The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  And nothing. It is gone. A moment too long or too soon, I never know – but we have lost it again. For an instant Aidan’s eyes gray with tears. Then the breeze rises, Molly yawns and snuffles, and once more we put aside the spells for lunch and other games.

  That night I toss in my bed, finally throwing my pillow against the bookcase. From the open window stream the chimes of peepers in the swamp, their plangent song broidered with the trills of toads and leopard frogs. As I churn feverishly through the sheets it comes again, and I lie still: like a star’s sigh, the shiver and promise of a door opening somewhere just out of reach. I hold my breath, waiting: will it close again?

  But no. The curtains billow and I slip from my bed, bare feet curling upon the cold planked floor as I race silently to the window.

  He is in the meadow at wood’s edge, alone, hair misty with starlight, his pajamas spectral blue in the dark. As I watch he raises his arms to the sky, and though I am too far to hear, I whisper the words with him, my heart thumping counterpoint to our invocation. Then he is quiet, and stands alert, waiting.

  I can no longer hear the peepers. The wind has risen, and the thrash of the beech trees at the edge of the forest drowns all other sounds. I can feel his heart now, beating within my own, and see the shadows with his eyes.

  In the lower branches of the willow tree, the lone willow that feeds upon a hidden spring beside the sloping lawn, there is a boy. His eyes are green and lucent as tourmaline, and silvery moths are drawn to them. His hands clutch the slender willow-wands: strong hands, so pale that I trace the blood beneath, and see the muscles strung like young strong vines. As I watch he bends so that his head dips beneath a branch, new leaves tangling fair hair, and then slowly he uncurls one hand and, smiling, beckons my brother toward him.

  The wind rises. Beneath his bare feet the dewy grass darkens as Aidan runs faster and faster, until he seems almost to be skimming across the lawn. And there, where the willow starts to shadow the starlit slope and the boy in the tree leans to take his hand, I tackle my brother and bring him crashing and swearing to earth.

  For a moment he stares at me uncomprehending. Then he yells and slaps me, hits me harder until, remembering, he shoves me away and stumbles to his feet.

  There is nothing there. The willow trembles, but only the wind shakes the new leaves. From the marsh the ringing chorus rises, swells, bursts as the peepers stir in the saw grass. In the old house yellow light stains an upstairs window and our father’s voice calls out sleepily, then with concern, and finally bellows as he leans from the casement to spot us below. Aidan glances at the house and back again at the willow, and then he turns to me despairingly. Before I can say anything he punches me and runs, weeping, back to the house.

  A gentler withdrawal than I’m accustomed to. For several minutes I lay with closed eyes, breathing gently as I tried to hold onto the scents of apple blossom and dew-washed grass. But they faded, along with the dreamy net of tree and stars. I sat up groggily, wires still taped to my head, and faced Dr. Harrow already recording her limbic system response from the NET.

  ‘Thank you, Wendy,’ she said brusquely without looking up. I glanced at the BEAM monitor, where the shaded image of my brain lingered, the last flash of activity staining the temporal lobe bright turquoise.

  ‘I never saw that color there before,’ I remarked as I leaned to examine it, when suddenly an unfocused wave of nausea choked me. I gagged and staggered against the bed, tearing at the wires.

  Eyes: brilliant green lanced with cyanogen, unblinking as twin chrysolites. A wash of light: leaves stirring the surface of a still pool. They continued to stare through the shadows, heedless of the play of sun and moon, days and years and decades. The electrodes dangled from my fist as I stared at the blank screen, the single dancing line bisecting the NET monitor. The eyes in my head did not move, did not blink, did not disappear. They stared relentlessly from the shadows until the darkness itself swelled and was absorbed by their feral gaze. They saw me.

  Not Dr. Harrow; not Aidan; not Morgan or Melisande or the others I’d absorbed in therapy.

  Me.

  I stumbled from the monitor to the window, dragging the wires behind me, heedless of Dr. Harrow’s stunned expression. Grunting I shook my head like a dog, finally gripped the windowsill and slammed my head against the oaken frame, over and over and over, until Dr. Harrow tore me away. Still I saw them: unblinking glaucous eyes, tumbling into darkness as Dr. Harrow pumped the sedatives into my arm.

  Much later I woke to see Dr. Harrow staring at me from the far end of the room. She watched me for a moment, and then walked slowly to the bed.

  ‘What was it, Wendy?’ she asked, smoothing her robe as she sat beside me. ‘Your name?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know,’ I stammered, biting the tip of my thumb. Then I twisted to stare at her and asked, ‘Who was the boy?’

  Her voice caught for an instant before she answered. ‘My brother Aidan. My twin.’

  ‘No – The other – The boy in the tree.’

  This time she held her breath a long moment, then let it out in a sigh. ‘I don’t know,’ she murmured. ‘But you remember him?’

  I nodded. ‘Now. I can see him now. If I–’ And I shut my eyes and drifted before snapping back. ‘Like that. He comes to me on his own. Without me recalling him. Like–’ I flexed my fingers helplessly. ‘Like a dream, only I’m awake now.’

  Slowly Dr. Harrow shook her head and reached to take my hand. ‘That’s how he found Aidan, too, the last time,’ she said. ‘And me. And now you.’ For an instant something like hope flared in her eyes, but faded as she bowed her head. ‘I think, Wendy…’ She spoke with measured calm. ‘I think we should keep this to ourselves right now. And tomorrow, perhaps, we’ll try again.’

  He sees me.

  I woke with a garbled scream, arms flailing, to my dark room bathed in the ambient glow of monitors. I stumbled to the window, knelt with my forehead against the cool oak sill and blinked against tears that welled unbidden from my burning eyes. There I fell asleep with my head pillowed upon my arms, and woke next morning to Dr. Harrow’s knock upon my door.

  ‘Emma,’ he whispers at the transom window. ‘Let me in.’

  The quilts piled on me muffle his voice. He calls again, louder, until I groan and sit up in bed, rubbing my eyes and glaring at the top of his head peeking through the narrow glass.

  From the bottom of the door echoes faint scratching, Molly’s whine. A thump. More scratching: Aidan crouched outside the room, growling through choked laughter. I drape a quilt around me like a toga and lean forward to unlatch the door.

  Molly flops onto the floor, snorting when she bumps her nose and then drooling apologetically. Behind her stumbles Aidan, shivering in his worn kimono with its tattered sleeves and belt stolen from one of my old dresses. I giggle uncontrollably, and gesture for him to shut the door before Father hears us in his room below.

  ‘It’s fucking freezing in this place,’ Aidan exclaims, pinning me to the bed and pulling the quilts over our heads. ‘Oh, come on, dog.’ Grunting, he hauls her up beside us. ‘My room is like Antarctica. Tierra del Fuego. The Bering Strait.’ He punctuates his words with kisses, elbowing Molly as she tries to slobber our faces. I squirm away and straighten my nightshirt.

  ‘Hush. You’ll wake Papa.’

  Aidan rolls his eyes and stretches against the wall. ‘Spare me.’ Through the rents in his kimono I can see his skin, dusky in the moonlight. No one has skin like Aidan’s, except for me: not white but the palest gray, almost blue, and fine and smooth as an eggshell. People stare at us in the street, especially at Aidan; at school girls stop talking when he passes, and fix me with narrowed eyes and lips pursed to mouth a question never asked.

  Aidan yawns remorselessly as a cat. Aidan is the beauty: Aidan whose gray eyes flicker green whereas mine muddy to blue in sunlight; Aidan whose long legs wrap around me and shame my own, scraped and bruised from an unfortunate bout with Papa’s
razor.

  ‘Molly. Here.’ He grabs her into his lap, groaning at her weight, and pulls me as well, until we huddle in the middle of the bed. Our heads knock and he points with his chin to the mirror.

  ‘ “Did you never see the picture of We Three?”’ he warbles. Then, shoving Molly to the floor, he takes my shoulders and pulls the quilt from me.

  My father had a daughter loved a man

  As it might be perhaps, were I a woman,

  I should your lordship.

  He recites softly, in his own voice: not the deeper drone he affected when we had been paired in the play that Christmas. I start to slide from bed but he holds me tighter, twisting me to face him until our foreheads touch and I know that the mirror behind us reflects a moon-lapped Rorschach and, at our feet, our snuffling mournful fool.

  ‘ “But died thy sister of her love, my boy?” ’ I whisper later, my lips brushing his neck where the hair, unfashionably long, waves to form a perfect S.

  I am all the daughters of my father’s house,

  And all the brothers, too; and yet I know not.

  He kisses me. Later he whispers nonsense, my name, rhyming words from our made-up language; a long and heated silence.

  Afterward he sleeps, but I lie long awake, stroking his hair and watching the rise and fall of his slender chest. In the coldest hour he awakens and stares at me, eyes wide and black, and turning on his side moans, then begins to cry as though his heart will break. I clench my teeth and stare at the ceiling, trying not to blink, trying not to hear or feel him next to me, his pale gray skin, his eyes: my beautiful brother in the dark.

  After this session Dr. Harrow let me sleep until early afternoon. The rush of summer rain against the high casements finally woke me, and I lay in bed staring up at a long fine crack that traversed the ceiling. To me it looked like the arm of some ghastly tree overtaking the room. It finally drove me downstairs. I ambled down the long glass-roofed corridor that led to the pre-Columbian annex. I paused to pluck a hibiscus blossom from a terra-cotta vase and arranged it behind one ear. Then I went on, until I reached the ancient elevator with its folding arabesques.

  The second floor was off limits to empaths, but Anna had memorized a dead patient’s release code and she and I occasionally crept up here to tap sleeping researchers. No medical personnel patrolled the rooms. Servers checked the monitors and recorded all responses. At the end of each twelve-hour shift doctors would flit in and out of the bedrooms, unhooking oneironauts and helping them stumble to other rooms where they could fall into yet another, though dreamless, sleep. I tapped the pirated code into the first security unit I saw, waiting for it to read my retina imprint and finally grant the access code that slid open the false paneled wall.

  Here stretched the sleep labs: chambers swathed in yellowed challis and moth-eaten linens, huge canopied beds where masked oneironauts turned and sighed as their monitors clicked in draped alcoves. The oneironauts’ skin shone glassy white; beneath the masks their eyes were bruised a tender green from enforced somnolence. I held my breath as long as I could: the air seethed with dreams. I hurried down the hall to a room with door ajar and an arched window columned with white drapes. A woman I did not recognize sprawled across a cherry four-poster, her demure lace gown at odds with the rakish mask covering her eyes. I slipped inside, locking the door behind me. Then I turned to the bed.

  The research subject’s hair formed a dark filigree against the disheveled linen sheets. I bowed to kiss her on the mouth, waiting to be certain she would not awake. Then I dipped my tongue between her lips and drew back, closing my eyes to unravel strands of desire and clouded abandon, pixie fancies. All faded in a moment: dreams, after all, are dreams. I reached to remove the wires connecting her to the monitors, adjusted the settings and hooked her into the NET. I did the same for myself with extra wires, relaying through the BEAM to the transmitter. I smoothed the sheets, lay beside her and closed my eyes.

  A gray plain shot with sunlight. Clouds mist the air with a scent of rain and seawater. In the distance I hear waves. Turning I can see a line of small trees, contorted like crippled children at ocean’s edge. We walk there, the oneironaut’s will bending so easily to mine that I scarcely sense her: she is another salt-scattered breeze.

  The trees draw nearer. I stare at them until they shift, stark lichened branches blurring into limbs bowed with green and gentle leaves. Another moment and we are beneath their heavy welcoming boughs.

  I place my hand against the rough bark and stare into the heart of the greenery. Within the emerald shadows something stirs. Sunlit shards of leaf and twig align themselves into hands. Shadows shift to form a pair of slanted beryl eyes. There: crouched among the boughs like a dappled cat, his curls crowned with a ring of leaves, his lips parted to show small white teeth. He smiles at me.

  Before he draws me any closer I withdraw, snapping the wires from my face. The tree shivers into white sheets and the shrouded body of the woman beside me.

  My pounding heart slowed as I drew myself up on my elbows to watch her, carefully peeling the mask from her face. Beneath lids mapped with fine blue veins her eyes roll, tracking something unseen. Suddenly they steady. Her mouth relaxes into a smile, then into an expression of such blissful rapture that without thinking I kiss her and taste a burst of ecstatic, halycon joy.

  And reel back as she suddenly claws at my chest, her mouth twisted to shout; but no sound comes. Bliss explodes into terror. Her eyes open and she stares, not at me but at something that looms before her. Her eyes grow wide and horrified, the pupils dilating as she grabs at my face, tears the hibiscus blossom from my hair and chokes a garbled scream, a shout I muffle with a pillow.

  I whirled and reset the monitors, switched the NET’s settings and fled out the door. In the hallway I hesitated and looked back. The woman pummeled the air before her blindly; she had not seen me. I turned and ran until I reached the doctors’ stairway leading to the floors below, and slipped away unseen.

  Downstairs all was silent. Servers creaked past bringing tea trays to doctors in their quarters. I hurried to the conservatory, where I inquired after the aide named Justice. The server directed me to a chamber where Justice stood recording the results of an evoked potential scan.

  ‘Wendy!’ Surprise melted into disquiet. ‘What are you doing here?’

  I shut the door and stepped to the window, tugging the heavy velvet drapes until they fell and the chamber darkened. ‘I want you to scan me,’ I whispered.

  He shook his head. ‘What? Why–’ I grabbed his hand as he tried to turn up the lights and he nodded slowly, then dimmed the screen he had been working on. ‘Where is Dr. Harrow?’

  ‘I want you to do it.’ I tightened my grip. ‘I think I have entered a fugue state.’

  He smiled, shaking his head. ‘That’s impossible, Wendy. You’d have no way of knowing it. You’d be catatonic, or –’ He shrugged, then glanced uneasily at the door. ‘What’s going on? You know I’m not certified to do that alone.’

  ‘But you know how,’ I wheedled, stroking his hand. ‘You are a student of their arts, you can do it as easily as Dr. Harrow.’ Smiling, I leaned forward until my forehead rested against his, and kissed him tentatively on the mouth. His expression changed to fear as he trembled and tried to move away. Sexual contact between staff and experimental personnel was forbidden and punishable by execution of the medics in question; empaths were believed incapable of initiating such contact. I grinned more broadly and pinned both of his hands to the table, until he nodded and motioned with his head toward the PET unit.

  ‘Sit down,’ he croaked. I latched the door, then sat in the wing-back chair beside the bank of monitors.

  In a few minutes I heard the dull hum of the scanners as he improvised the link for my reading. I waited until my brain’s familiar patterns emerged on the screen.

  ‘See?’ Relief brightened his voice, and he tilted the monitor so that I could see it more clearly. ‘All normal. Maybe she got your dosage
wrong. Perhaps Dr. Silverthorn can suggest a–’

  His words trickled into silence. I shut my eyes and drew up the image of the tree, beryl eyes and outstretched hand, then opened my eyes to see the PET scan showing intrusive activity in my temporal lobe: brain waves evident of an emergent secondary personality.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Justice breathed. ‘You have no MPs, no independent emotions – What the hell is that?’ He traced the patterns with an unsteady hand, then turned to stare at me. ‘What did you do, Wendy?’ he whispered.

  I shook my head, crouching into the chair’s corner, and carefully removed the wires. The last image shimmered on the screen like a cerebral ghost. ‘Take them,’ I said flatly, holding out the wires. ‘Don’t tell anyone.’

  He let me pass without a word. Only when my hand grasped the doorknob did he touch me briefly on the shoulder.

  ‘Where did it come from?’ he faltered. ‘What is it, Wendy?’

  I stared past him at the monitor with its pulsing shadows. ‘Not me,’ I whispered at last. ‘The boy in the tree.’

  They found the sleep researcher at shift-change that evening, hanging by the swag that had decorated her canopied bed. Anna told me about it at dinner.

  ‘Her monitors registered an emergent MP.’ She licked her lips unconsciously, like a kitten. ‘Do you think we could get into the morgue?’

  I yawned and shook my head. ‘Are you crazy?’

  Anna giggled and rubbed my neck. ‘Isn’t everybody?’

  Several aides entered the dining room, scanning warily before they started tapping empties on the shoulder and gesturing to the door. I looked up to see Justice, his face white and pinched as he stood behind me.