The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  ‘Doctor Taylor,’ I said.

  Both of them looked up, and I could tell from his expression that he didn’t recognize me. We had met only briefly, weeks before.

  ‘Doug Riddle,’ I said.

  ‘Mister Riddle!’ He stood quickly, brushed dirt off his hands, started to offer to shake, pulled back suddenly. ‘I don’t know if you want to shake hands with me. I’ve been rooting around in graves all day.’ He seemed genuinely flustered. He turned to the woman, who had risen with him. ‘Gertie, this is Doug Riddle. My associate, Gertrude Latham.’

  ‘I’m very pleased to meet you,’ she said. She seemed as ill at ease as he. She had a wonderful accent, German come through the heart of the Deep South.

  ‘Finding out what you came to find out?’ I said.

  Taylor made an attempt at a smile. ‘In this line of work, you never know what you’ll find out.’

  ‘Some people,’ I said, meaning mainly my irrepressible Uncle G. A., ‘called this place Gardner Gardens.’

  They looked uncertain, as if unsure they’d heard me right. He ventured to say, ‘Oh?’

  ‘The planting ground,’ I said, then shrugged. ‘Small-town black humor.’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’ Taylor smiled again, more feebly than before, and tried to make up the difference by adding a chuckle, with results that embarrassed everyone. My own smile began to hurt my mouth.

  Gertrude Latham went for a save. She nodded toward Julia Anne Rich’s grave and said, ‘That headstone tells us a great deal about this young woman’s life. Do you know anything about her?’

  I glanced at the dates on the stone. Julia Anne Rich had died, age twenty-two, before the turn of the century, when my great-grandparents were children. ‘I remember the name,’ I said, ‘from when I used to come here as a kid. I thought Julia Anne was a nice name –’ I gave Latham an apologetic look ‘– for a girl’s name. But I don’t know anything about her in particular.’

  Latham nodded at the grave again. ‘Those are her babies there by her feet. Judging from the dates, she lost four of them in a row. The last one may have killed her.’

  If this was archeology, I wasn’t impressed. I felt sure I could have deduced as much from the information on the stones. Childbirth in the nineteenth century was perilous.

  I said, ‘There’re more babies and mothers buried here than anything else. Lots of children’s graves, too. Children used to die of everything. After World War Two, though, hardly anyone except old people got buried here. All the young people went into the service or moved to Evansville to work in the P-forty-seven factory. And they just never came back.’

  The two archeologists were staring at me. There was something like admiration in Taylor’s expression. I felt a sheepish sort of pleasure and could not help smiling as he asked me, ‘Are you Gardner’s official historian?’

  I shook my head. ‘But there was a time when I must’ve known the name on every last one of these headstones. I got to be a whiz at subtraction from figuring out by the dates how old people were when they died. And in the forties people did start going away and not coming back. My father went into the service and stayed in. And somebody in the family did go build P-forty-sevens, too. There were framed prints of the things hanging in a spare bedroom at my grandparents’ house for years. Official prints, with the Republic Aircraft logo.’

  ‘Mister Riddle,’ Taylor said, ‘we could use your knowledge to interpret this site. I’d appreciate it if you’d consider letting us interview you sometime.’

  ‘You’d be what’s known in anthropology as an informant,’ said Latham.

  Informant didn’t have the ring to it that official historian did, but I was flattered all the same. There’s little to compare with having people hang on everything you say. Anyway, I told myself, maybe Gardner was too small for a full-fledged historian. Nothing had ever happened here – nothing that mattered to anybody besides Riddles, Riches, and Bassetts, harvest time, tent meetings, weddings, funerals, somebody’s barn being raised or burning down. No one famous had ever come from Gardner, or to it, for that matter. And it struck me then, with unexpected and shaming clarity, that I’d never made the effort to bring my own children or grandchildren to this place, that I should have been murmuring genealogy and tragic personal histories to them all their young lives, teaching them about family and the continuity of life. I should have been telling them, ‘Every one of your ancestors lived and suffered and sometimes all but swam up waterfalls like salmon to make sure you’d be here today and the family would continue and the thread be unbroken. They were brave and wonderful people, and if you don’t believe it, just look here at your great-aunt, your great-something Julia Anne, who lost four babies one right after another, which isn’t even a record, and it must’ve seemed to her like the worst thing in the world to lose the first one but then she carried three more, suffered crushing loss every time, died a probably painful and possibly protracted death trying to deliver the last one –’ And, ‘Doug,’ my wife would’ve said by then, ‘Dad,’ my daughter would’ve said by now, each with that same disapproving furrow between her eyebrows. I do get carried away at times.

  I blinked the thoughts away and looked at the two scientists. ‘So,’ I said, ‘what’re you finding out?’

  Latham said, ‘We never really know what we’ve found until we’ve finished an excavation and, uh, put all the pieces of the puzzle together.’

  ‘Is there a puzzle here?’

  She essayed a smile. It was the best smile any of us had managed thus far. ‘There’s always a puzzle.’

  ‘And you always find a solution?’

  Her smile got even better. ‘This is what you’d call quick and dirty archeology. We have to excavate by shovel, get as much information out as we can, as fast as we can, and move on. We don’t have a lot of time. All we can do is figure out what the person was buried with and measure the bones. And we try to look for evidence of disease that would show up in the skeletal material.’

  ‘Is there evidence of a lot of disease?’

  Everything suddenly felt awkward again. I could tell by the look she gave Taylor that she regretted her last statement.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw Roy Rich’s grave right where I’d left it decades before. ‘Here’s a puzzle for you,’ I said. ‘What does this stone tell you about Roy Rich’s life?’

  Latham glanced at it. ‘He died at age fifteen.’

  ‘He was lucky to live that long,’ I said. ‘Or maybe not so lucky. I remember Roy. He was deformed. Not “differently abled,” not even “physically handicapped.” Deformed. His sister Betty, too.’ I pointed to Betty’s headstone, next to his. ‘She died at age twelve. Those two had everything in the world wrong with them. I guess you’ll see for yourself when you open the coffins.’

  The two scientists were silent. It was very hot, and sweat gleamed on Taylor’s pate and beaded on Latham’s forehead and upper lip. I felt slimy inside my clothing. The cicadae would not shut up.

  At last, Taylor said, stiffly. ‘We’ll write a report when we finish the excavation. If you like, I’ll send you a copy.’

  ‘I’m sure it’d be much too technical for me. Tell me something about my ancestors that I can go home and tell my wife.’

  Taylor looked about as unhappy as any human being I’d seen lately. Latham looked as if she were trying to wish somebody away – me, of course. The more ill at ease they became, the pushier I felt. Maybe it was the gene for devilishness, handed down from Mammaw.

  ‘It doesn’t necessarily have to be something nice,’ I said, ‘if that’s what’s holding you back. Nothing you tell me can be any more horrible than some of the things Granny and Mammaw told me.’ I looked over the rows. A truck pulled away from the gate, bearing some of my dead away to strange soil. ‘Doctor Taylor, when we met last month, you said this ground’s full of history, and this was a one-time-only chance to get at it.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, slowly – warily, I thought. ‘Yes, I did say that.’

/>   ‘This is the last time I’ll ever see this place. Living or dead, everyone’s being scattered. I know it’s true I’ll be able to visit my relatives’ new graves over in Dawson, but they’ll be, they’ll seem out of place over there. This is where my grandparents and great-grandparents were buried. This little spot in the road was their home. It was my home, too, for a while. Next year, it’ll all be gone, the whole valley’ll be under water. It’ll be like Gardner never existed. So please indulge me. I’m not going to gum up the works for you, I really don’t want to be in your way or bother you a lot, but I need…I need to carry away everything from here that I can this time.’

  ‘We try,’ Taylor said, ‘we try very hard to be careful of the feelings of living relatives of the people we exhume. It’s been my experience that relatives shouldn’t, well, watch. And that despite what they say, they don’t really want to know everything.’

  ‘Look. There’re a few chicken thieves buried here. There’s even supposed to be a horse thief. And one of my cousins stabbed her husband with a big sharp kitchen knife when he beat up on the kids. He isn’t buried here, but the point is, I don’t have many illusions about my family. I’ll try not to be shocked by anything you tell me.’

  He manifestly wasn’t convinced. ‘It’s not illusions I’m talking about. I’m talking more along the lines of –’ he couldn’t look at me now, so he compelled me not to look at him by pointing down at his map of the cemetery – ‘grislier facts. Most people don’t find it pleasant to contemplate, ah, physical abnormality.’

  Pleasant or no, I almost said, I contemplate it with every step. I could’ve gone on, mentioned my children’s and grandchildren’s congenital problems, too. I did say, ‘I’m not squeamish, either.’

  He gave me an okay-but-I-warned-you look. ‘There’s evidence of pretty high incidences of birth defects, of bone disorders. Many of them are kind of gruesome and unusual.’

  If he was expecting me to flinch, he was disappointed. If I was supposed to react strongly in any way, I failed. The only reaction I noticed in myself was some kind of inward shrug, meaning, approximately. Sure, of course, so what? In a community like Gardner, with no medical facilities and not even a resident doctor since Dr. Sweeny, there had been no avoiding the raw proof that flesh is weak, treacherous stuff. The maimed, the hideously diseased, and the genetic misfires had at all times been at least semi-present and semi-visible.

  I said, ‘Unusual how?’

  He exhaled a soft, exasperated sound and said to Latham, ‘Gertie, would you please take Mister Riddle over to where Dan and Greg are working and…show him.’

  She almost managed to conceal her distress at finding herself appointed tour-guide. Anger flashed in her blue eyes, but she answered, ‘Sure, Bob.’

  We walked past the rows. Up ahead, I could see two men kneeling beside an open grave.

  ‘Doctor Taylor,’ I said, ‘seems to think I’m made of glass.’

  ‘Please try to understand. Working in recent graveyards is about the least pleasant job there is in archeology. It’s very sensitive and very stressful, actually.’

  One of the archeologists kneeling by the grave was writing in a notebook. The other poked at the contents of a coffin, yellow bones, disintegrating remnants of a dress. They smiled when they saw Latham, went blank when they saw me. Introductions were made: the man with the notebook was Greg, the one doing the poking, Dan. They received the news that I was a relative without cheering.

  Latham looked down at the bones and said, ‘Is this one of the – is this one?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Dan.

  ‘Would you please show Mister Riddle what you’ve got here?’

  Both of the men regarded me doubtfully for a second, and then Dan said, ‘Okay. Well, sir. Know anything about human anatomy?’

  ‘Not much more than the foot bone’s connected to the ankle bone.’ I hadn’t intended to call anyone’s attention to my mismatched shoes, but Dan was the least-stiff person I’d met so far. He just nodded and turned to the bones and began speaking very easily. It was refreshing.

  ‘I won’t make this technical,’ he said, ‘and I’ll skip the small stuff. Um, the long bones in your hand, how long’d you say they are?’

  I glanced at the back of my hand. ‘Three, four inches.’

  ‘Close enough.’ He directed my attention to the remains inside the coffin and pointed out an array of bones as long as cigars. ‘These are the same bones, and there’re the fingers. As you can see, it’s a pretty extraordinarily oversized hand.’

  It was almost an understatement. Whoever the dead girl or woman was – I looked for the name, but glare on the stone obscured it – she must have looked as if she had an oar up her sleeve.

  ‘Typically,’ Dan went on, ‘congenital problems left the door open for all sorts of other problems. She must’ve been in pain her whole life. She was about eighteen or twenty when she died. Most of the others’ve been much younger.’

  ‘There’re really a lot of skeletons like this one?’

  ‘Yep.’ He watched me carefully now. ‘Awful lot of ’em.’

  ‘Enough to make you wonder,’ said the other man, Greg, ‘if the local drinking water isn’t spiked with uranium dust or thalidomide or something.’

  Latham shot him a thoroughly dismayed look. Greg cleared his throat and examined a page in his notebook very, very carefully. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘my family’s probably just dangerously inbred.’

  Latham and the two men seemed not to know how to take that remark. I let them twist in the wind, stared down at the tormented bones, thought, Roy Rich, Betty…I had sometimes glimpsed them through the half-open doors of their back bedrooms when my grandmother visited their mother and hauled me along. My cousin Dorsey would nowadays be called ‘learning-disabled.’ Aunt Jean was ‘movement-impaired.’ Several of her lower vertebrae were fused together; walking, standing, even sitting, all were torture for her. Once, I eavesdropped fascinatedly on a morbid conversation about her back and hip and knee problems and strange calcium spurs the doctor didn’t know what to make of. Once, I was appointed to help her down the aisle at a revival meeting, at a pace glacial and excruciating even for me. The valley resounded with preaching on hot summer nights, and every household brought forth its lame, afflicted, dying, and sent them forward to be healed by faith. Summer after summer, I saw the lines of pain deepen around my aunt’s mouth. I saw the microcephalic and the acromegalic, saw the man whose body appeared to be collapsing telescope-fashion, the man with the tumor that sat on the side of his neck like a second head, the woman with calves like some pachyderm’s, the girl who was one great angry strawberry mark, saw it all and became inured to it. Faith never healed anyone, but no one ever lost faith. DNA had let us down, but Jesus would yet lift us up.

  I was jarred out of this reverie as Dr. Taylor strode up in a hurry. He had a frown on his face and appeared not to notice me. ‘Gertie,’ he said, ‘Rita’s got something we better take a look at.’

  He turned without waiting to see if she followed. She hurried after him, and after a moment’s hesitation I went lugging after her. Two men and a woman with her nose painted white stood over a warped coffin. One of the men held the lid like a surfboard. We looked down, and Latham said, ‘My God,’ mah Gott.

  Lying in the coffin was the apparently preserved body of an elderly man in a dirty funeral suit. Lying in the grass by the edge of the driveway was Dr. Chester Sweeny’s headstone. I heard a roaring in my head.

  The white-nosed woman, Rita, couldn’t contain herself. She said, ‘It’s not a cadaver!’

  Latham asked, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m saying this isn’t a dead, embalmed body here! It’s not a body at all!’

  Rita pointed to the side of the elderly man’s face. I peered and saw some sort of crease or seam under the jawline. It had come loose beneath one ear, and a flap of skin, if it was skin, was turned down there, exposing smooth white bone, if it was bone.

  ‘Check it o
ut,’ said Rita, and used her thumb to push up an eyelid and show us a startlingly realistic fake eye set in a grimy socket. Then she pinched the loose flap of skin between her thumb and forefinger and pulled. It came off easily, exposing a bony tri-lobed bulb with openings that couldn’t have been for eyes or any other familiar organ. Where the jaw ought to have been was a complicated prosthetic jaw complete with upper and lower rows of teeth and a fake tongue.

  Nobody spoke for at least half a minute.

  Latham looked at Rita and then at Taylor, whose frown deepened when he saw me. I said, ‘What,’ and then, ‘Why did, why would someone bury this,’ and couldn’t think of a suitable noun.

  I had to settle for gesturing.

  ‘Prosthetics,’ Rita said. ‘The whole thing’s goddamn prosthetics. Feel it,’ and first Taylor, then Latham, and finally I knelt beside the coffin. I touched the right cheek. It felt gritty but…I pulled my hand away quickly.

  Rita looked about wildly and said, ‘Now what is that stuff?’

  Latham said, ‘It feels like,’ and stopped and shook her head perplexedly.

  ‘Fleshlike,’ murmured Taylor, barely audibly.

  Rita nodded vehemently. ‘So what kind of stuff is it, Bob?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some plastic, I don’t know.’

  ‘This grave was dug and filled in nineteen hundred,’ Rita said, ‘and no one touched it until it was opened today. I know because Gil and I opened it ourselves, and we’d’ve known if it’d been disturbed. This thing was in the ground ever since it was put in the ground, back when nobody, nobody, could make plastic like this. ‘