The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  After the third margarita their hips were touching, and something was spreading through him in slow orgasmic waves. It was sticky where they were touching; an area the size of the heel of his thumb where the cloth had parted. He was two men: the one inside fusing with her in total cellular communion, and the shell who sat casually on a stool at the bar, elbows on either side of his drink, fingers toying with a swizzle stick. Smiling benignly into space. Calm in the cool dimness.

  And once, but only once, some distant worrisome part of him made Coretti glance down to where soft ruby tubes pulsed, tendrils tipped with sharp lips worked in the shadows between them. Like the joining tentacles of two strange anemones.

  They were mating, and no one knew.

  And the bartender, when he brought the next drink, offered his tired smile and said, ‘Rainin’ out now, innit? Just won’t let up.’

  ‘Been like that all goddamn week,’ Coretti answered. ‘Rainin’ to beat the band.’

  And he said it right. Like a real human being.

  Egnaro

  M. John Harrison

  M. John Harrison (1945–) is an influential English writer whose story ‘The New Rays’ also appears in this volume. Harrison was a leading figure in the British science fiction New Wave of the 1960s, along with writers like Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard. However, only Harrison can be said to have written in such a way as to modernize or comment on the traditional weird tale in his short fiction. His work has been instrumental to several generations of fantasists working in non-escapist modes. ‘Egnaro’ suggests at least two interpretations by story’s end, one of which repudiates the idea of reportage from weird or supernatural places.

  Egnaro is a secret known to everyone but yourself.

  It is a country or a city to which you have never been; it is an unknown language. At the same time it is like being cuckolded, or plotted against. It is part of the universe of events which will never wholly reveal itself to you: a conspiracy the barest outline of which, once visible, will gall you forever.

  It is in conversations not your own (so I learnt from Lucas) that you first hear of Egnaro. Egnaro reveals itself in minutiae, in that great and very real part of our lives when we are doing nothing important. You wait outside the library in the rain: an advert for a new kind of vacuum pump, photographed against a background of cycads and conifers, catches your eye. ‘Branch offices everywhere!’ Old men sit on the park benches, and as you pass make casual reference to some forgotten campaign in the marshes of a steamy country. You are always in transit when you hear of Egnaro, in transit or in limbo. A book falls open and you read with a sudden inexpressible frisson of nostalgia, ‘Will I ever return there?’ (Outside, rain again, falling into someone else’s garden; a wet black branch touches the window in the wind.) A woman at a dinner party murmurs, ‘Egnaro, where the long sunlit esplanades lift from a wine-dark sea…’

  It is this overheard, fragmentary quality which is so destructive. By the time you have turned your head the woman is speaking of tomatoes and hot-house flowers; someone has switched off the news broadcast with its hints of a foreign war; the accountant in the seat opposite you on the train has folded up his Daily Telegraph preparatory to getting off at Stockport. You forget immediately. Egnaro – in the beginning at least – hides itself in the interstices, the empty moments of your life.

  Lucas himself had a similar incidental quality. He was a fattish, intelligent, curly-haired man, between thirty and forty years old and prone to migraine headaches, who had worked his way up from records and goldfish in the Shude Hill Market to a shabby bookshop on one of the streets behind Manchester library. I did his accounts once a month in a filthy office he kept above the shop; afterwards he would treat me to a Chinese meal and pay me in cash, for which I was grateful. I sold some of my wife’s books to him when she died. He was quite decent to me on that occasion.

  He conducted the business evasively. Receipts were scribbled on decaying brown paper bags, in a variety of hands. He had three signatures. I never knew how many people he employed. He never paid his bills. He concealed from me almost as much as he was concealing from his suppliers, his partners, and his VAT inspector. To tell the truth I let him hide as much as he pleased: no one in the gray streets outside cared, and I was glad of the work. I hated the office, with its litter of half-empty plastic cups and plates of congealed food; but I liked the shop. After the rambling, apologetic evasions upstairs it had a sour candor.

  Its window was packed with colorful American comics cellotaped into plastic bags, and its door was always open. Inside it was the relic of a dozen bankruptcy cases: car rental, cheap shoes, do-it-yourself. Lucas had ripped out the original fitments, leaving raw scars on the wall to remind him, and replaced them with badly carpentered shelves. A tape player and two loudspeakers pumped the narrow aisles full of pop music which drew in the students and teenagers who made up his bread and butter clientele. They came in full of a sort of greedy idealism, to buy science fiction and crankcult material – books about spoon-bending, flying saucers and spiritualism – books by Koestler and Crowley, Cowper Powys and Colin Wilson – all the paraphernalia of that ‘new’ paradigm which so attracts the young. As a sideline Lucas sold them second-hand records, posters, novelties, and – from a basement stinking of broken lavatories and mold – film magazines, biographies of James Dean, and children’s comics.

  They loved it. Every flat surface was strewn with the poor stuff they wanted, and I don’t think any of them ever realized that Lucas hated them, or that this was his revenge on them.

  He kept the pornography at the rear of the shop. On slack afternoons he would stand behind the cash desk, sealing the new stock into plastic wrappers so that the customers couldn’t maul it. This activity seemed to relax him. His plump fingers had performed the task so often that they worked unsupervised, deftly folding the wrapper, pulling the cellotape off the reel, smoothing it down, while Lucas’s thoughts went elsewhere and his face took on a collapsed, distant expression; so that he looked, with his curly hair and smooth skin, like a corrupt but puzzled cherub. Occasionally he would leaf through a copy of Rustler or Big Breasted Women in Real Life Poses before he sealed it up, or stare with sudden stony contempt at the businessmen browsing the back shelves.

  Once or twice a month the police would come unannounced and remove his entire stock in black polythene dustbin bags. No one expected this to have any effect. He had the shelves full again the next day. They treated him with a jocular familiarity – and in the face of their warrants and destruction orders he was resentful but polite. He made no distinction between pornography and science fiction, often wondering out loud why they confiscated the one and not the other.

  ‘It all seems the same to me,’ he maintained. ‘Comfort and dreams. It all rots your brain.’ Then, reflectively: ‘Give them what they want and take the money.’

  Though he believed this, his cynicism wasn’t as simple as it seemed. The art student, with his baggy trousers and his magenta dyed hair, coming in for the latest Carlos Castaneda or John Cowper Powys; the shopgirl who asked in a distracted whine, ‘Got anything about Elvis Presley? Any books? Badges?’; the accounts executive in the three-piece suit who snapped back his cuff to consult his digital watch before folding the new issue of Young Girls in Full Color or Omni into his plastic attaché case: I soon saw that Lucas’s contempt for them stemmed from his fellow-feeling.

  In unguarded moments he showed me some of his own collection: florid volumes illustrated in the Twenties and Thirties by Harry Clarke; Beardsley prints and Burne Jones reproductions. He had newspapers from the fifties and sixties, announcing the deaths of politicians and pop stars; he had original recordings by Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. If he knew exactly what the teenagers wanted to buy, it was because he was privy to their dreams; it was because he had haunted the back streets of London and Manchester and Liverpool only a few years before, searching for a biography of Mervyn Peake, a forgotten novel, a bootleg record. And if
he hated them it was because he had lost their simplicity, their ability to be comforted, the ease with which they consummated their desires.

  He was trapped between the fantasy on the shelves, which no longer satisfied him, and the meaningless sheaves of invoices floating in pools of cold coffee on the desk upstairs. Therein lay his susceptibility to Egnaro. Where my own lay I am not half so sure.

  ‘We all love a mysterious country,’ said Lucas.

  We were sitting in his office, looking through his collection, warming our hands over the one-bar fire which drew a sour, failed smell from the piles of ancient magazines and overflowing waste bins. The accounts for February were finished. His takings were down, he claimed, his overheads up. All that month a wind from Siberia had been depressing the city center, scouring Deansgate from the cathedral eastward, and forcing its way into the shops. Downstairs the tape-player was broken. Students drifted listlessly past in ones or twos, or clustered round the window with their collars turned up, arguing over the value of the stuff inside.

  ‘For instance,’ Lucas explained, leaning over my shoulder to turn a page: ‘This tribe has lived for centuries under a volcano on an island somewhere off the south west coast of Africa. The exact latitude is unknown. Their elders worship the volcano as a god; they’re said to have inhuman powers.’ He turned several pages at once, his pudgy fingers nimble. ‘It’s the draftsmanship I love. There! You can see every head under the water, even the straws they’re breathing through. Look at that stipple! You won’t find drawing like that in the rubbish downstairs.’

  He sighed.

  ‘I used to spend hours with this stuff as a kid. See the spider monkeys, trapped in the burning village? They act as the eyes of the witch doctor: he never sees anything for the rest of his life but flames!’

  He had been preoccupied all day, sometimes depressed and edgy, at others full of the odd nostalgic eagerness which with him stood in for gaiety. He couldn’t settle to anything. Now he was showing me an illustrated omnibus of some American writer popular in the Nineteen Twenties, Edgar Rice Burroughs or Abraham Merritt, which had cost him, he said, over a hundred pounds. It had been privately printed a decade ago and was very hard to come by. I could make little of it, and was surprised to find he kept it with his treasured editions of Under the Hill and Salome. The pictures seemed badly drawn and drab, unwittingly comic in their portrayal of albino gorillas and wide-eyed, frightened women; the tales themselves fragmentary, motiveless and unreal.

  ‘I’ve never seen much of it,’ I admitted.

  Personally, I told him, I had adored Kipling at that age. (Even now, if I close my eyes, I can still picture ‘the cat who walked alone,’ his tail stuck up in the air like a brush and that poor little mouse speared on the end of his sword.) When he didn’t respond I closed the book with exaggerated care.

  ‘It’s very nice,’ I said, ‘but not my sort of thing. Are you hungry yet?’

  But he was staring down into the cold black street.

  ‘It’s almost as if he’d been there, don’t you think?’ he said. ‘Watching the way the ash drifts down endlessly over the pumice terraces.’

  He was talking to himself, but he couldn’t do it alone. He was trying to woo me, even though we had so little in common he didn’t know what to say. His obsession had him by the throat, and the Rice Burroughs volume had only been an introduction, a way of preparing me. Later I would begin to recognize these moods, and learn how to respond to them. Now I merely watched while he shook his head absently, abandoned the window, and, breathing heavily through his mouth, made a pretence of fumbling through the heaps of stuff under the desk. The book he came up with fell open, from long usage, at a page about halfway through. I see now that this is what he had wanted to show me all along. He looked at it for a minute, his lips moving slightly as he scanned the text, then nodded to himself and thrust it into my hands.

  ‘I always wondered what this meant,’ he said, with a peculiar deprecatory shrug. ‘You might be interested in it: what he really meant by it.’

  It was an American paperback, one of those with the edges of the pages dyed a dull red and the paper that smells faintly of excrement. There were newer editions of it in the shop downstairs; in fact it was quite popular. Its author claimed to link certain astronomical events with the activities of secret societies and Gnostic sects, although what he hoped to prove by this was unclear. It was called The Castles of the Kings, or something similar. The bookstalls have been full of this sort of thing for the last ten years; but Lucas’s copy had been bought in the mid-fifties when it was not so common, and its pages were tobacco brown with age. While I was reading it he fussed round the office, shuffling through the invoices, trying to tidy the desk, warming his hands at the fire: but I could feel him watching me intently.

  ‘We know what we see,’ the passage began, ‘or think we do…’ And it went on:

  …but is it possible that the real pattern of life is not in the least apparent, but rather lurks beneath the surface of things, half hidden and only apparent in certain rare lights, and then only to the prepared eye? A secret country, a place behind the places we know, which seems to have but little connection to the obvious schemes of the universe?

  In certain lights and at certain seasons the inhabitants of any city can see enormous faces hanging in the air, or words of fire. Also, one house in an otherwise dark street will be seen to be lit up at night for a week, even though no one lives there. From it will come sounds of revelry, although no one is observed to enter or leave it. Suddenly all is quiet and dark again, as if nothing had happened! But ordinary people will remember.

  Scientists give us many explanations to choose from. Are we really to believe that reality is built from tiny motes whirling invisibly about one another?

  There was more of this; an account of an eclipse witnessed in China during the fourteenth century; and then the following curious paragraph:

  In India newly married couples wade in the estuarine mud catching fish in a new garment. ‘What do you see?’ their friends call from the bank. ‘Sons and cattle!’ is the answer. Are we to doubt that India exists? In the Dark Ages they had never heard of America! When the Jew of Tunis exhibited a fish’s tail on a cushion, did anyone doubt that it was a fish?

  ‘I don’t quite see what he’s getting at,’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ said Lucas. He thought for a moment. He had expected my reaction, I could see, but was disappointed all the same. ‘You saw the hole in his argument though?’ He took the book gently from my hands and returned it to its heap. ‘You saw through that?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, as positively as I could: ‘I saw that.’

  But he seemed dissatisfied. He stared at me for some time as if I had tried to mislead him over something obvious – the time of a train, say, or the name of a film actress. I put my coat on under his watery blue-eyed gaze and we went out of the office in silence. It occurred to me suddenly that he saw no flaw at all in that ‘argument,’ such as it was; and I wondered briefly how many casual acquaintances like myself had been invited up to the office to puzzle over The Castles of the Kings; and how many more he had lent it to, in the hope that they would see what he saw in its skeins of unoriginal rhetoric and curious misinterpretations of the world.

  Downstairs he looked round the shop with dislike; pocketed the take – perhaps eighty pounds – after a short discussion with the bored lad behind the cash desk; and locked up. As we stood on the doorstep, fastening our coats against the scatter of snow coming down on the black Manchester air, he turned to me and dismissed it all with,

  ‘Good for a laugh, though, that passage? Good for a laugh, anyway!’ And I had the feeling he’d said that many times, too. ‘By the way,’ he went on, in the same dismissive tone: ‘Have you heard of this place they call “Egnaro”?’

  ‘That’s the Javanese place on Cross Street, isn’t it?’ I said. I thought perhaps he was bored with Chinese food. ‘Would you like to try it tonight instead of the Luck
y Lotus? We could easily go there.’

  He looked at me as if this was the last answer in the world he had been expecting; then gave a queasy, almost placatory laugh.

  ‘Easily go there!’ he said, and took my arm.

  Egnaro: it was a word, I found, that came easily to the tongue.

  ‘Do you ever think,’ said Lucas later, prodding his chicken curry, ‘that the only part of your life that really mattered is over?’ And, without giving me a chance to answer: ‘I do.’

  We were sitting in the Lucky Lotus, listening to the wet raincoats dripping in the alcove behind us.

  ‘No, don’t laugh,’ he said. ‘I’m serious. Once your childhood’s over up here, they put you in the toothpaste factory. You get a council house in Blakely. You get piles, and watch Coronation Street for the rest of your life.’

  He ate in the Lotus two or three times a week, mostly on his own, because it saved him the trouble of cooking for himself when he got home. The little Malay waitresses, I think, realized he was lonely, and surrounded him as soon as he sat down, joking about the weather in their gluey inexplicable accents. They had made of him a fixture, a fetish; and the Lotus, with its hideous maroon flock wallpaper, dirty tablecloths and congealed rice, seemed like a natural extension of the office on Peter Street. He ate his food with a sort of lugubrious greed, planting his elbows firmly on the table before he began, eyeing his plate suspiciously, and surrounding it with his forearms as if he thought someone might take it away before he had finished.

  ‘That hasn’t happened to you,’ I pointed out. ‘You’ve got the shop. You’ve chosen a different kind of life.’

  He stared for a long time at a piece of meat on the end of his fork. ‘You never escape,’ he said finally. Then: ‘Look, I don’t want to put you off, but could you just smell this?’ He waved the fork under my nose. ‘It tastes a bit funny.’