walked alone to the end of the jetty. Somewhere behind the last crab shanty there was a noise of splashing water as he threw himself into the bay. Once, he came at night to the theatre. No one had cause to recognize him. There, from the edge of the darkness beyond the footlights, he showed his sad face to the actors. He was sitting alone, marking time by sketching a maze of webs around their bodies the night the old man saw him.

  The metabolic process remains more or less normal, or normalizes according to the needs of sleep. As long as intravenous nourishment is provided, there is no reason at all why the patient cannot live out his allotted span of life in dreams. Glucose. Tubes to drain off the liquid excretions. Growth of hair and fingernails continues long after the last evacuation of feces. Always, whenever too many of them have been gathered in one place, the overpowering stench of sugared urine.

  2.0ml. No effect. To keep myself from dozing off, I reset the alarm every five minutes and tried to picture the moon, which no one has seen for weeks. Before the mask, it was a lot easier to get around my office without knocking drug samples and specimen tubes off the cabinet tops. A full moon every night, large and yellow, under clouds swept by wind across the heavens. Something I’d read in a book. In cutting the eyeholes, I hadn’t followed the pattern closely enough. Whenever I ventured out, or if I was called away, I had to be careful of where I walked. A distinct fall-off of light toward the edges. The moon had all but disappeared behind the trees. The silvering that limned the rooftops passed, and I was alone in the streets. They must have come for me before morning. A half moon every night, blood-red, hovers near the horizon. Without stars or light, he waited for her footfall on the stair. He was in his room, stretched out on the mattress. The mattress leaned against the wall, by the window. He had stretched out on the bare springs to keep from turning over. A waning moon each night the map hung under a sheet of glass. Second window. What I can see of the mist from here. The old man is leaving, going down the wooden porch steps. He will not return. He has taken almost everything. By degrees, piece by piece, until nothing remains but the smile in a pool of lunar clouds.

  Something more that runs counter to every precept of medicine. Just before the plague of sleep, another nameless disease had taken form. Those who were exposed to the contagion began to dematerialize. They were only half there, as though the accumulating mists had wanted to eat them alive. Since the brain was almost the last organ to deteriorate, the victim was forced to suffer in full consciousness not so much the fading away, but the agonizing process of starvation. At first, the skin became a mass of effervescing dust behind which the internal organs gradually came to appear. Once the victim had reached this stage, a normal examination became impossible. The desire to eat remained; but, as the disease took its course, any solid or liquid nourishment placed in the mouth fell through the floor of the buccal cavity to the ground before it could be swallowed. The internal and external musculature remain in working order almost to the end. Temperature seems to play a crucial rôle in determining the degree of dematerialization of any given part of the body. The pathology, here, is elemental. The tip of the nose, the ears, the toes, and often the buttocks, being anywhere from a quarter to a full two degrees cooler than the normal bodily temperature, tend to retain their density over a longer period of time than those organs and tissue which are normally concealed by the epidermal layer. One way to retard the illness, then, would be to keep the patient constantly exposed to the cold which, however, would almost certainly result in pneumonia or some other complication. The process of dematerialization is such that, once the cutaneous envelope becomes affected, the glands, the musculature, the lymphatic and circulatory systems, being from one to four degrees warmer, will already be too far gone by the time the skin has begun to effervesce, removing all possibility of an early diagnosis. The incubation period is unknown. One cannot be absolutely certain that the dematerialization is in any way connected to the endless sleep.

  2.5ml. Another opening. Then the old man must have known something. Before the mask. Before the mist. To imitate the buzz of the flies. It deflates. Without light, the putrid blot spreads over it, driving them mad. From room to empty room. Old, tumbledown crates. Shreds of crumpled waxpaper. And if I dare to close my eyes. Another street. In a strange part of the city. I was with her, upstairs with the one who died. Before the fog. The flies. What passed for a bed, a night table by the curtained window, the faint ellipse of lamplight thrown up on the wall, bending out along the ceiling’s end. If this was the room. One without a clock. The ticks. It was much easier then, without the eyeholes or the goggles to fog my vision of a moonless night. Without stars. I could see her leaning in the doorway at the top of a long flight of stairs, where the light had begun to seep through. An opening, yes. I went on tiptoe. Late in the afternoon. In the morning. On a moonless night when the noise of the traffic was not so loud. If I closed my eyes, she would be there in the half-light of her room because my office was too far off, though I would have preferred to have her there, like all the others. Someone must have told him about it the night the landlady died. He must have been told. They would have come for me. Before morning. Upstairs, where so little remained of what we knew. All the rooms were empty, except one. The room with a second window on the mist. A bit more of the warbling. One of my patients sang like a nightingale. Other silhouettes. The flies. And all because the rats, as rats are wont to do, were making a bit of noise on their own, sniffing amid the wood shavings for a crumb of cheese the cat had carried away. In my eyes, the steps. One at a time. Like all the others. A soft tread on rubber mats nailed to the wood. On tiptoe in the night. The flies. The fleas. All that remained to be collected was lost to him. He had relinquished any rights he might have had to the landlady. Old jukebox colors tinged with a fading redness in the air. By way of recompense. Be careful, one of the steps has a loose mat. Squeak by squeak. The odor I could smell, always, on my hands. I have to go now. The police will handle everything, I have to go. Just after five. Scratches. Contusions. Where the lamplight glimmered through. We tried it on the bed. She lay in the shadows. The steps, once more. Not that I’m old. I return, step-shadows dwindling over the tips of my shoes. As I neared the top, she was standing with the light behind her, the one who died, and like the poor landlady after her, not even the unkept promises of the old man could bring her back. I told you to phone the police. Are you deaf? Or he has lost his own shadow beyond the last reaches of the mist. He searches the library alone each night for the words to come to him again. To come while I still have time to remember the ticks, not just a tick at a time. Between which, the notable absence of a clock at the bedside. Standing between the bed and the curtained window. Now, if she wanted to sleep. It would have to be the floor. Soon sh
e would be too far gone. Nothing, at the brink of death, but this coarse-grained shroud of dust sinking through the floorboards, down through the stippled ceiling to the last staircase, and into the bowels of the earth. If they told him about it, he must also know the horror of that night. Her skin took color with the cold, but the bed wouldn’t hold her. She sank under my weight through the mattress. Echoes of the wind passing through old piano wire. I found her under the springs, stretched out beneath the hanging wads of dust, in a shadow.

  Incipient ticks of metal, enamel to enameled wood, replace the ticking of all the rundown clocks. Still some places left in the gaps between them to find refuge from these hazy lights. Prowl the streets and your shadow comes just short of reaching through the mist; it sweeps across the pavement, stretching out till it is one with the dark at the far end of a wide ellipse that reduplicates itself endlessly on other streets whenever someone, or something, moves off under the burning lamps. And if the light carried only a bit farther, the three of them would be going to meet the doubles of their hulking silhouettes. Now they are far from home, lost beyond any reckoning back. It is useless to hope that anyone would come to answer the door, if they knocked. An upstairs window might open then slam quickly shut again, but often not before some object had come flying down: a flowerpot, shattered into a thousand fragments on the walk, scattering its contents from a mound of loam and upturned roots; or a wrench; or a rubber teething bone, after which they would hear the plaintive yelp of a dog. But no one came down to answer. The first of the three walks on ahead, trying to keep track of the house numbers. All that can be said is that they believe they’re headed roughly in the right direction. The numbers are odd and diminishing. Not far behind him, the second figure drags his heels, staggering under the weight of the third – the yellow plume cuts an S with each uncertain step – who rides him pickaback, arms pendent, like an ape in sleep. Now and again, the two who are walking have to step over a man or woman who seems still to be breathing. Even if there were trash bins to dump them in, it would hardly be worth the effort. They might have come across three or four bodies in the last half hour, though no one awake seemed to be about. The prankster was getting heavy. Every so often, when he felt he could bear no more, the second figure would unburden himself on a stoop, if there was a stoop, and stretch out on the bottom step as though he, too, were given up to the sickness. He would not be able to close his eyes. Something of the marble’s coldness penetrated his clothing as he watched the fog scud over the lamppost. Once or twice he thought he discerned hitherto secret irregularities, as though the mist were not all of a piece but a mixture of smoky densities that came together like ghosts in the air around the lamp nearest to his lying place. It is probably long past morning. The streets are lost, so quiet now that when the first one’s footsteps cease to echo back, his only waking companion thinks he hears the wind breathing like a man, and turns to see if someone else is there behind him. This, to fill in the lacunæ. Thin margins of silence where the first of the three stops walking to check the front of a house, and the third, slumped over the back of the second, pauses before emitting a pebbly rattle. There can be no rest for a while longer. They carry him, stretched between them, by the ankles and under the dangling arms. His coattails drag the concrete, catching the tin ring of a beer can, which adds its scraping noise to all the other muffled echoes that neither ‘one’ nor ‘two’ is of a mind to squelch. ‘Three,’ with closed eyes, head thrown back, the fuzzy tip of the panache stuck to his upper lip, breathes easier, blissfully unaware of the quickening pace of his bearers. A pulsing blot lies just ahead, tinging the mist with an orange glow that gradually sharpens into a neon arrow, pointing down a subterranean stair to a restaurant or an inn or a bar that has, in spite of everything, remained open. A descent into the dark below street level. The scrap of metal sounds a ticking ring on the narrow steps, all the way to the bottom puddle. It foretells their coming to those who listen from within.

  Areas of deep shadow. The cool marine obscurity masks a no man’s land between the pool tables. Eddies of cigarette smoke drift toward low, canopied lights with the dust. Green baize and clicking balls. They come in by an old spittoon that keeps the inner door ajar, past nearly empty coatracks to a smell of stale tobacco juice and grease-stained leather, arm-tired and out of patience to carry the prankster to the gallery lost in darkness behind a brass rail at the other end of the hall. There, beyond the farthest lamps, a smoke cloud seems to hover above a few dim forms, barely distinguishable, as one’s eyes become accustomed to the murk, from the high-backed chairs they sit in. One of the players is making a run of the table. After a pause to take in the new arrivals, he bends to shoot again. The cue ball caroms off three cushions, grazes the five ball with a brittle click, and sends it rolling into a corner pocket. The other player, wooden chair tipped back against the rail, cue cradled between his knees, stares blankly as the two figures make their way among the tables, in and out of the greenish pools of light, their ponderous burden jackknifed so low between them that his knuckles scrape the musty floorboards. One shot before the table empties. The prankster is carried to the rail amid growls of displeasure, blocking all view of the table as his bearers stretch him. One hears the chalked nub tapping the cue ball, a rolling, a muffled bounce, more rolling…then a click. The two dark figures are silhouettes forming an H; the third, their umbilicus. They grope about with their knees, answering the jibes of irate devotees with noncommittal shrugs, in the not-unreasonable hope of finding an empty chair to dump the prankster in for the duration of their visit. The ostrich plume droops and stirs with his breathing as they sit him down, crossing his arms so he won’t lean too far back. The game is at a standstill. Everyone has missed the last shot – even the second player, who had turned in his chair at the crucial moment to watch the helpless newcomers fend off blows from the few diehards still awake in the gallery. Now no one but the standing player will ever know how the shot fell. True, there were no more balls on the green bed cloth, but no one had heard anything like the sharp rattle at the end of a brief descent in any of the six pockets. The standing player, on a point of honor, refuses to claim victory. He, too, if they are to believe him, glanced away when he heard the fracas in the gallery. When he looked back, less than a second later, the table was cleared – only the cue ball, rolling to a stop, remained on the felt.

  The prankster remained impassive throughout the whole of this discussion. His two friends had quietly slipped off to the manager’s cage to scrounge a couple of cups of coffee. The manager pours out his heart, glad to have someone other than the seedy pool enthusiasts to share in his sorrows. Now that interest in the game has waned, he’s playing to the gallery as well which, with the exception of the prankster, comprises a somewhat limited but attentive audience. In a glowing stage voice, racked with emotion, he runs through the unabridged catalogue of domestic aggravations. The wife was giving him an ulcer. Since the outbreak of the sickness, she had been afraid of the bed. One morning, having taken the advice of a friend, she brought home two white mice in a cage. The ticks, always the ticks. It was driving him crazy. They liked to stick their tails through the bars and whip the metal feeder all night long, or chase each other in the wheel. Two days of that and he was fit to be tied. So he told her, ‘This is it, I can’t take no more!’ Put a cot here in the back, tucked between the wall and a pile of crates, and now, after twenty-nine years, his worries are over. He’s even cut the telephone cord so she can’t get through to him. The mails aren’t running. She’ll never find him in this fog. They say it comes as a sudden black-out. Being tired isn’t enough. No way to make the diagnosis. You could go to sleep tonight in your bed and never wake again, without realizing that the rest of your life is a dream. He could be dreaming this pool hall, down to the detail of that smoke-blackened door.

  You can’t quite make them out. The manager finishes his monologue. Two figures, faces blurred or turned away, lost under their night-hat brims, drain their cups to the dre
gs and set off once more for the gallery, across a space of darkness and green rectangular islands.

  The game resumes. The losing player racks up the balls, carefully lifts off the triangular frame, sets it down on a neighboring table, chalks his cue, bends, lets his mouth hang open, makes two passes at the white sphere (multiple shadows, faint ellipses cast on felt, the shape of a star), then gives it a hard shot into the phalanx of colored balls, which scatter, spinning out in all directions, banking off the cushions before slamming into one another on a field of altering trajectories. The cue ball alone, through some dreadful miscalculation or ineptitude, rolls to a corner pocket and plummets out of sight.

  – That’s scratch.

  But who hears him now? The manager bounds out of his cage like a man possessed. Gesticulating wildly, he overtakes the two figures less than halfway to the gallery and shoves them under the light of the nearest table. They turn out their pockets in the smoke to prove they have nothing but an old button left with which to pay for the coffee. The manager dabs his brow with a wad of Kleenex. It’s not enough. Not nearly enough. Catching sight of the yellow plume (it rises and falls in the gallery darkness), he indicates the figure breathing beneath it to the two men, and that this figure might be brought to him to have its pockets searched.

  Silence descends. Not a whine, not a murmur as they raise the prankster up, arms crooked around his back, hands clasped under his knees to make the throne of an imaginary palanquin, and bear him over the brass rail into the place of light. They prop him up between them, head slumped and open-mouthed, teetering from side to side, oblivious to one and all. The manager unbuttons the prankster’s overcoat, emptying his pockets of: some panty shreds garnished with lace, a pair of manicure scissors, seventeen plastic cups, a match, two Swedish meatballs, a variety of hors d’œuvres (slightly damaged), nine plastic forks, a pocket flashlight, three cocktail napkins (one with the dried imprint of a ring), a penknife (containing bottle opener, nail file/emery board, skeleton key, and four blades of various size), a hickory duck-call, half a railroad tie with a dangerously splintered edge, a tube of airplane glue, a small screwdriver, some gravel, a handful of grass, two dog biscuits (half eaten), a stuffed canary, the cracked hand of a porcelain figurine (three fingers missing), one hypodermic syringe (empty, the needle broken off), seven pieces of colored chalk.