The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  The patrol car was behind the building. The doctor saw a crueller beauty in the stars than he had an hour before. They got in, and Craven swung them out onto the empty street. The doctor opened the window and hearkened, but the motor’s surge drowned out the river sound. Before the thrust of their headlights, ranks of old-fashioned parking meters sprouted shadows tall across the sidewalks, shadows that shrank and were cut down by the lights’ passage. The sheriff said:

  ‘All those extra dead. For nothing! Not even to…feed him! If it was a bomb, and he made it, he’d know how powerful it was. He wouldn’t try some stupid escape stunt with it. And how did he even know that globe was there? We worked it out that Allen was just ending a shift, but he wasn’t even up out of the ground before Billy Lee’d parked out of sight from the shaft.’

  ‘Let it rest, Nate. I want to hear more, but after you’ve slept. I know you. All the photos will be there, and the report complete, all the evidence neatly boxed and carefully described. When I’ve looked things over, I’ll know exactly how to proceed by myself.’

  Bailey had neither hospital nor morgue, and the bodies were in a defunct ice-plant on the edge of town. A generator had been brought down from the mine, lighting improvised, and the refrigeration system reactivated. Dr Parsons’s office, and the tiny examining room that served the sheriff’s station in place of a morgue, had furnished this makeshift with all the equipment that Dr Winters would need beyond what he carried with him. A quarter-mile outside the main body of the town, they drew up to it.

  Treeflanked, unneighbored by any other structure, it was a double building; the smaller half – the office – was illuminated. The bodies would be in the big windowless refrigerator segment. Craven pulled up beside a second squad car parked near the office door. A short rake-thin man wearing a large white stetson got out of the car and came over. Craven rolled down his window.

  ‘Trav. This here’s Dr Winters.’

  “’Lo, Nate. Dr Winters. Everything’s shipshape inside. Felt more comfortable out here. Last of those newshounds left two hours ago.’

  ‘They sure do hang on. You take off now, Trav. Get some sleep and be back at sunup. What temperature we getting?’

  The pale stetson, far clearer in the starlight than the shadowface beneath it, wagged dubiously. ‘Thirty-six. She won’t get lower – some kind of leak.’

  ‘That should be cold enough,’ the doctor said.

  Travis drove off, and the sheriff unlocked the padlock on the office door. Waiting behind him, Dr Winters heard the river again – a cold balm, a whisper of freedom – and overlying this, the stutter and soft snarl of the generator behind the building, a gnawing, remorseless sound that somehow fed the obscure anguish that the other soothed. They went in.

  The preparations had been thoughtful and complete. ‘You can wheel ’em out of the fridge on this and do the examining in here,’ the sheriff said, indicating a table and a gurney. ‘You should find all the gear you need on this big table here, and you can write up your reports on that desk. The phone’s not hooked up – there’s a pay phone at the last gas station if you have to call me.’

  The doctor nodded, checking over the material on the larger table: scalpels, postmortem and cartilage knives, intestine scissors, rib shears, forceps, probes, mallet and chisels, a blade saw and electric bone saw, scale, jars for specimens, needles and suture, sterilizer, gloves…Beside this array were a few boxes and envelopes with descriptive sheets attached, containing the photographs and such evidentiary objects as had been found associated with the bodies.

  ‘Excellent,’ he muttered.

  ‘The overhead light’s fluorescent, full spectrum or whatever they call it. Better for colors. There’s a pint of decent bourbon in that top desk drawer. Ready to look at ’em?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The sheriff unbarred and slid back the big metal door to the refrigeration chamber. Icy tainted air boiled out of the doorway. The light within was dimmer than that provided in the office – a yellow gloom wherein ten oblong heaps lay on trestles.

  The two stood silent for a time, their stillness a kind of unpremeditated homage paid the eternal mystery at its threshold. As if the cold room were in fact a shrine, the doctor found a peculiar awe in the row of veiled forms. The awful unison of their dying, the titan’s grave that had been made for them, conferred on them a stern authority, Death’s Chosen Ones. His stomach hurt, and he found he had his hand pressed to his abdomen. He glanced at Craven and was relieved to see that his friend, staring wearily at the bodies, had missed the gesture.

  ‘Nate. Help me uncover them.’

  Starting at opposite ends of the row, they stripped the tarps off and piled them in a corner. Both were brusque now, not pausing over the revelation of the swelled, pulpy faces – most three-lipped with the gaseous burgeoning of their tongues – and the fat, livid hands sprouting from the filthy sleeves. But at one of the bodies Craven stopped. The doctor saw him look, and his mouth twist. Then he flung the tarp on the heap and moved to the next trestle.

  When they came out, Dr Winters took out the bottle and glasses Craven had put in the desk, and they had a drink together. The sheriff made as if he would speak, but shook his head and sighed.

  ‘I will get some sleep, Carl. I’m getting crazy thoughts with this thing.’ The doctor wanted to ask those thoughts. Instead he laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

  ‘Go home, Sheriff Craven. Take off the badge and lie down. The dead won’t run off on you. We’ll all still be here in the morning.’

  When the sound of the patrol car faded, the doctor stood listening to the generator’s growl and the silence of the dead, resurgent now. Both the sound and the silence seemed to mock him. The after-echo of his last words made him uneasy. He said to his cancer:

  ‘What about it, dear colleague? We will still be here tomorrow? All of us?’

  He smiled, but felt an odd discomfort, as if he had ventured a jest in company and roused a hostile silence. He went to the refrigerator door, rolled it back, and viewed the corpses in their ordered rank, with their strange tribunal air. ‘What, sirs?’ he murmured. ‘Do you judge me? Just who is to examine whom tonight, if I may ask?’

  He went back into the office, where his first step was to examine the photographs made by the sheriff in order to see how the dead had lain at their uncovering. The earth had seized them with terrible suddenness. Some crouched, some partly stood, others sprawled in crazy free-fall postures. Each successive photo showed more of the jumble as the shovels continued their work between shots. The doctor studied them closely, noting the identifications inked on the bodies as they came completely into view.

  One man, Roger Willet, had died some yards from the main cluster. It appeared he had just straggled into the stope from the adit at the moment of the explosion. He should thus have received, more directly than any of the others, the shock waves of the blast. If bomb fragments were to be found in any of the corpses, Mr Willet’s seemed likeliest to contain them. Dr Winters pulled on a pair of surgical gloves.

  Willet lay at one end of the line of trestles. He wore a thermal shirt and overalls that were strikingly new beneath the filth of burial. Their tough fabrics jarred with the fabric of his flesh – blue, swollen, seeming easily torn or burst, like ripe fruit. In life Willet had grease-combed his hair. Now it was a sculpture of dust, spikes and whorls shaped by the head’s last grindings against the mountain that clenched it.

  Rigor had come and gone – Willet rolled laxly onto the gurney. As the doctor wheeled him past the others, he felt a slight self-consciousness. The sense of some judgment flowing from the dead assembly – unlike most such vagrant fantasies – had an odd tenacity in him. This stubborn unease began to irritate him with himself, and he moved more briskly.

  He put Willet on the examining table and cut the clothes off him with shears, storing the pieces in an evidence box. The overalls were soiled with agonal waste expulsions. The doctor stared a moment with unwilling pity at his naked
subject. ‘You won’t ride down to Fordham in any case,’ he said to the corpse. ‘Not unless I find something pretty damned obvious.’ He pulled his gloves tighter and arranged his implements.

  Waddleton had said more to him than he had reported to the sheriff. The doctor was to find, and forcefully to record that he had found, strong ‘indications’ absolutely requiring the decedents’ removal to Fordham for X-ray and an exhaustive second postmortem. The doctor’s continued employment with the Coroner’s Office depended entirely on his compliance in this. He had received this stipulation with a silence Waddleton had not thought it necessary to break. His present resolution was all but made at that moment. Let the obvious be taken as such. If the others showed as plainly as Willet did the external signs of death by asphyxiation, they would receive no more than a thorough external exam. Willet he would examine internally as well, merely to establish in depth for this one what should appear obvious in all. Otherwise, only when the external exam revealed a clearly anomalous feature – and clear and suggestive it must be – would he look deeper.

  He rinsed the caked hair in a basin, poured the sediment into a flask and labeled it. Starting with the scalp, he began a minute scrutiny of the body’s surfaces, recording his observations as he went.

  The characteristic signs of asphyxial death were evident, despite the complicating effects of autolysis and putrefaction. The eyeballs’ bulge and the tongue’s protrusion were, by now, as much due to gas pressure as to the mode of death, but the latter organ was clamped between locked teeth, leaving little doubt as to that mode. The coloration of degenerative change – a greenish-yellow tint, a darkening and mapping-out of superficial veins – was marked, but not sufficient to obscure the blue of cyanosis on the face and neck, nor the pinpoint hemorrhages freckling neck, chest, and shoulders. From the mouth and nose the doctor scraped matter he was confident was the blood-tinged mucous typically ejected in the airless agony.

  He began to find a kind of comedy in his work. What a buffoon death made of a man! A blue pop-eyed three-lipped thing. And there was himself, his curious solicitous intimacy with this clownish carrion. Excuse me, Mr Willet, while I probe this laceration. What do you feel when I do this? Nothing? Nothing at all? Fine, now what about these nails? Split them clawing at the earth, did you? Yes. A nice bloodblister under this thumbnail, I see – got it on the job a few days before your accident, no doubt? Remarkable calluses here, still quite tough…

  The doctor looked for an unanalytic moment at the hands – puffed dark paws, gestureless, having renounced all touch and grasp. He felt the wastage of the man concentrated in the hands. The painful futility of the body’s fine articulation when it is seen in death – this poignancy he had long learned not to acknowledge when he worked. But now he let it move him a little. This Roger Willet, plodding to his work one afternoon, had suddenly been scrapped, crushed to a nonfunctional heap of perishable materials. It simply happened that his life had chanced to move too close to the passage of a more powerful life, one of those inexorable and hungry lives that leave human wreckage – known or undiscovered – in their wakes. Bad luck, Mr Willet. Naturally, we feel very sorry about this. But this Joe Allen, your co-worker. Apparently he was some sort of…cannibal. It’s complicated. We don’t understand it all. But the fact is we have to dismantle you now to a certain extent. There’s really no hope of your using these parts of yourself again, I’m afraid. Ready now?

  The doctor proceeded to the internal exam with a vague eagerness for Willet’s fragmentation, for the disarticulation of that sadness in his natural form. He grasped Willet by the jaw and took up the postmortem knife. He sank its point beneath the chin and began the long, gently sawing incision that opened Willet from throat to groin.

  In the painstaking separation of the body’s laminae Dr Winters found absorption and pleasure. And yet throughout he felt, marginal but insistent, the movement of a stream of irrelevant images. These were of the building that contained him, and of the night containing it. As from outside, he saw the plant – bleached planks, iron roofing – and the trees crowding it, all in starlight, a ghosttown image. And he saw the refrigerator vault beyond the wall as from within, feeling the stillness of murdered men in a cold yellow light. And at length a question formed itself, darting in and out of the weave of his concentration as the images did: Why did he still feel, like some stir of the air, that sense of mute vigilance surrounding his action, furtively touching his nerves with its inquiry as he worked? He shrugged, overtly angry now. Who else was attending but Death? Wasn’t he Death’s hireling, and this Death’s place? Then let the master look on.

  Peeling back Willet’s cover of hemorrhage-stippled skin, Dr Winters read the corpse with an increasing dispassion, a mortuary text. He confined his inspection to the lungs and mediastinum and found there unequivocal testimony to Willet’s asphyxial death. The pleurae of the lungs exhibited the expected ecchymoses – bruised spots in the glassy enveloping membrane. Beneath, the polyhedral surface lobules of the lungs themselves were bubbled and blistered – the expected interstitial emphysema. The lungs, on section, were intensely and bloodily congested. The left half of the heart he found contracted and empty, while the right was overdistended and engorged with dark blood, as were the large veins of the upper mediastinum. It was a classic picture of death by suffocation, and at length the doctor, with needle and suture, closed up the text again.

  He returned the corpse to the gurney and draped one of his mortuary bags over it in the manner of a shroud. When he had help in the morning, he would weigh the bodies on a platform scale the office contained and afterward bag them properly. He came to the refrigerator door, and hesitated. He stared at the door, not moving, not understanding why.

  Run. Get out. Now.

  The thought was his own, but it came to him so urgently he turned around as if someone behind him had spoken. Across the room a thin man in smock and gloves, his eyes shadows, glared at the doctor from the black windows. Behind the man was a shrouded cart, behind that, a wide metal door.

  Quietly, wonderingly, the doctor asked, ‘Run from what?’ The eyeless man in the glass was still half-crouched, afraid.

  Then, a moment later, the man straightened, threw back his head, and laughed. The doctor walked to the desk and sat down shoulder to shoulder with him. He pulled out the bottle and they had a drink together, regarding each other with identical bemused smiles. Then the doctor said, ‘Let me pour you another. You need it, old fellow. It makes a man himself again.’

  Nevertheless his reentry of the vault was difficult, toilsome, each step seeming to require a new summoning of the will to move. In the freezing half-light all movement felt like defiance. His body lagged behind his craving to be quick, to be done with this molestation of the gathered dead. He returned Willet to his pallet and took his neighbor. The name on the tag wired to his boot was Ed Moses. Dr Winters wheeled him back to the office and closed the big door behind him.

  With Moses his work gained momentum. He expected to perform no further internal necropsies. He thought of his employer, rejoicing now in his seeming-submission to Waddleton’s ultimatum. The impact would be dire. He pictured the coroner in shock, a sheaf of Pathologist’s Reports in one hand, and smiled.

  Waddleton could probably make a plausible case for incomplete examination. Still, a pathologist’s discretionary powers were not well-defined. Many good ones would approve the adequacy of the doctor’s method, given his working conditions. The inevitable litigation with a coalition of compensation claimants would be strenuous and protracted. Win or lose, Waddleton’s venal devotion to the insurance company’s interest would be abundantly displayed. Further, immediately on his dismissal the doctor would formally disclose its occult cause to the press. A libel action would ensue that he would have as little cause to fear as he had to fear his firing. Both his savings and the lawsuit would long outlast his life.

  Externally, Ed Moses exhibited a condition as typically asphyxial as Willet’s had been, with n
o slightest mark of fragment entry. The doctor finished his report and returned Moses to the vault, his movements brisk and precise. His unease was all but gone. That queasy stirring of the air – had he really felt it? It had been, perhaps, some new reverberation of the death at work in him, a psychic shudder of response to the cancer’s stealthy probing for his life. He brought out the body next to Moses in the line.

  Walter Lou Jackson was big, six feet two inches from heel to crown, and would surely weigh out at more than two hundred pounds. He had writhed mightily against his million-ton coffin with an agonal strength that had torn his face and hands. Death had mauled him like a lion. The doctor set to work.

  His hands were fully themselves now – fleet, exact, intricately testing the corpse’s character as other fingers might explore a keyboard for its latent melodies. And the doctor watched them with an old pleasure, one of the few that had never failed him, his mind at one remove from their busy intelligence. All the hard deaths! A worldful of them, time without end. Lives wrenched kicking from their snug meat-frames. Walter Lou Jackson had died very hard. Joe Allen brought this on you, Mr Jackson. We think it was part of his attempt to escape the law.

  But what a botched flight! The unreason of it – more than baffling – was eerie in its colossal futility. Beyond question, Allen had been cunning. A ghoul with a psychopath’s social finesse. A good old boy who could make a tavernful of men laugh with delight while he cut his victim from their midst, make them applaud his exit with the prey, who stepped jovially into the darkness with murder at his side clapping him on the shoulder. Intelligent, certainly, with a strange technical sophistication as well, suggested by the sphere. Then what of the lunacy yet more strongly suggested by the same object? In the sphere was concentrated all the lethal mystery of Bailey’s long nightmare.

  Why the explosion? Its location implied an ambush for Allen’s pursuers, a purposeful detonation. Had he aimed at a limited cave-in from which he schemed some inconceivable escape? Folly enough in this – far more if, as seemed sure, Allen had made the bomb himself, for then he would have to know its power was grossly inordinate to the need.