The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  The doctor shook his head. ‘You are in your grave already, Traveler. That body will be your coffin. You will be buried in it a second time, for all time.’

  The thing came one step nearer and opened its mouth. The flabby throat wrestled as with speech, but what sprang out was a slender white filament, more than whip-fast. Dr Winters saw only the first flicker of its eruption, and then his brain nova-ed, thinning out at light-speed to a white nullity.

  When the doctor came to himself, it was in fact to a part of himself only. Before he had opened his eyes he found that his wakened mind had repossessed proprioceptively only a bizarre truncation of his body. His head, neck, left shoulder, arm, and hand declared themselves – the rest was silence.

  When, he opened his eyes, he found that he lay supine on the gurney, and naked. Something propped his head. A strap bound his left elbow to the gurney’s edge, a strap he could feel. His chest was also anchored by a strap, and this he could not feel. Indeed, save for its active remnant, his entire body might have been bound in a block of ice, so numb was it, and so powerless was he to compel the slightest movement from the least part of it.

  The room was empty, but from the open door of the vault there came slight sounds: the creak and soft frictions of heavy tarpaulin shifted to accommodate some business involving small clicking and kissing noises.

  Tears of fury filled the doctor’s eyes. Clenching his one fist at the starry engine of creation that he could not see, he ground his teeth and whispered in the hot breath of strangled weeping:

  ‘Take it back, this dirty little shred of life! I throw it off gladly like the filth it is.’ The slow knock of boot soles loudened from within the vault, and he turned his head. From the vault door Joe Allen’s corpse approached him.

  It moved with new energy, though its gait was grotesque, a ducking, hitching progress, jerky with circumventions of decayed muscle, while above this galvanized, struggling frame, the bruise-colored face hung inanimate, an image of detachment. With terrible clarity the thing was revealed for what it was – a damaged hand-puppet vigorously worked from within. And when that frozen face was brought to hang above the doctor, the reeking hands, with the light, solicitous touch of friends at sickbeds, rested on his naked thigh.

  The absence of sensation made the touch more dreadful than if felt. It showed him that the nightmare he still desperately denied at heart had annexed his body while he – holding head and arm free – had already more than half-drowned in its mortal paralysis. There, from his chest on down, lay his nightmare part, a nothingness freely possessed by an unspeakability. The corpse said:

  ‘Rotten blood. Thin nourishment. I had only one hour alone before you came. I fed from my neighbor to my left – barely had strength to extend a siphon. Fed from the right while you worked. Tricky going – you are alert. I expected Dr Parsons. The energy needs of animating this’ – one hand left the doctor’s thigh and smote the dusty overalls – ‘and of host-transfer, very high. Once I have you synapsed, I will be near starvation again.’

  A sequence of unbearable images unfolded in the doctor’s mind, even as the robot carrion turned from the gurney and walked to the instrument table: the sheriff’s arrival just after dawn, alone of course, since Craven always took thought for his deputies’ rest and because on this errand he would want privacy to consider any indiscretion on behalf of the miners’ survivors that the situation might call for; Craven’s finding his old friend, supine and alarmingly weak; his hurrying over, his leaning near. Then, somewhat later, a police car containing a rack of still wet bones might plunge off the highway above some deep spot in the gorge.

  The corpse took an evidence box from the table and put the scalpel in it. Then it turned and retrieved the mortuary knife from the floor and put that in as well, saying as it did so, without turning, ‘The sheriff will come in the morning. You spoke like close friends. He will probably come alone.’

  The coincidence with his thoughts had to be accident, but the intent to terrify and appall him was clear. The tone and timing of that patched-up voice were unmistakably deliberate – sly probes that sought his anguish specifically, sought his mind’s personal center. He watched the corpse – over at the table – dipping an apish but accurate hand and plucking up rib shears, scissors, clamps, adding all to the box. He stared, momentarily emptied by shock of all but the will to know finally the full extent of the horror that had appropriated his life. Joe Allen’s body carried the box to the worktable beside the gurney, and the expressionless eyes met the doctor’s.

  ‘I have gambled. A grave gamble. But now I have won. At risk of personal discovery we are obliged to disconnect, contract, hide as well as possible in the host-body. Suicide in effect. I disregarded situational imperatives, despite starvation before disinterment and subsequent autopsy being all but certain. I caught up with the crew, tackled Pollock and Jackson microseconds before the blast. I computed five days’ survival from this cache. I could disconnect at limit of my strength to do so, but otherwise I would chance autopsy, knowing the doctor was an alcoholic incompetent. And now see my gain. You are a prize host. Through you I can feed with near impunity even when killing is too dangerous. Safe meals are delivered to you still warm.’

  The corpse had painstakingly aligned the gurney parallel to the worktable but offset, the table’s foot extending past the gurney’s, and separated from it by a distance somewhat less than the reach of Joe Allen’s right arm. Now the dead hands distributed the implements along the right edge of the table, save for the scissors and the box. These the corpse took to the table’s foot, where it set down the box and slid the scissors’s jaws round one strap of its overalls. It began to speak again, and as it did, the scissors dismembered its cerements in unhesitating strokes.

  ‘The cut must be medical, forensically right, though a smaller one is easier. I must be careful of the pectoral muscles or these arms will not convey me. I am no larva anymore – over fifteen hundred grams.’

  To ease the nightmare’s suffocating pressure, to thrust out some flicker of his own will against its engulfment, the doctor flung a question, his voice more cracked than the other’s now was:

  ‘Why is my arm free?’

  ‘The last, fine neural splicing needs a sensory-motor standard, to perfect my brain’s fit to yours. Lacking this eye-hand coordinating check, only a much coarser control of the host’s characteristic motor patterns is possible. This done, I flush out the paralytic, unbind us, and we are free together.’

  The grave-clothes had fallen in a puzzle of fragments, and the cadaver stood naked, its dark gas-rounded contours making it seem some sleek marine creature, ruddered with the black-veined gas-distended sex. Again the voice had teased for his fear, had uttered the last word with a savoring protraction, and now the doctor’s cup of anguish brimmed over; horror and outrage wrenched his spirit in brutal alternation as if trying to tear it naked from its captive frame. He rolled his head in this deadlock, his mouth beginning to split with the slow birth of a mind-emptying outcry.

  The corpse watched this, giving a single nod that might have been approbation. Then it mounted the worktable and, with the concentrated caution of some practiced convalescent reentering his bed, lay on its back. The dead eyes again sought the living and found the doctor staring back, grinning insanely.

  ‘Clever corpse!’ the doctor cried. ‘Clever, carnivorous corpse! Able alien! Please don’t think I’m criticizing. Who am I to criticize? A mere arm and shoulder, a talking head, just a small piece of a pathologist. But I’m confused.’ He paused, savoring the monster’s attentive silence and his own buoyancy in the hysterical levity that had unexpectedly liberated him. ‘You’re going to use your puppet there to pluck you out of itself and put you on me. But once he’s pulled you from your driver’s seat, won’t he go dead, so to speak, and drop you? You could get a nasty knock. Why not set a plank between the tables – the puppet opens the door, and you scuttle, ooze, lurch, flop, slither, as the case may be, across the bridge. N
o messy spills. And in any case, isn’t this an odd, rather clumsy way to get around among your cattle? Shouldn’t you at least carry your own scalpels when you travel? There’s always the risk you’ll run across that one host in a million that isn’t carrying one with him.’

  He knew his gibes would be answered to his own despair. He exulted, but solely in the momentary bafflement of the predator – in having, for just a moment, mocked its gloating assurance to silence and marred its feast.

  Its right hand picked up the postmortem knife beside it, and the left wedged a roll of gauze beneath Allen’s neck, lifting the throat to a more prominent arch. The mouth told the ceiling:

  ‘We retain larval form till entry of the host. As larvae we have locomotor structures, and sense buds usable outside our ships’ sensory amplifiers. I waited coiled round Joe Allen’s bed leg till night, entered by his mouth as he slept.’ Allen’s hand lifted the knife, held it high above the dull, quick eyes, turning it in the light. ‘Once lodged, we have three instars to adult form,’ the voice continued absently – the knife might have been a mirror from which the corpse read its features. ‘Larvally we have only a sketch of our full neural tap. Our metamorphosis is cued and determined by the host’s endosomatic ecology. I matured in three days.’ Allen’s wrist flexed, tipping the knife’s point downmost. ‘Most supreme adaptations are purchased at the cost of inessential capacities.’ The elbow pronated and slowly flexed, hooking the knife bodyward. ‘Our hosts are all sentients, ecodominants, are already carrying the baggage of coping structures for the planetary environment we find them in. Limbs, sensory portals’ – the fist planted the fang of its tool under the chin, tilted it and rode it smoothly down the throat, the voice proceeding unmarred from under the furrow that the steel ploughed – ‘somatic envelopes, instrumentalities’ – down the sternum, diaphragm, abdomen the stainless blade painted its stripe of gaping, muddy tissue – ‘with a host’s brain we inherit all these, the mastery of any planet, netted in its dominant’s cerebral nexus. Thus our genetic codings are now all but disencumbered of such provisions.’

  So swiftly that the doctor flinched, Joe Allen’s hand slashed four lateral cuts from the great wound’s axis. The seeming butchery left two flawlessly drawn thoracic flaps cleanly outlined. The left hand raised the left flap’s hem, and the right coaxed the knife into the aperture, deepening it with small stabs and slices. The posture was a man’s who searches a breast pocket, with the dead eyes studying the slow recoil of flesh. The voice, when it resumed, had geared up to an intenser pitch:

  ‘Galactically, the chordate nerve/brain paradigm abounds, and the neural labyrinth is our dominion. Are we to make plank bridges and worm across them to our food? Are cockroaches greater than we for having legs to run up walls and antennae to grope their way? All the quaint, hinged crutches that life sports! The stilts, fins, fans, springs, stalks, flippers, and feathers, all in turn so variously terminating in hooks, clamps, suckers, scissors, forks, or little cages of digits! And besides all the gadgets it concocts for wrestling through its worlds, it is all knobbed, whiskered, crested, plumed, vented, spiked, or measeled over with perceptual gear for combing pittances of noise or color from the environing plentitude.’

  Invincibly calm and sure, the hands traded tool and tasks. The right flap eased back, revealing ropes of ingeniously spared muscle while promising a genuine appearance once sutured back in place. Helplessly the doctor felt his delirious defiance bleed away and a bleak fascination rebind him.

  ‘We are the taps and relays that share the host’s aggregate of afferent nerve-impulse precisely at its nodes of integration. We are the brains that peruse these integrations, integrate them with our existing banks of host-specific data, and, lastly, let their consequences flow down the motor pathway – either the consequences they seek spontaneously, or those we wish to graft upon them. We are besides a streamlined alimentary/circulatory system and a reproductive apparatus. And more than this we need not be.’

  The corpse had spread its bloody vest, and the feculent hands now took up the rib shears. The voice’s sinister coloration of pitch and stress grew yet more marked – the phrases slid from the tongue with a cobra’s seeking sway, winding their liquid rhythms round the doctor till a gap in his resistance should let them pour through to slaughter the little courage left him.

  ‘For in this form we have inhabited the densest brainweb of three hundred races, lain intricately snug within them like thriving vine on trelliswork. We’ve looked out from too many variously windowed masks to regret our own vestigial senses. None read their worlds definitively. Far better then our nomad’s range and choice than an unvarying tenancy of one poor set of structures. Far better to slip on as we do whole living beings and wear at once all of their limbs and organs, memories and powers – wear all these as tightly congruent to our wills as a glove is to the hand that fills it.’

  The shears clipped through the gristle, stolid, bloody jaws monotonously feeding, stopping short of the sternoclavicular joint in the manubrium where the muscles of the pectoral girdle have an important anchorage.

  ‘No consciousness of the chordate type that we have found has been impermeable to our finesse – no dendritic pattern so elaborate we could not read its stitchwork and thread ourselves to match, precisely map its each synaptic seam till we could loosen it and retailor all to suit ourselves. We have strutted costumed in the bodies of planetary autarchs, venerable manikins of moral fashion, but cut of the universal cloth: the weave of fleet electric filaments of experience that we easily reshuttled to the warp of our wishes. Whereafter – newly hemmed and gathered – their living fabric hung obedient to our bias, investing us with honor and influence unlimited.’

  The tricky verbal melody, through the corpse’s deft, unfaltering self-dismemberment – the sheer neuromuscular orchestration of the compound activity – struck Dr Winters with the detached enthrallment great keyboard performers could bring him. He glimpsed the alien’s perspective – a Gulliver waiting in a Brobdingnagian grave, then marshaling a dead giant against a living, like a dwarf in a huge mechanical crane, feverishly programming combat on a battery of levers and pedals, waiting for the robot arms’ enactments, the remote, titanic impact of the foes – and he marveled, filled with a bleak wonder at life’s infinite strategy and plasticity. Joe Allen’s hands reached into his half-opened abdominal cavity, reached deep below the uncut anterior muscle that was exposed by the shallow, spurious incision of the epidermis, till by external measure they were extended far enough to be touching his thighs. The voice was still as the forearms advertised a delicate rummaging with the buried fingers. The shoulders drew back. As the steady withdrawal brought the wrists into view, the dead legs tremored and quaked with diffuse spasms.

  ‘You called your kind our food and drink, Doctor. If you were merely that, an elementary usurpation of your motor tracts alone would satisfy us, give us perfect cattle-control – for what rarest word or subtlest behavior is more than a flurry of varied muscles? That trifling skill was ours long ago. It is not mere blood that feeds this lust I feel now to tenant you, this craving for an intimacy that years will not stale. My truest feast lies in compelling you to feed in that way. It lies in the utter deformation of your will this will involve. Had gross nourishment been my prime need, then my grave-mates – Pollock and Jackson – could have eked out two weeks of life for me or more. But I scorned a cowardly parsimony in the face of death. I reinvested more than half the energy that their blood gave me in fabricating chemicals to keep their brains alive, and fluid-bathed with oxygenated nutriment.’

  The corpse reached into its gaping abdomen, and out of its cloven groin the smeared hands pulled two long skeins of silvery filament. The material looked like masses of nerve fiber, tough and scintillant – for the weave of it glittered with a slight incessant movement of each single thread. These nerve skeins were contracting. They thickened into two swollen nodes, while at the same time the corpse’s legs tremored and faintly twitched, as the b
right vermiculate roots of the parasite withdrew from within Allen’s musculature. When the nodes lay fully contracted – the doctor could just see their tips within the abdomen – then the legs lay still as death.

  ‘I had accessory neural taps only to spare, but I could access much memory, and all of their cognitive responses, and having in my banks all the organ of Corti’s electrochemical conversions of English words, I could whisper anything to them directly into the eighth cranial nerve. Those are our true feast, Doctor, such bodiless electric storms of impotent cognition as I tickled up in those two little bone globes. I was forced to drain them just before disinterment, but they lived till then and understood everything – everything I did to them.’

  When the voice paused, the dead and living eyes were locked together. They remained so a moment, and then the dead face smiled.

  It recapitulated all the horror of Allen’s first resurrection – this waking of expressive soul in that purple death mask. And it was a demon-soul the doctor saw awaken: the smile was barbed with fine, sharp hooks of cruelty at the corners of the mouth, while the barbed eyes beamed fond, languorous anticipation of his pain. Remotely, Dr Winters heard the flat sound of his own voice asking:

  ‘And Joe Allen?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Doctor. He is with us now, has been throughout. I grieve to abandon so rare a host! He is a true hermit-philosopher, well-read in four languages. He is writing a translation of Marcus Aurelius – he was, I mean, in his free time…’

  Long minutes succeeded of the voice accompanying the surreal self-autopsy, but the doctor lay resigned, emptied of reactive power. Still, the full understanding of his fate reverberated in his mind as the parasite sketched his future for him in that borrowed voice. And it did not stop haunting Winters, the sense of what a virtuoso this entity was, how flawlessly this mass of neural fibers played the tricky instrument of human speech. As flawlessly as it had puppeteered the corpse’s face into that ghastly smile. And with the same artistic aim: to waken, to amplify, to ripen its host-to-be’s outrage and horror. The voice, with ever more melody and gloating verve, sent waves of realization through the doctor, amplifications of the Unspeakable.