The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  (Here, I think, lies the misfortune of philosophy: always we encounter on our travels some exceptional freak to which the philosophical rules are found to be non-applicable. Which are right – the freaks or the philosophical principles? I once had a lecture on this problem in a lift, inlaid with amber. On the one hand we are somewhat loath to dispose of the whole thing merely by saying ‘so much worse for the freaks,’ on the other we are also reluctant to accept that the whole of our fine system of thought be dependent on some ugly old freak. At the same time we fail to grasp the relativity of the concept of ‘freakishness’ – if there were no human beings with their evaluating criteria, there would be no ‘freakishness’ either – also we ignore the vicious circle of reasoning to which we fall victim: freakish for us is that which falls outside our own sense of order, but simultaneously we proclaim that this breaching of our own sense of order proves nothing against its truth value, since after all we are simply dealing with a freak.)

  So I followed this struggle, full of feelings of confusion and ambivalence, until finally I tapped the woman strangling the fretful lizard on the shoulder and said in an uncertain voice: ‘Please leave the lizard alone,’ and when that did nothing, I added: ‘He’s a rare creature from Indonesia, everywhere else these lizards are only tiny.’ Eventually the woman let the lizard go, he shambled off, head drooping into the farthest corner of the room, where he huddled up against a glass-fronted cabinet with shelves displaying china dogs and sea shells and began to sob loudly. The woman slowly got up from the floor, straightened her dress and looked at me severely. She had wavy black hair and an extraordinarily lovely, sharply sculptured face with an aquiline nose, her eyes were so vivaciously painted in various hues of turquoise, purple and green that it looked as if an exotic butterfly with outspread wings were perched on the top of her nose.

  She went up to a glass-fronted bookcase holding neatly arranged rows of adventure novels by Alexandre Dumas pere and Paul Feval, printed sometime at the turn of last century. She turned the key in the lock, and the doors opened with a gentle creak. She reached confidently inside, pulled out a thick old book with gilt edging, covered in dust, and handed it to me. With astonishment I read my own name on the cover, set in a rounded fin-de-siecle typeface interlaced with tendrils of plant decoration which swirled across the entire binding in inextricably tangled swathes; below was the book’s title: At the End of the Garden. I have never written a book in my life, although I have always wanted to be a writer, because I would enjoy working on a book in the mornings – I used to imagine it would be something between Phenomenology of Mind, The Three Musketeers and Les Chants de Maldoror (nothing funny in that!) – and in the afternoons I’d sit in a café, sip sweet coffee and watch the faces of the passers-by in the street through the glass like fish in an aquarium. Now I gazed in surprise at the book whose binding held my name. Do demons execute for us works we have dreamt of and never created? Do our hidden literary projects ripen in the dark depths of other people’s libraries? Are the books we regard as our own creations only copies of texts engraved on glass sheets and deposited in a library situated in a labyrinth of malachite passageways beneath the city? In any case it seems that someone carries out unfulfilled tasks for us. I recalled how a musician friend once whispered to me in a pub about hearing beneath the surface of an evening pond in a desolate landscape the symphony he had resolved to write when he was studying at the conservatory, but of which he had only composed a few bars.

  I opened the book, the work of a demon, and began to leaf through it. But wherever I opened the pages, though I saw the printed text, the letters immediately began to turn pale and vanish like ancient frescoes from the catacombs, exposed to fresh air, I only managed to glimpse a couple of words on each page; together they made up a mysterious sentence, oddly beautiful in its absurdity. It spoke of great railway-station halls, river embankments of marble, and the glass-fronted veranda of a mountain lodge. Beneath the melted text there remained only yellowed, melancholy fragrant paper, a few brown marks, only occasionally an isolated letter was left on the page or the fragment of a word.

  But the pictures did not vanish. When the whole text had evaporated, I started to inspect them at last. I liked them, because they reminded me of the naïve wash illustrations from the books of Karl May which I read in my childhood when I was ill, lying by myself at home in an empty flat. All the pictures showed a monitor lizard in some situation or other, displaying him as a perfect scoundrel without a single jot of honour in all his long body. Here with lascivious paws he assails an innocent girl as she prepared in her translucent night-dress to lie down in her virginal bed, here we see him on top of the pyramid of Cheops, disguised as a bedouin, knocking over with his rifle butt a gentleman in a light-coloured colonial suit, who loses his balance and hurtles into the terrible abyss, his tropical helmet has fallen off his head – in the picture it hangs in the air a foot or two above the top of the pyramid. Another illustration is especially fine: we see a gloomy dark underground cavern, flooded with water, gushing in a great current out of the mouth of some pipe projecting from the wall. To the pillar supporting the vault an elegant mustachioed young man and a nice young girl are tied with a strong rope (the girl is maybe the same as the one in the picture of the bedroom); the water has reached up to their waists. The monitor lizard is standing over them at the top of the stairs, opening the door, through which rays of daylight penetrate, and turning his head towards the unfortunates. The text beneath this picture lasted a bit longer, so I managed to read all of it. It said: ‘I am sorry, my dear Count, that we shall not have occasion to finish our interesting debate on Kant’s moral philosophy, begun during those unforgettable days in the gardens of El Amarna,’ said the lizard with a devilish leer leer on his horrid face –p.427.

  When I had finished looking through the illustrations, I glanced in surprise at the monitor lizard, huddled in the corner. He had covered his face with his paws, as though he were terribly ashamed, and tried to secrete himself right into the hollow between the display cabinet and the wall. He now surely regretted that his ancestors had attained such a length in Komodo. The woman took the book from my hand and placed it on a low round table, covered with a crocheted cloth. She looked at me frowningly and shook her head rebukingly. Although she was younger than I, she now looked like a school teacher. I began to feel ashamed too, I felt like crawling behind the cabinet after the lizard. Will this school teacher not complain to my parents that I make friends with lizards, that I am incapable of carrying out the categorical imperative in spite of going on about Kant all the time in Prague’s Mala Strana restaurants, that I haven’t written the book I was set to do as homework, that instead of working on this I spent my time aimlessly walking along past garden walls and fences, that my brain has produced nothing but incompletely crystallised thoughts, still half just the scents of places and inconsequential rhythms?

  Now the monitor lizard got up and, still squinting timidly at the woman in the black dress, he opened a case lying on the cabinet. He took out of it a viola d’amore and tucked it under his lower jaw, after first pushing aside the obstructing flap of skin. He caught the bow in his other claw and started playing a waltz. Into the quavering sounds of the strings he mingled his unabated wailing lament, sometimes reminiscent of the whining of a dog. I went up to the woman, bowed slowly and grandly to her and took her round the waist. We started to dance, clumsily we circled the leather armchairs and lamps on long metal standards. The room echoed to the melancholy notes of the viola and the lizard’s whimpering and whining.

  But in his playing the lizard evidently forgot his pain, the music engrossed him more and more, the whining gradually ceased and the notes of the viola became louder, more emphatic and joyous, the melody became ever more boisterous and aggressive. He rose from his corner and, with the viola under his chin, he approached us, playing like the first fiddler at a gypsy ball after midnight, he whooped and thumped the beat with his tail on the floor. His boisterous smil
e gradually changed into a devilish leer. A change also came over the woman. Her face was no longer that of a school teacher, rather the face of a terrified little girl, she gazed in horror at the grinning monster and pressed herself timidly against me. I stroked her hair soothingly. Don’t be afraid, I’m here with you, I won’t let the lizard eat you up. She whispered to me: ‘I love you very much, if we manage to escape the claws of this terrible beast, we’ll go off together somewhere where no such horrid lizards live, there must be such a place, not long ago three-metre-long lizards were only to be found on Komodo, and now they’re everywhere; when I ride in the metro, they’re sitting opposite me, dozing, I have to spend the whole journey looking at their thick faces, at work they’ve made a lizard my new boss, he keeps coming up and pawing my shoulders when I’m typing, he makes lewd suggestions…’ The lizard stood close beside us, his jaw hanging open, with ghastly teeth flashing, he played a wild Hungarian tune, he stamped his foot till the walls shook and cracks appeared in them, like branching roots, and he whooped loudly. But the tension fell away from me too, I wasn’t afraid of the lizard’s teeth, I no longer felt the need to give an account of myself, to apologise for not fulfilling my task, I knew now that no such task existed, there was only the quietly flowing river of being with its currents and scents, the unknown and the unenvisaged that ripens within the flow.

  The lizard broke off the tune in mid-bar, shoved me, till I flew into the corner, and chucked the viola d’amore after me – that clearly meant it was my turn to play. Then he clutched the woman in his embrace and started dancing a strange lizard’s tango with her. I was furious, but the fall had taken my breath away, so I wasn’t able to get up at once and jump on the lizard. The woman was half-dead with fear, the lizard dragged her round the room like a rag puppet, croaking a wordless song and leaning over her hapless body in eccentric figures. During one of these they fell on the carpet and with lascivious huffing the lizard started to assault the woman, sticking his maw into her neckline. I recovered myself, with a leap and a bound I went over and with the viola I hit the lizard on the head with all my strength.

  When the musical instrument shattered on the lizard’s skull, a terrific bang was heard and the walls surrounding us collapsed. When the dust settled, I saw we were on wide plain, covered with yellow grass and low desiccated bushes. On one side of the distant horizon the plain descended to a harbour town, whose houses from a distance looked like little stones scattered round the curving bay. The only building on the empty plain was the National Museum. It stood some way off, the same size as in Prague, but all made of glass, through the glass walls you could see, flapping its mighty wings as it flew down the empty corridors, an Andean condor. The lizard staggered to its feet, clasping his head with both paws. He started to feel scared again and hid behind me, so that the woman wouldn’t see him. My courage also left me. The woman got up, shaking with fury, and angrily hissing: ‘You haven’t heard the last of this!’ I decided to back off, pushing the lizard in the rear, as he clung to my shirt and wept. But the woman let us alone, she went off towards the glass building; we could hear her muttering to herself: ‘You’ll pay for this, you blithering idiots’ and ‘It won’t do you a bit of good, being a protected species, and the other little sod’s also got it coming to him.’ Up the glass ramp, past the glass statues she went, reached the main doorway and entered. She could be seen going up the glass staircase, walking slowly along the corridors, the condor slowly wheeling round her, occasionally brushing a wing against her hair. Should I go after her? I was attracted by the cold glass and the condor’s sharp beak. Meanwhile the monitor lizard bit its teeth into some rope tied to the end of the bed. He turned his head and gave me a doggy look. I smiled sadly and lay down on the pale quilt. The lizard slowly walked off with the rope in his mouth the rope went taut and the bed started to move, it began bumping off along the plain. I lay on my back staring at the bright sky, sometimes I heard the cracking of a dry bush. After a while the lizard began to croon a little song, I didn’t understand it too well, I only caught the words:

  At the end of the garden

  in thorn thicket’s land

  treasures are harboured

  of Arabian sand.

  You behold jewels’ spark

  from silvery shrines

  when up with the lark

  you creep there betimes.

  Towards evening we found ourselves on the edge of the harbour town. The lizard kept pulling with all his strength. First I rode through an estate of luxury villas whose walls shone white through the darkening foliage of their gardens. Then the bed rolled along the asphalt of broad and practically empty streets, where the red rays of the setting sun, penetrating through gaps between the houses, lit up large letters on facades of bare brick and struck sharp blinding flashes which bounced off the chrome of cars which passed us from time to time. Finally we plunged into the winding lanes of the old harbour quarter, which were sometimes so narrow that the bed grated on the walls; then the lizard always turned round, patiently pushed the bed back and took another route. I was moving along in close proximity to men and women sitting at tables in front of little pubs; they shook hands with me, without having to get up from their seats, and shouted something at me in an unknown tongue. A little black bird jumped up on the bed, rode for a while and then flew off. People stood up, patted the lizard on the shoulder like a horse, someone brought a jug and tried to make the lizard drink some wine, by sticking his head into the jug. The lizard fended them all off benevolently with his paw and went on calmly pulling his load. Soon the harbour appeared at the end of one of the lanes. The red sun on the horizon was already touching the surface of the sea; the harbour was empty, only a few children were chasing a ball across the wide asphalt expanse, their shadows flitted across the distant facades of lengthy administrative buildings, reddened in the light of the setting sun. At the other end of the harbour cranes were unloading goods from a large white ship.

  The lizard halted only on reaching the pier. A chill blew in from the sea. Yachts bobbed on the waves and scraped gently, the water splashed and there was a smell of rotting. The lizard curled up on the ground in a ball and slept. I felt sleepy too, what luck, not having to rush about an unfamiliar town looking for a room for the night in unwelcoming hotels. I buried myself in the quilt. When I shut my eyes I could hear the quiet voices of abandoned boats, the splashing of waves, the distant call of children.

  (Sea, harbour piers, large letters on facades, worn-through plush of hotel armchair backs, lights in drinks, marbles, smells of corridors, an unfamiliar animal walking in the gestures of hands, from unrepeatable and unnecessary encounters which we forget, yet whose poison ripens in the blood, there may perhaps be born a future home, unlooked-for asylum.)

  In the morning the lizard climbed on to the bed. I grasped the rope in my hands and started slowly pulling the bed in the direction of Prague. I think some other animals jumped on to the bed on the way, because it got heavier and heavier, apart from that behind my back the hooting and yelling of several voices resounded and sounds of wild struggles. But I didn’t look back, I pulled the bed along empty highways, the mist rolling over them.

  The Dark

  Karen Joy Fowler

  Karen Joy Fowler (1950–) is an American writer who has written science fiction, fantasy novels and stories that tend to work by way of ambiguity, misdirection, and deep characterization. Although she is best-known for her New York Times bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club (2004), also made into a movie, novels such as Sarah Canary (1991), The Sweetheart Season (1996), and Sister Noon (2001) cemented her reputation as a writer of the first rank. Story collections include Artificial Things (1986), Black Glass (1997), and What I Didn’t See (2010). Although Fowler rarely writes stories that could be called horror or weird, ‘The Dark’ is a powerful and topical exception.