The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  He had not counted on the heat.

  The hills were dry and rocky. Kress ran from the house as quickly as he could, ran until his ribs ached and his breath was coming in gasps. Then he walked, but as soon as he had recovered he began to run again. For almost an hour he ran and walked, ran and walked, beneath the fierce hot sun. He sweated freely, and wished that he had thought to bring some water. He watched the sky in hopes of seeing Wo and Shade.

  He was not made for this. It was too hot, and too dry, and he was in no condition. But he kept himself going with the memory of the way the maw had breathed, and the thought of the wriggling little things that by now were surely crawling all over his house. He hoped Wo and Shade would know how to deal with them.

  He had his own plans for Wo and Shade. It was all their fault, Kress had decided, and they would suffer for it. Lissandra was dead, but he knew others in her profession. He would have his revenge. He promised himself that a hundred times as he struggled and sweated his way east.

  At least he hoped it was east. He was not that good at directions, and he wasn’t certain which way he had run in his initial panic, but since then he had made an effort to bear due east, as Wo had suggested.

  When he had been running for several hours, with no sign of rescue, Kress began to grow certain that he had gone wrong.

  When several more hours passed, he began to grow afraid. What if Wo and Shade could not find him? He would die out here. He hadn’t eaten in two days; he was weak and frightened; his throat was raw for want of water. He couldn’t keep going. The sun was sinking now, and he’d be completely lost in the dark. What was wrong? Had the sandkings eaten Wo and Shade? The fear was on him again, filling him, and with it a great thirst and a terrible hunger. But Kress kept going. He stumbled now when he tried to run, and twice he fell. The second time he scraped his hand on a rock, and it came away bloody. He sucked at it as he walked, and worried about infection.

  The sun was on the horizon behind him. The ground grew a little cooler, for which Kress was grateful. He decided to walk until last light and settle in for the night. Surely he was far enough from the sandkings to be safe, and Wo and Shade would find him come morning.

  When he topped the next rise, he saw the outline of a house in front of him.

  It wasn’t as big as his own house, but it was big enough. It was habitation, safety. Kress shouted and began to run toward it. Food and drink, he had to have nourishment, he could taste the meal now. He was aching with hunger. He ran down the hill towards the house, waving his arms and shouting to the inhabitants. The light was almost gone now, but he could still make out a half-dozen children playing in the twilight. ‘Hey there,’ he shouted. ‘Help, help.’

  They came running toward him.

  Kress stopped suddenly. ‘No,’ he said, ‘oh, no. Oh, no.’ He backpedaled, slipped on the sand, got up and tried to run again. They caught him easily. They were ghastly little things with bulging eyes and dusky orange skin. He struggled, but it was useless. Small as they were, each of them had four arms, and Kress had only two.

  They carried him toward the house. It was a sad, shabby house built of crumbling sand, but the door was quite large, and dark, and it breathed. That was terrible, but it was not the thing that set Simon Kress to screaming. He screamed because of the others, the little orange children who came crawling out from the castle, and watched impassive as he passed.

  All of them had his face.

  Window

  Bob Leman

  Bob Leman (1922–2006) was an American science fiction and horror short story author, most often associated with The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Leman’s first story appeared when he was forty-five. ‘Window’ (1980), which continues this anthology’s exploration of ‘weird science fiction,’ is his most famous story. Nominated for the Nebula Award, it was adapted for an episode of Night Visions, directed by and starring Bill Pullman. Another of Leman’s stories, ‘How Dobbstown Was Saved’, was to have been published in the Harlan Ellison anthology The Last Dangerous Visions but eventually appeared in the collection Feesters in the Lake and Other Stories (2002).

  Krantz was occupied with the lighting of a cigar. He blew a cloud of foul smoke, and through it he said, ‘We’re missing one prefab building, one POBEC computer, some medical machinery, and one, uh, researcher named Culvergast.’

  ‘Explain “missing”,’ Gilson said.

  ‘Gone. Disappeared. A building and everything in it. Just not there any more. But we do have something in exchange.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘I think you’d better wait and see for yourself,’ Krantz said. ‘We’ll be there in a few minutes.’ They were passing through the farther reaches of the metropolitan area, a series of decayed small towns. The highway wound down the valley beside the river, and the towns lay stretched along it, none of them more than a block or two wide, their side streets rising steeply toward the first ridge. In one of these moribund communities they left the highway and went bouncing up the hillside on a crooked road whose surface changed from cobblestones to slag after the houses had been left behind. Beyond the crest of the ridge the road began to drop as steeply as it had risen, and after a quarter of a mile they turned into a lane whose entrance would have been missed by anyone not watching for it. They were in a forest now; it was second growth, but the logging had been done so long ago that it might almost have been a virgin stand, lofty, silent, and somewhat gloomy on this gray day.

  ‘Pretty,’ Gilson said. ‘How does a project like this come to be way out here, anyhow?’

  ‘The place was available,’ the colonel said. ‘Has been since World War Two. They set it up for some work on proximity fuses. Shut it down in ’48. Was vacant until the professor took it over.’

  ‘Culvergast is a little bit eccentric,’ Krantz said. ‘He wouldn’t work at the university – too many people, he said. When I heard this place was available, I put in for it, and got it – along with the colonel, here. Culvergast has been happy with the setup, but I guess he bothers the colonel a little.’

  ‘He’s a certifiable loony,’ the colonel said, ‘and his little helpers are worse.’

  ‘Well, what the devil was he doing?’ Gilson asked.

  Before Krantz could answer, the driver braked at a chain-link gate that stood across the lane. It was fastened with a loop of heavy logging chain and manned by armed soldiers. One of them, machine pistol in hand, peered into the car. ‘Everything O.K., sir?’ he said.

  ‘O.K. with waffles, Sergeant,’ the colonel said. It was evidently a password. The noncom unlocked the enormous padlock that secured the chain. ‘Pretty primitive,’ the colonel said as they bumped through the gateway, ‘but it’ll do until we get proper stuff in. We’ve got men with dogs patrolling the fence.’ He looked at Gilson. ‘We’re just about there. Get a load of this, now.’

  It was a house. It stood in the center of the clearing in an island of sunshine, white, gleaming, and incongruous. All around was the dark loom of the forest under a sunless sky, but somehow sunlight lay on the house, sparkling in its polished windows and making brilliant the colors of massed flowers in carefully tended beds, reflecting from the pristine whiteness of its siding out into the gray, littered clearing with its congeries of derelict buildings.

  ‘You couldn’t have picked a better time,’ the colonel said. ‘Shining there, cloudy here.’

  Gilson was not listening. He had climbed from the car and was staring in fascination. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Like a goddam Victorian postcard.’

  Lacy scrollwork foamed over the rambling wooden mansion, running riot at the eaves of the steep roof, climbing elaborately up towers and turrets, embellishing deep oriels and outlining a long, airy veranda. Tall windows showed by their spacing that the rooms were many and large. It seemed to be a new house, or perhaps just newly painted and supremely well-kept. A driveway of fine white gravel led under a high porte-cochère.

  ‘How about that?’ the colonel said. ‘
Look like your grandpa’s house?’

  As a matter of fact, it did: like his grandfather’s house enlarged and perfected and seen through a lens of romantic nostalgia, his grandfather’s house groomed and pampered as the old farmhouse never had been. He said, ‘And you got this in exchange for a prefab, did you?’

  ‘Just like that one,’ the colonel said, pointing to one of the seedy buildings. ‘Of course we could use the prefab.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Watch,’ the colonel said. He picked up a small rock and tossed it in the direction of the house. The rock rose, topped its arc, and began to fall. Suddenly it was not there.

  ‘Here,’ Gilson said. ‘Let me try that.’

  He threw the rock like a baseball, a high, hard one. It disappeared about fifty feet from the house. As he stared at the point of its disappearance, Gilson became aware that the smooth green of the lawn ended exactly below. Where the grass ended, there began the weeds and rocks that made up the floor of the clearing. The line of separation was absolutely straight, running at an angle across the lawn. Near the driveway it turned ninety degrees, and sliced off lawn, driveway and shrubbery with the same precise straightness.

  ‘It’s perfectly square,’ Krantz said. ‘About a hundred feet to a side. Probably a cube, actually. We know the top’s about ninety feet in the air. I’d guess there are about ten feet of it underground.’

  ‘“It”?’ Gilson said. ‘“It”? What’s “it”?’

  ‘Name it and you can have it,’ Krantz said. ‘A three-dimensional television receiver a hundred feet to a side, maybe. A cubical crystal ball. Who knows?’

  ‘The rocks we threw. They didn’t hit the house. Where did the rocks go?’

  ‘Ah. Where, indeed? Answer that and perhaps you answer all.’

  Gilson took a deep breath. ‘All right. I’ve seen it. Now tell me about it. From the beginning.’

  Krantz was silent for a moment; then, in a dry lecturer’s voice he said, ‘Five days ago, June thirteenth, at eleven thirty a.m., give or take three minutes, Private Ellis Mulvihill, on duty at the gate, heard what he later described as “an explosion that was quiet, like.” He entered the enclosure, locked the gate behind him, and ran up here to the clearing. He was staggered – “shook-up” was his expression – to see, instead of Culvergast’s broken-down prefab, that house, there. I gather that he stood gulping and blinking for a time, trying to come to terms with what his eyes told him. Then he ran over there to the guardhouse and called the colonel. Who called me. We came out here and found that a quarter of an acre of land and a building with a man in it had disappeared and been replaced by this, as neat as a peg in a pegboard.’

  ‘You think the prefab went where the rocks did,’ Gilson said. It was a statement.

  ‘Why, we’re not even absolutely sure it’s gone. What we’re seeing can’t actually be where we’re seeing it. It rains on that house when it’s sunny here, and right now you can see the sunlight on it, on a day like this. It’s a window.’

  ‘A window on what?’

  ‘Well – that looks like a new house, doesn’t it? When were they building houses like that?’

  ‘Eighteen seventy or eighty, something like – oh.’

  ‘Yes,’ Krantz said. ‘I think we’re looking at the past.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Gilson said.

  ‘I know how you feel. And I may be wrong. But I have to say it looks very much that way. I want you to hear what Reeves says about it. He’s been here from the beginning. A graduate student, assisting here. Reeves!’

  A very tall, very thin young man unfolded himself from a crouched position over an odd-looking machine that stood near the line between grass and rubble and ambled over to the three men. Reeves was an enthusiast. ‘Oh, it’s the past, all right,’ he said. ‘Sometime in the eighties. My girl got some books on costume from the library, and the clothes check out for that decade. And the decorations on the horses’ harnesses are a clue, too. I got that from–’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Gilson said. ‘Clothes? You mean there are people in there?’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ Reeves said. ‘A fine little family. Mamma, poppa, little girl, little boy, old granny or auntie. A dog. Good people.’

  ‘How can you tell that?’

  ‘I’ve been watching them for five days, you know? They’re having – we’re having – fine weather there – or then, or whatever you’d say. They’re nice to each other, they like each other. Good people. You’ll see.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Well, they’ll be eating dinner now. They usually come out after dinner. In an hour, maybe.’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ Gilson said. ‘And while we wait, you will please tell me some more.’

  Krantz assumed his lecturing voice again. ‘As to the nature of it, nothing. We have a window, which we believe to open into the past. We can see into it, so we know that light passes through; but it passes in only one direction, as evidenced by the fact that the people over there are wholly unaware of us. Nothing else goes through. You saw what happened to the rocks. We’ve shoved poles through the interface there – there’s no resistance at all – but anything that goes through is gone, God knows where. Whatever you put through stays there. Your pole is cut off clean. Fascinating. But wherever it is, it’s not where the house is. That interface isn’t between us and the past; it’s between us and – someplace else. I think our window here is just an incidental side-effect, a – a twisting of time that resulted from whatever tensions exist along that interface.’

  Gilson sighed. ‘Krantz,’ he said, ‘what am I going to tell the secretary? You’ve lucked into what may be the biggest thing that ever happened, and you’ve kept it bottled up for five days. We wouldn’t know about it now if it weren’t for the colonel’s report. Five days wasted. Who knows how long this thing will last? The whole goddam scientific establishment ought to be here – should have been from day one. This needs the whole works. At this point the place should be a beehive. And what do I find? You and a graduate student throwing rocks and poking with sticks. And a girlfriend looking up the dates of costumes. It’s damn near criminal.’

  Krantz did not look abashed. ‘I thought you’d say that,’ he said. ‘But look at it this way. Like it or not, this thing wasn’t produced by technology or science. It was pure psi. If we can reconstruct Culvergast’s work, we may be able to find out what happened; we may be able to repeat the phenomenon. But I don’t like what’s going to happen after you’ve called in your experimenters, Gilson. They’ll measure and test and conjecture and theorize, and never once will they accept for a moment the real basis of what’s happened. The day they arrive, I’ll be out. And dammit, Gilson, this is mine.’

  ‘Not any more,’ Gilson said. ‘It’s too big.’

  ‘It’s not as though we weren’t doing some hard experiments of our own,’ Krantz said. ‘Reeves, tell him about your batting machine.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Reeves said. ‘You see, Mr. Gilson, what the professor said wasn’t absolutely the whole truth, you know? Sometimes something can get through the window. We saw it on the first day. There was a temperature inversion over in the valley, and the stink from the chemical plant had been accumulating for about a week. It broke up that day, and the wind blew the gunk through the notch and right over here. A really rotten stench. We were watching our people over there, and all of a sudden they began to sniff and wrinkle their noses and make disgusted faces. We figured it had to be the chemical stink. We pushed a pole out right away, but the end just disappeared, as usual. The professor suggested that maybe there was a pulse, or something of the sort, in the interface, that it exists only intermittently. We cobbled up a gadget to test the idea. Come and have a look at it.’

  It was a horizontal flywheel with a paddle attached to its rim, like an extended cleat. As the wheel spun, the paddle swept around a table. There was a hopper hanging above, and at intervals something dropped from the hopper onto the table, where it was immediatel
y banged by the paddle and sent flying. Gilson peered into the hopper and raised an interrogatory eyebrow. ‘Ice cubes,’ Reeves said. ‘Colored orange for visibility. That thing shoots an ice cube at the interface once a second. Somebody is always on duty with a stopwatch. We’ve established that every fifteen hours and twenty minutes the thing is open for five seconds. Five ice cubes go through and drop on the lawn in there. The rest of the time they just vanish at the interface.’

  ‘Ice cubes. Why ice cubes?’

  ‘They melt and disappear. We can’t be littering up the past with artifacts from our day. God knows what the effect might be. Then, too, they’re cheap, and we’re shooting a lot of them.’

  ‘Science,’ Gilson said heavily. ‘I can’t wait to hear what they’re going to say in Washington.’

  ‘Sneer all you like,’ Krantz said. ‘The house is there, the interface is there. We’ve by God turned up some kind of time travel. And Culvergast the screwball did it, not a physicist or an engineer.’

  ‘Now that you bring it up,’ Gilson said, ‘just what was your man Culvergast up to?’

  ‘Good question. What he was doing was – well, not to put too fine a point upon it, he was trying to discover spells.’

  ‘Spells?’

  ‘The kind you cast. Magic words. Don’t look disgusted yet. It makes sense, in a way. We were funded to look into telekinesis – the manipulation of matter by the mind. It’s obvious that telekinesis, if it could be applied with precision, would be a marvelous weapon. Culvergast’s hypothesis was that there are in fact people who perform feats of telekinesis, and although they never seem to know or be able to explain how they do it, they nevertheless perform a specific mental action that enables them to tap some source of energy that apparently exists all around us, and to some degree to focus and direct that energy. Culvergast proposed to discover the common factor in their mental processes.

  ‘He ran a lot of putative telekinesists through here, and he reported that he had found a pattern, a sort of mnemonic device functioning at the very bottom of, or below, the verbal level. In one of his people he found it as a set of musical notes, in several as gibberish or various sorts, and in one, he said, as mathematics at the primary arithmetic level. He was feeding all this into the computer, trying to eliminate simple noise and the personal idiosyncrasies of the subjects, trying to lay bare the actual, effective essence. He then proposed to organize this essence into words; words that would so shape the mental currents of a speaker of standard American English that they would channel and manipulate the telekinetic power at the will of the speaker. Magic words, you might say. Spells.