The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  We spent a happy time refurbishing the museum, polishing the inlaid precious metals of the wall fixtures, brushing away the dust that frosted the velvet designs of the wallpaper, alternately burning incense and charring bits of cloth we had saturated with our blood, in order to give the rooms the odor we desired – a charnel perfume strong enough to drive us to frenzy. We travelled far in our collections, but always we returned home with crates full of things no man had ever been meant to possess. We heard of a girl with violet eyes who had died in some distant town; not seven days later we had those eyes in an ornate cut-glass jar, pickled in formaldehyde. We scraped bone dust and nitre from the bottoms of ancient coffins; we stole the barely withered heads and hands of children fresh in their graves, with their soft little fingers and their lips like flower petals. We had baubles and precious heirlooms, vermiculated prayerbooks and shrouds encrusted with mold. I had not taken seriously Louis’s talk of making love in a charnel-house – but neither had I reckoned on the pleasure he could inflict with a femur dipped in rose-scented oil.

  Upon the night I speak of – the night we drank our toast to the grave and its riches – we had just acquired our finest prize yet. Later in the evening we planned a celebratory debauch at a nightclub in the city. We had returned from our most recent travels not with the usual assortment of sacks and crates, but with only one small box carefully wrapped and tucked into Louis’s breast pocket.

  The box contained an object whose existence we had only speculated upon previously. From certain half-articulate mutterings of an old blind man plied with cheap liquor in a French Quarter bar, we traced rumors of a certain fetish or charm to a Negro graveyard in the southern bayou country. The fetish was said to be a thing of eerie beauty, capable of luring any lover to one’s bed, hexing any enemy to a sick and painful death, and (this, I think, was what intrigued Louis the most) turning back tenfold on anyone who used it with less than the touch of a master.

  A heavy mist hung low over the graveyard when we arrived there, lapping at our ankles, pooling around the markers of wood and stone, abruptly melting away in patches to reveal a gnarled root or a patch of blackened grass, then closing back in. By the light of a waning moon we made our way along a path overgrown with rioting weeds. The graves were decorated with elaborate mosaics of broken glass, coins, bottlecaps, oyster shells lacquered silver and gold. Some mounds were outlined by empty bottles shoved neck-downward into the earth. I saw a lone plaster saint whose features had been worn away by years of wind and rain. I kicked half-buried rusty cans that had once held flowers; now they held only bare brittle stems and pestilent rainwater, or nothing at all. Only the scent of wild spider lilies pervaded the night.

  The earth in one corner of the graveyard seemed blacker than the rest. The grave we sought was marked only by a crude cross of charred and twisted wood. We were skilled at the art of violating the dead; soon we had the coffin uncovered. The boards were warped by years of burial in wet, foul earth. Louis pried up the lid with his spade and, by the moon’s meager and watery light, we gazed upon what lay within.

  Of the inhabitant we knew almost nothing. Some said a hideously disfigured old conjure woman lay buried here. Some said she was a young girl with a face as lovely and cold as moonlight on water, and a soul crueler than Fate itself. Some claimed the body was not a woman’s at all, but that of a white voodoo priest who had ruled the bayou. He had features of a cool, unearthly beauty, they said, and a stock of fetishes and potions which he would hand out with the kindest blessing…or the direst curse. This was the story Louis and I liked best; the sorcerer’s capriciousness appealed to us, and the fact that he was beautiful.

  No trace of beauty remained to the thing in the coffin – at least not the sort of beauty that a healthy eye might cherish. Louis and I loved the translucent parchment skin stretched tight over long bones that seemed to have been carved from ivory. The delicate brittle hands folded across the sunken chest, the soft black caverns of the eyes, the colorless strands of hair that still clung to the fine white dome of the skull – to us these things were the poetry of death.

  Louis played his flashlight over the withered cords of the neck. There, on a silver chain gone black with age, was the object we had come seeking. No crude wax doll or bit of dried root was this. Louis and I gazed at each other, moved by the beauty of the thing; then, as if in a dream, he reached to grasp it. This was our rightful night’s prize, our plunder from a sorcerer’s grave.

  ‘How does it look?’ Louis asked as we were dressing.

  I never had to think about my clothes. On an evening such as this, when we were dressing to go out, I would choose the same garments I might wear for a night’s digging in the graveyard – black, unornamented black, with only the whiteness of my face and hands showing against the backdrop of night. On a particularly festive occasion, such as this, I might smudge a bit of kohl round my eyes. The absence of color made me nearly invisible: if I walked with my shoulders hunched and my chin tucked down, no one except Louis would see me.

  ‘Don’t slouch so, Howard,’ said Louis irritably as I ducked past the mirror. ‘Turn around and look at me. Aren’t I fine in my sorcerer’s jewelry?’

  Even when Louis wore black, he did it to be noticed. Tonight he was resplendent in narrow-legged trousers of purple paisley silk and a silvery jacket that seemed to turn all light iridescent. He had taken our prize out of its box and fastened it around his throat. As I came closer to look at it, I caught Louis’s scent: rich and rather meaty, like blood kept too long in a stoppered bottle.

  Against the sculpted hollow of Louis’s throat, the thing on its chain seemed more strangely beautiful than ever. Have I neglected to describe the magical object, the voodoo fetish from the churned earth of the grave? I will never forget it. A polished sliver of bone (or a tooth, but what fang could have been so long, so sleekly honed, and still have somehow retained the look of a human tooth?) bound by a strip of copper. Set into the metal, a single ruby sparkled like a drop of gore against the verdigris. Etched in exquisite miniature upon the sliver of bone, and darkened by the rubbing in of some black-red substance, was an elaborate veve – one of the symbols used by voodooists to invoke their pantheon of terrible gods. Whoever was buried in that lonely bayou grave, he had been no mere dabbler in swamp magic. Every cross and swirl of the veve was reproduced to perfection. I thought the thing still retained a trace of the grave’s scent – a dark odor like potatoes long spoiled. Each grave has its own peculiar scent, just as each living body does.

  ‘Are you certain you should wear it?’ I asked.

  ‘It will go into the museum tomorrow,’ he said, ‘with a scarlet candle burning eternally before it. Tonight its powers are mine.’

  The nightclub was in a part of the city that looked as if it had been gutted from the inside out by a righteous tongue of fire. The street was lit only by occasional scribbles of neon high overhead, advertisements for cheap hotels and all-night bars. Dark eyes stared at us from the crevices and pathways between buildings, disappearing only when Louis’s hand crept toward the inner pocket of his jacket. He carried a small stiletto there, and knew how to use it for more than pleasure.

  We slipped through a door at the end of an alley and descended the narrow staircase into the club. The lurid glow of a blue bulb flooded the stairs, making Louis’s face look sunken and dead behind his tinted glasses. Feedback blasted us as we came in, and above it, a screaming battle of guitars. The inside of the club was a patchwork of flickering light and darkness. Graffiti covered the walls and the ceiling like a tangle of barbed wire come alive. I saw bands’ insignia and jeering death’s-heads, crucifixes bejewelled with broken glass and black obscenities writhing in the stroboscopic light.

  Louis brought me a drink from the bar. I sipped it slowly, still drunk on absinthe. Since the music was too loud for conversation, I studied the club-goers around us. A quiet bunch, they were, staring fixedly at the stage as if they had been drugged (and no doubt many of them had – I
remembered visiting a club one night on a dose of hallucinogenic mushrooms, watching in fascination as the guitar strings seemed to drip soft viscera onto the stage). Younger than Louis and myself, most of them were, and queerly beautiful in their thrift shop rags, their leather and fishnet and cheap costume jewelry, their pale faces and painted hair. Perhaps we would take one of them home with us tonight. We had done so before. ‘The delicious guttersnipes,’ Louis called them. A particularly beautiful face, starkly boned and androgynous, flickered at the edge of my vision. When I looked, it was gone.

  I went into the restroom. A pair of boys stood at a single urinal, talking animatedly. I stood at the sink rinsing my hands, watching the boys in the mirror and trying to overhear their conversation. A hairline fracture in the glass seemed to pull the taller boy’s eyes askew. ‘Casper and Alyssa found her tonight,’ he said. ‘In some old warehouse by the river. I heard her skin was gray, man. And sort of withered, like something had sucked out most of the meat.’ ‘Far out,’ said the other boy. His black-rimmed lips barely moved.

  ‘She was only fifteen, you know?’ said the tall boy as he zipped his ragged trousers.

  ‘She was a cunt anyway.’

  They turned away from the urinal and started talking about the band – Ritual Sacrifice, I gathered, whose name was scrawled on the walls of the club. As they went out, the boys glanced at the mirror and the tall one’s eyes met mine for an instant. Nose like a haughty Indian chief’s, eyelids smudged with black and silver. Louis would approve, I thought – but the night was young, and there were many drinks left to be had.

  When the band took a break we visited the bar again. Louis edged in beside a thin dark-haired boy who was barechested except for a piece of torn lace tied about his throat. When he turned, I knew his was the androgynous and striking face I had glimpsed before. His beauty was almost feral, but overlaid with a cool elegance like a veneer of sanity hiding madness. His ivory skin stretched over cheekbones like razors; his eyes were hectic pools of darkness.

  ‘I like your amulet,’ he said to Louis. ‘It’s very unusual.’

  ‘I have another one like it at home,’ Louis told him.

  ‘Really? I’d like to see them both together.’ The boy paused to let Louis order our vodka gimlets, then said, ‘I thought there was only one.’

  Louis’s back straightened like a string of beads being pulled taut. Behind his glasses, I knew, his pupils would have shrunk to pinpoints: the light pained him more when he was nervous. But no tremor in his voice betrayed him when he said, ‘What do you know about it?’

  The boy shrugged. On his bony shoulders, the movement was insouciant and drop-dead graceful. ‘It’s voodoo,’ he said. ‘I know what voodoo is. Do you?’

  The implication stung, but Louis only bared his teeth the slightest bit; it might have been a smile. ‘I am conversant in all types of magic,’ he said, ‘at least.’

  The boy moved closer to Louis, so that their hips were almost touching, and lifted the amulet between thumb and forefinger. I thought I saw one long nail brush Louis’s throat, but I could not be sure. ‘I could tell you the meaning of this veve,’ he said, ‘if you were certain you wished to know.’

  ‘It symbolizes power,’ Louis said. ‘All the power of my soul.’ His voice was cold, but I saw his tongue dart out to moisten his lips. He was beginning to dislike this boy, and also to desire him.

  ‘No,’ said the boy so softly that I barely caught his words. He sounded almost sad. ‘This cross in the center is inverted, you see, and the line encircling it represents a serpent. A thing like this can trap your soul. Instead of being rewarded with eternal life…you might be doomed to it.’

  ‘Doomed to eternal life?’ Louis permitted himself a small cold smile. ‘Whatever do you mean?’

  ‘The band is starting again. Find me after the show and I’ll tell you. We can have a drink…and you can tell me all you know about voodoo.’ The boy threw back his head and laughed. Only then did I notice that one of his upper canine teeth was missing.

  The next part of the evening remains a blur of moonlight and neon, ice cubes and blue swirling smoke and sweet drunkenness. The boy drank glass after glass of absinthe with us, seeming to relish the bitter taste. None of our other guests had liked the liqueur. ‘Where did you get it?’ he asked. Louis was silent for a long moment before he said, ‘It was sent over from France.’ Except for its single black gap, the boy’s smile would have been as perfect as the sharp-edged crescent moon.

  ‘Another drink?’ said Louis, refilling both our glasses.

  When I next came to clarity, I was in the boy’s arms. I could not make out the words he was whispering; they might have been an incantation, if magic may be sung to pleasure’s music. A pair of hands cupped my face, guiding my lips over the boy’s pale parchment skin. They might have been Louis’s hands. I knew nothing except this boy, the fragile movement of the bones beneath the skin, the taste of his spit bitter with wormwood.

  I do not remember when he finally turned away from me and began lavishing his love upon Louis. I wish I could have watched, could have seen the lust bleeding into Louis’s eyes, the pleasure wracking his body. For, as it turned out, the boy loved Louis so much more thoroughly than ever he loved me.

  When I awoke, the bass thump of my pulse echoing through my skull blotted out all other sensations. Gradually, though, I became aware of tangled silk sheets, of hot sunlight on my face. Not until I came fully awake did I see the thing I had cradled like a lover all through the night.

  For an instant two realities shifted in uneasy juxtaposition and almost merged. I was in Louis’s bed; I recognized the feel of the sheets, their odor of silk and sweat. But this thing I held – this was surely one of the fragile mummies we had dragged out of their graves, the things we dissected for our museum. It took me only a moment, though, to recognize the familiar ruined features – the sharp chin, the high elegant brow. Something had desiccated Louis, had drained him of every drop of his moisture, his vitality. His skin crackled and flaked away beneath my fingers. His hair stuck to my lips, dry and colorless. The amulet, which had still been around his throat in bed last night, was gone.

  The boy had left no trace – or so I thought until I saw a nearly transparent thing at the foot of the bed. It was like a quantity of spiderweb, or a damp and insubstantial veil. I picked it up and shook it out, but could not see its features until I held it up to the window. The thing was vaguely human-shaped, with empty limbs trailing off into nearly invisible tatters. As the thing wafted and billowed, I saw part of a face in it – the sharp curve left by a cheekbone, the hole where an eye had been – as if a face were imprinted upon gauze.

  I carried Louis’s brittle shell of a corpse down into the museum. Laying him before his mother’s niche, I left a stick of incense burning in his folded hands and a pillow of black silk cradling the papery dry bulb of his skull. He would have wished it thus.

  The boy has not come to me again, though I leave the window open every night. I have been back to the club, where I stand sipping vodka and watching the crowd. I have seen many beauties, many strange wasted faces, but not the one I seek. I think I know where I will find him. Perhaps he still desires me – I must know.

  I will go again to the lonely graveyard in the bayou. Once more – alone, this time – I will find the unmarked grave and plant my spade in its black earth. When I open the coffin – I know it, I am sure of it! – I will find not the mouldering thing we beheld before, but the calm beauty of replenished youth. The youth he drank from Louis. His face will be a scrimshaw mask of tranquility. The amulet – I know it; I am sure of it – will be around his neck.

  Dying: the final shock of pain or nothingness that is the price we pay for everything. Could it not be the sweetest thrill, the only salvation we can attain…the only true moment of self-knowledge? The dark pools of his eyes will open, still and deep enough to drown in. He will hold out his arms to me, inviting me to lie down with him in his rich wormy bed.
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  With the first kiss his mouth will taste of wormwood. After that it will taste only of me – of my blood, my life, siphoning out of my body and into his. I will feel the sensations Louis felt: the shrivelling of my tissues, the drying-up of all my vital juices. I care not. The treasures and the pleasures of the grave? They are his hands, his lips, his tongue.

  The End of the Garden

  Michal Ajvaz

  Translated into English by James Naughton

  Michal Ajvaz (1949–) is a Czech novelist, poet and translator. Born into an exiled Russian family, Ajvaz studied Czech studies and aesthetics at Charles University in Prague. He did not begin publishing fiction until 1989, probably due to the political repression in the Czech Republic (then Czechoslovakia) during the 1970s and 1980s. His novel Prázdné ulice (2004) was awarded the prestigious Jaroslav Seifert Prize for literary achievement (2005). English-language translations include the critically acclaimed The Other City (2009) and The Golden Age (2010). Ajvaz comes by the ‘weirdness’ in his fiction through dark humor and absurdity, as in ‘The End of the Garden’ (1991).

  As I am passing, I hear a pathetic call for help from a ground-floor window. I clamber up to the sill and jump into the room; I find myself in a room with heavy dark furniture, with tassel-edged covers, with mountains of variegated little cushions, with a darkened painting of the Bay of Naples on the wall. Behind the great double bed something or other is wrestling on the ground, you can year puffing, groaning and blows. I rush over to the fight and see: a young woman in a black evening dress with narrow shoulder-straps and a plunging back is struggling with a lizard! It is evidently a huge monitor lizard (Varanus komodoensis), which lives on the island of Komodo in Indonesia and reaches a length of as much as three metres. Zoologists reckon that these lizards were able to reach such a length on Komodo due to the fact that on this island they had no natural enemies. I jump on the lizard like Saint George, I grab it by the floppy wrinkled skin under the neck and heave it about. While I am shaking it, the lamenting call for help continues to be heard. Suddenly I realise, it is not the woman calling for help, but the lizard! I let the beast go, sit down on the threadbare carpet and awkwardly observe the struggle. It really looks as if the woman is the assailant and the lizard the assaulted. If he didn’t have any enemies on Komodo, I said to myself, here it is evidently otherwise. The lizard would clearly have done better to remain in Indonesia. He would have saved not only himself from a nasty situation but also me: for I was unable to decide how to behave; on the one hand the lizard was obviously the victim of an attack, on the other it seemed morally unacceptable for me to side with a lizard in this fight between a lizard and a human being. Hegel reproaches Kant for the merely formal and abstractly universal quality of his categorical imperative, which makes it unable to guide us sufficiently in concrete situations. ‘Act in such a way that the principle of your behaviour may become a universal maxim’: should this universal maxim rather be ‘help those under attack’ or ‘help women who are struggling with monitor lizards’? Kant says: ‘In your conduct let a human being be always the aim, not the means.’ What of the lizard, can he be a means? On this subject the Critique of Practical Reason has absolutely nothing to say; as far as I know, in the whole of this extensive work there is not a single mention of monitor lizards. Kant is of course partly excused by the fact that, as is generally known, he never left Konigsberg (though he speculated whether after our death we would inhabit other heavenly spheres), so that he quite certainly never encountered a Komodo lizard; on the other hand, however, he might surely have devoted at least a couple of lines to a creature as remarkable as the three-metre-long monitor lizard. Maybe this lizard is now pursuing him across the endless empty plains of some other star.