The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  Before he could move away I asked him, ‘What becomes of the poor things after we have finished with them?’

  I lay in bed for three days at the hotel, very ill and depressed, wondering if it was all worth it. To W.B. I wrote, ‘Why this mania of mine to stay alive? I feel no better, I can’t even go for a walk or eat a piece of cake! I hate myself for hanging on.’ When I caught sight of myself in the mirror I was so thin that my shoulder blades looked like two plucked chicken wings. Sleeping fitfully during the day, I dreamed that I had a goiter which drained all the virtues of the world around me. Everything around me grew two-dimensional and unrealistic, while the thing on my neck fattened up like a huge purple plum. I woke up in a sweat and found myself staring out of the window at a square of sky the color of zinc.

  Later I found that someone had telephoned me, but the hotel people hadn’t thought to wake me up. They said they had made a mistake about my name.

  At night I could hardly sleep at all. I stared out of the window; listened to the boys singing under the sodium lamps in their mournful, half-broken voices. Far away a man blew inexpertly on a bugle. One boy lifted up the stump of his arm, which looked as if it was covered with black tar. I thought that if W.B. would let me change my mind and start paying for the treatments I might feel less downcast.

  The mornings are dark now, and quite cold. You cannot see inside the cafés for steam; it billows over the pavement where people are buttoning themselves into their overcoats. As winter approaches, and the women wheel their prams a little quicker along the streets by the river, a thin wind rises round Dr. Alexandre’s clinic. Some little-understood property of the new rays, it seems, is rotting the walls of the treatment shed, so that when you get down on the table now you are surrounded at once by little icy drafts smelling of decayed wood. The wall-clock, a very delicate mechanism, stopped and had to be replaced. When they opened it up all its working parts were covered with damp furry mold.

  Outside Dr. Alexandre’s office window a couple of low shrubs struggle with the desolation of the treatment shed garden, their grayish leaves and waxy orange berries covered with a film of dust or thin mud according to the weather. Inside, the doctor sits impatiently behind a desk piled high with papers, manila envelopes, rubber tubes. Behind him are some green metal shelves, so overloaded with the patients’ files that they curve in the middle. It was raining the afternoon I was there. A desk lamp was burning in the dim room and the crippled girl was staring out across the garden through the streaming window pane. ‘The doctor wishes to say something to you,’ she told me, turning reluctantly to face into the room. ‘He asks me to say that you must not worry the other patients with questions. It will only hold up your own progress, as well as interfering with theirs. A positive attitude is very important.’

  I cleared my throat. ‘I can see that,’ I said cautiously.

  The doctor wrote something on the margin of the file in front of him. Suddenly he held up his hand for silence, stared hard at me, and said with great difficulty and slowness: ‘Matter is cheap in the universe. It is disorganized, but yearns to be of use. Do you see? We do nothing wrong when we create these blue bodies. We violate no laws.’ He put the cap carefully on his pen then leaned back in his chair and remained silent for some minutes, as if the effort of speaking English had tired him out. The crippled girl watched me triumphantly from the window.

  ‘I only want to be sure I’m doing the right thing,’ I explained. ‘It’s that I don’t quite understand what happens to them when they’re finished with.’

  ‘Do we not give you these treatments free?’ Dr. Alexandre reminded me gently.

  After this he made the girl translate for him again while he examined me. ‘The doctor says you are not making fast progress. You are not sleeping. Why is this? He thinks you should move into the clinic if you wish your treatments to have the best effect. Your disease does not wait. Please do not talk to the other women in the common room. Everything here is humane and legal.’

  All I want from life is this room. If I can successfully identify myself with its red candlewick bedspread, the mustard wallpaper and the thin light coming in through the curtains, I won’t have to admit to anything else.

  I decided not to move into the clinic. But I couldn’t stand the hotel any longer. When I went to the lavatory in the small hours there was always someone there to stare at my hair or clothes; if I found the courage to complain at the desk about the silver-fish in the bathroom, the woman said it wasn’t very convenient for them to have me always asleep in the room during the day. Then W.B. arrived, and there was a fuss about transferring us to a double room. They weren’t going to let us have one at all until I said I would be moving out soon.

  One night we lay in bed talking. Suddenly he asked me, ‘What are you thinking?’ and I answered, ‘That I had died and the doctor had gone to tell you.’

  I thought that if I could get furnished accommodation somewhere I would feel better. In furnished accommodation you can sleep all day, come and go as you like. But in Bayswater in November it was difficult. They were all too expensive or they didn’t want single women.

  At first I didn’t mind. I treated it as a holiday. A tremendous lonely wind blew us up and down the streets, past the cats, milk bottles, and pots of geraniums in basement areas. I felt elated, as if we had recovered something of our youth. Then came a week of really difficult treatments; the rays were more intractable than ever; I was very tired. We started to argue about Dr. Alexandre. W.B. was all for him now. ‘After all it was your decision to come here.’ Soon we were having a blazing row in the hotel lobby. The woman behind the desk watched exactly as if she was at the cinema, nodding slyly to the other guests when they came down to see what was happening.

  ‘You disgust me, stewing in your self-concern!’ shouted W.B. I ran out into the street for some air and fell over.

  After that I walked around for a while not quite knowing where I was, until I got the idea of going into a gallery and sitting down in front of the first picture I came to.

  It showed a woman standing by a yellowish shoreline covered with boulders. The sea was slack and cold. In the background, where the bay curved round into a promontory, some wooden frame houses, and a gray sky streaked with more yellow, were one or two indistinct figures – a man, another woman, perhaps a child in a white confirmation dress – with their backs turned. It had a sort of exhausted calm. I heard myself say quietly: ‘There is something detestable about all these attempts to preserve yourself.’ Once I had understood this a complete tranquility came over me, and I realized I hadn’t felt so well for a long time. I laughed softly. I was hungry. Soon I would get up and run all the way back to the hotel, but first I would have a cup of coffee and perhaps some battenburg cake.

  A man in a lovely gray suit came and stood uncertainly next to me. ‘It has a certain atmosphere, this one, doesn’t it?’ he said. He sighed. ‘A certain atmosphere.’ He had come to tell me the gallery was closing; I saw that it was almost dark outside and suddenly remembered W.B.

  When I got up to go I felt odd and a bit tired. The attendant put out his hand to help me and I was horrified to see vomit pour unexpectedly and painlessly out of my mouth all over the sleeve of his suit. I stood trembling with cold, surrounded by the sour smell of it, until they got the name of the hotel from me and put me in a taxi. ‘At least I didn’t do it on the picture,’ I thought on the way back. ‘At least it was only his sleeve.’ In the hotel lobby I found all my cases piled by the door. The woman behind the desk wouldn’t let me go up to my room.

  ‘Your friend left some time ago I’m afraid,’ she said. I stared at her. ‘If you recall my dear, you did tell us you’d be moving into furnished accommodation when your friend left.’

  In the end they agreed to let me have the room for one more week.

  I was ill all the next day. I stayed in the room trying to eat soup but I couldn’t keep anything down, not even water, and if I closed my eyes and concentrated I coul
d hear a far-away buzzing, like a noise at the end of a corridor. I wrote letters to W.B. (‘Please forgive me and take me away from here’) and tore them up. When the maid came in there was a row about the state of the sheets, but they can’t get rid of me now until the end of the week. I made them change the bed. In the end I was so frightened I decided to go and see Dr. Alexandre and find out why I was this ill.

  It was quite late when I arrived at the clinic. A strange woman came out of the common room wiping her mouth on a paper serviette, and walked off down the passage without speaking. There was the distant sound of a tray being dropped in the kitchens. I had the impression that things were going on here much as they did during the day, but at a reduced and much duller pace. I went to the rooms I knew, one after the other, hoping I would remember how to find Dr. Alexandre’s office. The waiting rooms were unlocked: I sat in one of them for a bit, touching the familiar plastic bed-sheet with my hand and turning the hot water on and off in the little sink. Later I stood in the dark in the garden in case I could see the office from there. But a bluish light came from under the treatment shed door, so I went back in.

  By now I couldn’t remember where anything was. I went downstairs and tried a door with frosted glass panels, but it was only an empty linen cupboard. While I was in there I heard someone coming. One of the blue bodies had got into the passage and was drifting towards me, pale and bemused-seeming under the downstairs lights. It kept looking back over its shoulder, blundering into doorways, and entangling its limbs in the heating pipes which ran along the walls. The crippled girl came round a corner and began to urge it along impatiently.

  I stared at her in surprise. I said, ‘I didn’t know you were having treatment.’

  ‘You aren’t allowed down here,’ she said. ‘Go back upstairs before someone finds you.’

  The blue body bobbed gently between us, waving its hands about in the air like a policeman directing the traffic. It touched her face; examined its own fingertips. It was the exact image of her, molded in cool blue jelly. She pushed it away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t seem to find the doctor. Perhaps you could help me. I feel rather ill.’

  She looked at me like a stone. ‘Patients aren’t allowed downstairs after nine o’clock,’ she said. She drove the blue body out of the linen cupboard, where it had been trying to thrust its head in among the pillow slips, and started to man-handle it through a door further along the corridor. I followed her and stood outside watching. She had to struggle with it physically to keep it moving. Her hair fell into her eyes. Once she got it into the room, which was similar to the one in which Dr. Alexandre’s assistant had shown us our first blue body, she dragged it on to a table and lay down next to it. It stared inertly at the ceiling for a time, then slowly turned to face her. One of its legs slipped off the table. She put her arms round it and tried to get it to press itself against her, encouraging it with little clicks of her tongue.

  When nothing happened she got off the table with an irritable sigh, went to the door, and looked up and down the corridor. No one was there. Then she got back on to the table again. This time something seemed to happen but before I could see what it was the blue body fell off the table, pulling her down with it. She began to shout and scream with pain. I went closer and saw that they were partly joined together along their legs. The blue body had penetrated the muscles of her calves. She was flailing about, calling, ‘Push us together! Help!’ The blue body stared at the ceiling, opening and closing its mouth.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ cried the crippled girl. ‘Help us join back together!’

  I backed away and ran upstairs to the common room and sat down. Later that night there was a lot of coming and going, and I heard Dr. Alexandre and his assistant shouting in the passages.

  When I first came here it was like a picture painted on a sodden, opened-out cardboard box. I remember the train slowing down between garden fences from which dangled bits of rag; and convolvulus spilling like white of egg out of a rusty old car abandoned in a scrapyard. Some of the soldiers said goodbye to us; most of them went silently away up the platform. All I want now is to stay in this room sleeping and reading. The maid says very politely, ‘Could you go downstairs for a bit, miss, we want to give the place a thorough going over.’ They know they will be getting rid of me tomorrow. W.B. will come and fetch me. We are going over to France, where he has heard of a man who has had above-average success with a new chemical.

  Last night, listening to the barges full of conscripts being towed up and down the river, the men singing their mournful songs, I thought: ‘Places are not so easy to escape from.’ I will never go back to Agar Grove, but I see my own blue bodies everywhere. Spawned in the violence and helplessness of the treatment shed, shadows of myself cast somehow by rays that no one properly understands, they bob and gesticulate dumbly at the edge of vision. How many times have I said, ‘I would do anything at all to be cured!’

  Now that I have done everything I feel as if I have been complicit in some appalling violation of myself.

  The Discovery of Telenapota

  Premendra Mitra

  Translated into English by P. Nandy

  Premendra Mitra (1904–1988) was a renowned Bengali poet, novelist and short-story writer. He was also an author of Bangla science fiction and thrillers. He was born in Varanasi, India. His work was first published in the Bengali journal Probasi in 1922. He experimented with the stylistic nuances of Bengali prose and tried to offer alternative linguistic parameters to the high-class elite prosaic Bengali language. His science fiction work was considered by many to be brilliant and innovative. He wrote a series of stories around a ghost-hunter named Mejokarta, considered classics of Bengali ghost stories. ‘The Discovery of Telenapota’ (1984) is a subtle and atmospheric tale of an almost imperceptible crossing over into the weird.

  When Saturn and Mars come together, you may also discover Telenapota.

  On a leisurely day, after hours of angling without a catch, when someone comes and tempts you, saying that somewhere there is a magic pool filled with the most incredible fish anxiously waiting to swallow any bait, you are already on your way to Telenapota.

  But finding Telenapota is not all that easy. You catch a bus late in the afternoon. It is packed with countless people and by the time you get off, you are drenched in sweat and dust-smeared. Actually you are even unprepared for the stop when it comes.

  Before you even know where you are, the bus disappears in the distance, over a bridge across the low swampland. The forest is dense and dark, and night has arrived even before the sun has set. There is a strange wind that blows, an eerie quiet. You will see no one anywhere. Even the birds have flown away, as if in fright. There is an uncanny feeling, a strange dread slowly rearing its head out of the lonely marshland.

  You leave the main road and take the narrow muddy track that winds into the forest. After a while, the track gets lost in the thick groves of bamboo.

  To find Telenapota you need a couple of friends with you. You will be going there to angle. What their interests are you have no clue.

  Your first problem will be mosquitoes. They will arrive in hordes and you will try to scare them away. Failing, all three of you will stand and look at each other, wondering what to do. And slowly it will grow quite dark, the mosquitoes will become more insistent and you will wonder if it would not have been better to get back onto the main road and catch the return bus.

  Just then a strange noise will startle you. A noise from that point where the mud track loses itself in the forest. Your nerves being on edge, you will imagine this phantom scream coming from the dumb forest and you will immediately become tense and perhaps a little scared as well. And then, you will see in the dark a faint lamp gently swaying. Slowly a bullock cart will amble out of the dark forest.

  It is a small cart. The bullocks are also very small. They will all seem dwarf-like, and yet the three of you will c
limb onto the cart and huddle together in the dark interior where there is only room for one. The cart will return the way it came. The dark, impenetrable forest will yield a narrow tunnel that the cart slowly enters. The bullocks will move forward, unhurried, as if creating with each step the path they slowly tread.

  For some time you will feel terribly cramped in the dark. But slowly you will drown in the depths of the blackness around you. From your familiar world you will enter another. An unknown mist-clad universe, bereft of all feeling. Time will stop dead in its tracks. And then, suddenly, a howl of drums will wake you. You will look around you and find the driver of the cart furiously beating an empty drum. The skies will be full of countless stars.

  You will ask what the matter is. And the driver will casually tell you that this din is to drive the tigers away. When you wonder how one can scare away tigers by just raising a racket, he will reassure you that these are not real tigers. They are panthers; and a stick and a drum are enough to keep them at bay.

  Tigers! Within thirty miles of the metropolis! Before you can raise your eyebrows, the cart will have crossed a wide moor lit by a late moon. Ruins of deserted palaces will gleam in the phantom moonlight. Lone colonnades, broken arches, the debris of courtyard walls. A ruined temple somewhere further down. They will stand like litigants, waiting in futile hope, for the recording of some evidence in the court of time. You will try to sit up. A strange sensation will once again make you feel as if you have left behind the world of the living and entered a phantom universe peopled only by memories.

  The night will be far gone. It will seem an endless dark in which everything lies stilled, without genesis or end. Like extinct animals preserved in museums for all time.