The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  I stared at her, outlined in the moonlight – coiled, graceful body. ‘What does Terran blood taste like to you?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘What are you?’ I whispered. ‘What are we to you?’

  She lay still, rested her head on her topmost coil. ‘You know me as no other does,’ she said softly. ‘You must decide.’

  ‘That’s what happened to my face,’ I told her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Qui goaded me into deciding to do something. It didn’t turn out very well.’ I moved the gun slightly, brought the barrel up diagonally under my own chin. ‘At least it was a decision I made.’

  ‘As this will be.’

  ‘Ask me, Gatoi.’

  ‘For my children’s lives?’

  She would say something like that. She knew how to manipulate people, Terran and Tlic. But not this time.

  ‘I don’t want to be a host animal,’ I said. ‘Not even yours.’

  It took her a long time to answer. ‘We use almost no host animals these days,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

  ‘You use us.’

  ‘We do. We wait long years for you and teach you and join our families to yours.’ She moved restlessly. ‘You know you aren’t animals to us.’

  I stared at her, saying nothing.

  ‘The animals we once used began killing most of our eggs after implantation long before your ancestors arrived,’ she said softly. ‘You know these things, Gan. Because your people arrived, we are relearning what it means to be a healthy, thriving people. And your ancestors, fleeing from their homeworld, from their own kind who would have killed or enslaved them – they survived because of us. We saw them as people and gave them the Preserve when they still tried to kill us as worms.’

  At the word ‘worms,’ I jumped. I couldn’t help it, and she couldn’t help noticing it.

  ‘I see,’ she said quietly. ‘Would you really rather die than bear my young, Gan?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Shall I go to Xuan Hoa?’

  ‘Yes!’ Hoa wanted it. Let her have it. She hadn’t had to watch Lomas. She’d be proud…Not terrified.

  T’Gatoi flowed off the table onto the floor, startling me almost too much.

  ‘I’ll sleep in Hoa’s room tonight,’ she said. ‘And sometime tonight or in the morning, I’ll tell her.’

  This was going too fast. My sister Hoa had had almost as much to do with raising me as my mother. I was still close to her – not like Qui. She could want T’Gatoi and still love me.

  ‘Wait! Gatoi!’

  She looked back, then raised nearly half her length off the floor and turned to face me. ‘These are adult things, Gan. This is my life, my family!’

  ‘But she’s…my sister.’

  ‘I have done what you demanded. I have asked you!’

  ‘But–’

  ‘It will be easier for Hoa. She has always expected to carry other lives inside her.’

  Human lives. Human young who should someday drink at her breasts, not at her veins.

  I shook my head. ‘Don’t do it to her, Gatoi.’ I was not Qui. It seemed I could become him, though, with no effort at all. I could make Xuan Hoa my shield. Would it be easier to know that red worms were growing in her flesh instead of mine?

  ‘Don’t do it to Hoa,’ I repeated.

  She stared at me, utterly still.

  I looked away, then back at her. ‘Do it to me.’

  I lowered the gun from my throat and she leaned forward to take it.

  ‘No,’ I told her.

  ‘It’s the law,’ she said.

  ‘Leave it for the family. One of them might use it to save my life someday.’

  She grasped the rifle barrel, but I wouldn’t let go. I was pulled into a standing position over her.

  ‘Leave it here!’ I repeated. ‘If we’re not your animals, if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner.’

  It was clearly hard for her to let go of the rifle. A shudder went through her and she made a hissing sound of distress. It occurred to me that she was afraid. She was old enough to have seen what guns could do to people. Now her young and this gun would be together in the same house. She did not know about the other guns. In this dispute, they did not matter.

  ‘I will implant the first egg tonight,’ she said as I put the gun away. ‘Do you hear, Gan?’

  Why else had I been given a whole egg to eat while the rest of the family was left to share one? Why else had my mother kept looking at me as though I were going away from her, going where she could not follow? Did T’Gatoi imagine I hadn’t known?

  ‘I hear.’

  ‘Now!’ I let her push me out of the kitchen, then walked ahead of her toward my bedroom. The sudden urgency in her voice sounded real. ‘You would have done it to Hoa tonight!’ I accused.

  ‘I must do it to someone tonight.’

  I stopped in spite of her urgency and stood in her way. ‘Don’t you care who?’

  She flowed around me and into my bedroom. I found her waiting on the couch we shared. There was nothing in Hoa’s room that she could have used. She would have done it to Hoa on the floor. The thought of her doing it to Hoa at all disturbed me in a different way now, and I was suddenly angry.

  Yet I undressed and lay down beside her. I knew what to do, what to expect. I had been told all my life. I felt the familiar sting, narcotic, mildly pleasant. Then the blind probing of her ovipositor. The puncture was painless, easy. So easy going in. She undulated slowly against me, her muscles forcing the egg from her body into mine. I held on to a pair of her limbs until I remembered Lomas holding her that way. Then I let go, moved inadvertently, and hurt her. She gave a low cry of pain and I expected to be caged at once within her limbs. When I wasn’t, I held on to her again, feeling oddly ashamed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered.

  She rubbed my shoulders with four of her limbs.

  ‘Do you care?’ I asked. ‘Do you care that it’s me?’

  She did not answer for some time. Finally, ‘You were the one making the choices tonight, Gan. I made mine long ago.’

  ‘Would you have gone to Hoa?’

  ‘Yes. How could I put my children into the care of one who hates them?’

  ‘It wasn’t…hate.’

  ‘I know what it was.’

  ‘I was afraid.’

  Silence.

  ‘I still am.’ I could admit it to her here, now. ‘But you came to me…to save Hoa.’

  ‘Yes.’ I leaned my forehead against her. She was cool velvet, deceptively soft. ‘And to keep you for myself,’ I said. It was so. I didn’t understand it, but it was so.

  She made a soft hum of contentment. ‘I couldn’t believe I had made such a mistake with you,’ she said. ‘I chose you. I believed you had grown to choose me.’

  ‘I had, but…’

  ‘Lomas.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I had never known a Terran to see a birth and take it well. Qui has seen one, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Terrans should be protected from seeing.’

  I didn’t like the sound of that – and I doubted that it was possible. ‘Not protected,’ I said. ‘Shown. Shown when we’re young kids, and shown more than once. Gatoi, no Terran ever sees a birth that goes right. All we see is N’Tlic – pain and terror and maybe death.’

  She looked down at me. ‘It is a private thing. It has always been a private thing.’

  Her tone kept me from insisting – that and the knowledge that if she changed her mind, I might be the first public example. But I had planted the thought in her mind. Chances were it would grow, and eventually, she would experiment.

  ‘You won’t see it again,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you thinking any more about shooting me.’

  The small amount of fluid that came into me with her egg relaxed me as completely as a sterile egg would have, so that I could remember the rifle in my hand
s and my feelings of fear and revulsion, anger and despair. I could remember the feelings without reviving them. I could talk about them.

  ‘I wouldn’t have shot you,’ I said. ‘Not you.’ She had been taken from my father’s flesh when he was my age.

  ‘You could have,’ she insisted.

  ‘Not you.’ She stood between us and her own people, protecting, interweaving.

  ‘Would you have destroyed yourself?’

  I moved carefully, uncomfortable. ‘I could have done that. I nearly did. That’s Qui’s ‘away.’ I wonder if he knows.’

  ‘What?’

  I did not answer. ‘You will live now.’ ‘Yes.’ Take care of her, my mother used to say.

  Yes. ‘I’m healthy and young,’ she said. ‘I won’t leave you as Lomas was left – alone, N’Tlic. I’ll take care of you.’

  In the Hills, the Cities

  Clive Barker

  Clive Barker (1952–) is an English writer best known for his work in both fantasy and horror fiction. His first interests were the theater and painting, but he burst onto the publishing scene in the mid-1980s with The Books of Blood. The stories published in these volumes permanently changed the landscape of weird fiction. They were visceral; modern; went beyond the scare into richer, deeper territory; and often featured transgressive body horror. ‘In the Hills, the Cities’ (1984) is a classic from this period, continuing this anthology’s theme of ‘weird ritual.’ Barker has since written many novels and other works, and his fiction has been adapted into motion pictures, notably the Hellraiser series.

  It wasn’t until the first week of the Yugoslavian trip that Mick discovered what a political bigot he’d chosen as a lover. Certainly, he’d been warned. One of the queens at the Baths had told him Judd was to the Right of Attila the Hun, but the man had been one of Judd’s ex-affairs, and Mick had presumed there was more spite than perception in the character assassination.

  If only he’d listened. Then he wouldn’t be driving along an interminable road in a Volkswagen that suddenly seemed the size of a coffin, listening to Judd’s views on Soviet expansionism. Jesus, he was so boring. He didn’t converse, he lectured, and endlessly. In Italy the sermon had been on the way the Communists had exploited the peasant vote. Now, in Yugoslavia, Judd had really warmed to this theme, and Mick was just about ready to take a hammer to his self-opinionated head.

  It wasn’t that he disagreed with everything Judd said. Some of the arguments (the ones Mick understood) seemed quite sensible. But then, what did he know? He was a dance teacher. Judd was a journalist, a professional pundit. He felt, like most journalists Mick had encountered, that he was obliged to have an opinion on everything under the sun. Especially politics; that was the best trough to wallow in. You could get your snout, eyes, head and front hooves in that mess of muck and have a fine old time splashing around. It was an inexhaustible subject to devour, a swill with a little of everything in it, because everything, according to Judd, was political. The arts were political. Sex was political. Religion, commerce, gardening, eating, drinking and farting – all political.

  Jesus, it was mind-blowingly boring; killingly, love-deadeningly boring.

  Worse still, Judd didn’t seem to notice how bored Mick had become, or if he noticed, he didn’t care. He just rambled on, his arguments getting windier and windier, his sentences lengthening with every mile they drove.

  Judd, Mick had decided, was a selfish bastard, and as soon as their honeymoon was over he’d part with the guy.

  It was not until their trip, that endless, motiveless caravan through the graveyards of mid-European culture, that Judd realized what a political lightweight he had in Mick. The guy showed precious little interest in the economics or the politics of the countries they passed through. He registered indifference to the full facts behind the Italian situation, and yawned, yes, yawned when he tried (and failed) to debate the Russian threat to world peace. He had to face the bitter truth: Mick was a queen; there was no other word for him; all right, perhaps he didn’t mince or wear jewelry to excess, but he was a queen nevertheless, happy to wallow in a dreamworld of early Renaissance frescoes and Yugoslavian icons. The complexities, the contradictions, even the agonies that made those cultures blossom and wither were just tiresome to him. His mind was no deeper than his looks; he was a well-groomed nobody.

  Some honeymoon.

  The road south from Belgrade to Novi Pazar was, by Yugoslavian standards, a good one. There were fewer potholes than on many of the roads they’d travelled, and it was relatively straight. The town of Novi Pazar lay in the valley of the River Raska, south of the city named after the river. It wasn’t an area particularly popular with the tourists. Despite the good road it was still inaccessible, and lacked sophisticated amenities; but Mick was determined to see the monastery at Sopocani, to the west of the town, and after some bitter argument, he’d won.

  The journey had proved uninspiring. On either side of the road the cultivated fields looked parched and dusty. The summer had been unusually hot, and droughts were affecting many of the villages. Crops had failed, and livestock had been prematurely slaughtered to prevent them dying of malnutrition. There was a defeated look about the few faces they glimpsed at the roadside. Even the children had dour expressions; brows as heavy as the stale heat that hung over the valley.

  Now, with the cards on the table after a row at Belgrade, they drove in silence most of the time; but the straight road, like most straight roads, invited dispute. When the driving was easy, the mind rooted for something to keep it engaged. What better than a fight?

  ‘Why the hell do you want to see this damn monastery?’ Judd demanded.

  It was an unmistakable invitation.

  ‘We’ve come all this way…’ Mick tried to keep the tone conversational. He wasn’t in the mood for an argument.

  ‘More fucking Virgins, is it?’

  Keeping his voice as even as he could, Mick picked up the Guide and read aloud from it: ‘…there, some of the greatest works of Serbian painting can still be seen and enjoyed, including what many commentators agree to be the enduring masterpiece of the Raska school: The Dormition of the Virgin.’

  Silence.

  Then Judd: ‘I’m up to here with churches.’

  ‘It’s a masterpiece.’

  ‘They’re all masterpieces according to that bloody book.’

  Mick felt his control slipping.

  ‘Two and a half hours at most–’

  ‘I told you, I don’t want to see another church; the smell of the places makes me sick. Stale incense, old sweat and lies…’

  ‘It’s a short detour; then we can get back on to the road and you can give me another lecture on farming subsidies in the Sandzak.’

  ‘I’m just trying to get some decent conversation going instead of this endless tripe about Serbian fucking masterpieces–

  ‘Stop the car!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stop the car!’

  Judd pulled the Volkswagen onto the side of the road. Mick got out.

  The road was hot, but there was a slight breeze. He took a deep breath, and wandered into the middle of the road. Empty of traffic and of pedestrians in both directions. In every direction, empty. The hills shimmered in the heat off the fields. There were wild poppies growing in the ditches. Mick crossed the road, squatted on his haunches and picked one.

  Behind him he heard the VW’s door slam.

  ‘What did you stop us for?’ Judd said. His voice was edgy, still hoping for that argument, begging for it.

  Mick stood up, playing with the poppy. It was close to seeding, late in the season. The petals fell from the receptacle as soon as he touched them, little splashes of red fluttering down on to the grey tarmac.

  ‘I asked you a question,’ Judd said again.

  Mick looked around. Judd was standing along the far side of the car, his brows a knitted line of burgeoning anger. But handsome; oh yes; a face that made women weep with frustration that he was g
ay. A heavy black moustache (perfectly trimmed) and eyes you could watch forever, and never see the same light in them twice. Why in God’s name, thought Mick, does a man as fine as that have to be such an insensitive little shit?

  Judd returned the look of contemptuous appraisal, staring at the pouting pretty boy across the road. It made him want to puke, seeing the little act Mick was performing for his benefit. It might just have been plausible in a sixteen-year-old virgin. In a twenty-five-year-old, it lacked credibility.

  Mick dropped the flower, and untucked his T-shirt from his jeans. A tight stomach, then a slim, smooth chest were revealed as he pulled it off. His hair was ruffled when his head reappeared, and his face wore a broad grin. Judd looked at the torso. Neat, not too muscular. An appendix scar peering over his faded jeans. A gold chain, small but catching the sun, dipped in the hollow of his throat. Without meaning to, he returned Mick’s grin, and a kind of peace was made between them.

  Mick was unbuckling his belt.

  ‘Want to fuck?’ he said, the grin not faltering.

  ‘It’s no use,’ came an answer, though not to that question.

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘We’re not compatible.’

  ‘Want a bet?’

  Now he was unzipped, and turning away towards the wheat field that bordered the road.

  Judd watched as Mick cut a swathe through the swaying sea, his back the color of the grain, so that he was almost camouflaged by it. It was a dangerous game, screwing in the open air – this wasn’t San Francisco, or even Hampstead Heath. Nervously, Judd glanced along the road. Still empty in both directions. And Mick was turning, deep in the field, turning and smiling and waving like a swimmer buoyed up in a golden surf. What the hell…there was nobody to see, nobody to know. Just the hills, liquid in the heat-haze, their forested backs bent to the business of the earth, and a lost dog, sitting at the edge of the road, waiting for some lost master.

  Judd followed Mick’s path through the wheat, unbuttoning his shirt as he walked. Field mice ran ahead of him, scurrying through the stalks as the giant came their way, his feet like thunder. Judd saw their panic, and smiled. He meant no harm to them, but then how were they to know that? Maybe he’d put out a hundred lives, mice, beetles, worms, before he reached the spot where Mick was lying, stark bollock naked, on a bed of trampled grain, still grinning.