The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  ‘Rita,’ Latham said, ‘just calm down and–’

  ‘Calm down? Gertie, nobody can make goddamn plastic like this now!’

  Everybody was quiet again for a time. I looked around a circle of red sweaty faces. Taylor said to Rita, in a strangled voice, ‘What’s under the clothes?’

  Rita carefully opened the coat and the shirt, exposing a dirty but otherwise normal-looking human torso. It was an old man’s torso, flabby, loose-skinned, fish-belly white. Wiry hair grew in tufts around the nipples and furred the skin. Rita touched the belly gingerly, pinched up a fold, and, wide-eyed, peeled it right off like skin off a hardboiled egg. The inner surface had many small fittings and trailed strands of wire as fine as spider web. Within the exposed cavity, where a ribcage ought to have been, was a structure like a curved piece of painted iron lawn furniture.

  Someone muttered, ‘What in the hell–’ Maybe it was me, though I am not a swearing man.

  Rita started to touch the structure, but her hand trembled, and she pulled it back. She looked around, gray-faced, and said, ‘Too weird for me. Bob. Just too goddamn weird. I’m sorry.’

  Taylor touched the bulb carefully, then the chest structure.

  ‘Doctor,’ I said, ‘what’re we looking at?’

  ‘Well, obviously, some kind of articulated skeleton, but–’

  ‘Is it, is this more – what, some birth defect, bone disease, what?’ I was panting now, my heart was bursting out of my chest.

  Taylor worried his lower lip with his teeth. ‘No disease in the world twists ribs into latticework. Whatever this thing is, it looks like it was supposed to grow this way. I don’t even think it’s bone. It feels almost like…I don’t know. Coral.’

  ‘Coral?’

  ‘Something.’

  ‘Jesus, Jesus Christ,’ and I pushed myself up. Latham looked after me and asked if I was all right; I barely heard her.

  The roaring in my head was louder now, and I staggered away, ran as only lame men run, disjointedly, agonizedly, until I found myself standing shaking before my grandparents’ common headstone. I sat down on the ground between their graves to let my breathing slow and my heart stop racing, stared at the stone, tried to draw some comfort, some something, from the inscription. Beloved in memory, Ralph Riddle, Mary Riddle. All I could think of, however, was furry pale plastic skin draped from Rita’s fingers, the bony white bulb inside the headpiece, the false tongue in the false mouth.

  ‘Are you all right. Mister Riddle?’

  I started. Gertrude Latham had followed me and was hovering concernedly.

  ‘Just an anxiety attack.’ I punctuated the remark with a bark of mirthless laughter. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’ She choked on a reply to that, so I said it for her. ‘You think I shouldn’t go back?’

  She all but wrung her hands.

  ‘If you people are playing practical jokes–’

  ‘We would never, ever, play jokes!’

  ‘Somebody’s up to something here! If this is some kind of, of stunt, you, Taylor, the historical commission, none of you will ever see the end of trouble. I can promise you that.’

  ‘What do you think we’d possibly gain from a stunt?’ she demanded hotly.

  ‘Money, publicity, I don’t know.’

  ‘There’s no money in archeology, Mister Riddle,’ she said, biting off the words. ‘Certainly not in this kind of archeology! You think we do this to get rich, to be on television?’

  I was about to snap back, but then I saw that she was really angry, too, as angry as I was, maybe angrier. I got a hold on myself and said, in as reasonable a voice as I could manage, ‘What is that thing?’

  ‘It’s not a joke!’

  ‘Well, it’s something, and it doesn’t belong. If it’s not a joke and not a box full of junk and not human – and it sure isn’t human, or any animal, vegetable, mineral I’ve ever seen or heard about–’

  ‘I’m sure there’s a logical explanation,’ she said, obviously not convinced herself. ‘We’ll be able to find out more when we get the…remains to the lab.’

  ‘Yeah? And how long will that take?’

  ‘We’ll have to get all kinds of permission. It’s going to be very complicated. Anything you could tell us about this Doctor Sweeny could be very important.’

  ‘Doc Sweeny,’ I said, and had to pause to clear my throat loudly. My voice was lined with wet sand. ‘Doc Sweeny was the only doctor here for thirty years. My great-grandmother was at his funeral. She told me once the whole valley showed up to pay last respects. I don’t know any more than what she told me and what’s on his stone. He came here after the War Between the States. He died at the turn of the century.’

  She didn’t say anything for several seconds. Then: ‘Where did he come from?’

  ‘How would I know? Who knows if he ever said?’

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘then why did he come here?’

  ‘Everybody’s got to go somewhere.’

  ‘But why here? We’re not talking about your standard-issue nineteenth-century country doctor. We’re talking about…God, I don’t know what we’re talking about. A guy with plastic skin, latticework for ribs. A skull like, like–’

  She couldn’t find the right word, if there was a right word, and the sentence hung unfinished in the air between us until I said, ‘A skull like something. And a face like nothing. Those bones back there are the bones of a–’

  ‘A Martian, for all anybody knows.’ She was embarrassed to have said that, and I was embarrassed to have heard her say it. I couldn’t look at her again for several seconds, until I heard her suck in a breath like a sob and say, ‘Whatever he was, nobody caught on to him in thirty years. Thirty years! What was he doing here all that time?’

  ‘Driving around the countryside in his buggy. Dispensing solicitude, advice, and placebos.’

  ‘No, what was he really doing? Gardner’s small, isolated, even backward.’

  I could only nod. The roads hadn’t been paved until the 1920s. There hadn’t been plumbing and electricity in all the homes until the 1950s.

  ‘There’s no money to be made here,’ she went on, ‘and never has been.’

  I nodded again.

  ‘So why,’ she began, and hesitated.

  ‘Maybe he was stranded. Maybe the place just suited him.’

  She appeared to mull that over for a moment, then nodded. ‘Who’d’ve bothered, who’d’ve been able, to check anybody’s background in a place like this in eighteen seventy? Why else except that a doctor, someone claiming to be a doctor and willing to settle here, would’ve seemed like a godsend? He could’ve given them anything he wanted to give them and called it medicine.’

  I heard the roaring in my head again. I thought of my grandmother, breaking snap beans and humming. Are you washed in the blood? I murmured, ‘Or candy.’

  ‘What?’

  The roaring in my head rose in pitch and blended into the incessant twirring of the cicadae. I thought suddenly that I knew the words to that song – it was a song of the need to obey the biological imperative; Keep your genetic material in circulation, the chorus went – and I suddenly felt cold and feverish.

  I said, ‘What if,’ and then on second thought knew I could never go on and say what if Doc Sweeny had come to small, isolated, manageable Gardner from God knew where and become one of its citizens in order to become one with its citizens and had been accepted by them though the flesh of their children ever after twisted itself into knots trying to reject the alien matter he somehow had bequeathed to them, and those children, those who survived, had gone out into the world to pass along that same alien stuff to their children in turn, and –

  So I said no more, only lurched past Gertrude Latham, and if she called after me, I didn’t hear her. I wanted to be away from her and away from here, in my car, speeding away homeward with the radio turned way up and wind roaring past the open window. The waters could not close over Gardner soon enough to suit me. I didn’t stop moving
until I was through the cemetery gate, and then only because I put my bad foot in a shallow hole hidden in the grass and went down on one knee. The stab of pain in my leg and hip was so intense that I believed for a moment I was going to black out. Gasping, I dug my fingers into the earth, gripped it desperately. Maybe I was going to be sick anyway.

  Last Rites and Resurrections

  Martin Simpson

  Martin Simpson (1962–) is an American writer who has won the British Fantasy Award and serves as the Director of the University of Florida’s Reading & Writing Center. Ann VanderMeer published his first story, ‘Last Rites and Resurrections’ (1994), in her magazine The Silver Web. ‘Last Rites’ is a powerful meditation on loss that uses a naturalistic approach to the weird common to horror fiction from the 1990s. It subsequently became the title story of The Third Alternative’s first best-of anthology. The inspiration for the story came from Simpson’s daily drive while an assistant professor. ‘I began to get depressed by the amount of roadkill. Morose meditations led me to imagine the last thoughts of the animals.’

  Every morning I drive the same route I drove when I still had to work. I take State Road 40 through the Ocala National Forest, forty miles from Barberville to just this side of Ocala. The road has two lanes, with a passing lane every five or six miles, first for the east bound traffic, then for the west. Each time I come to a passing lane, I pull into the slow lane and let everyone go by. I’m always on the lookout for dead animals.

  The first dead animal’s voice I ever heard came from a brown and white basset hound with a broken neck. He was lying in the grass beside the westbound lane in Astor, and I only noticed him because I had stopped behind a school bus that was picking up a couple of kids. The dog looked like Barney, my neighbor’s basset when I was growing up on Lincoln Street in a small town in Illinois. The resemblance made my throat tighten; how long had it been since I’d thought about that neighbor, or his brown and white dog? When the bus’s red lights stopped flashing and it moaned into first gear, I pulled my BMW off the road instead of following.

  The dog lay on its side, his head lolling back at an impossible angle, one ear chastely flopped across his head, shielding his dead right eye from the sun that was just beginning to burn through the morning fog. I knelt beside him and patted his side. He wasn’t bloated. He didn’t smell. There was nothing wrong with him except for his neck, and it looked as if he might get up if I twisted his body and arranged his head just right.

  I couldn’t put him in the BMW; I had chosen the leather interior package, and who knows the mysteries of a basset hound’s first few postmortem hours? It had to be the trunk.

  I carried him carefully. As I leaned over the empty trunk I heard his voice. It wasn’t an audible voice – the dog’s mouth didn’t move or anything – but it was English. It said, ‘A motorcycle hit me twenty minutes ago. My legs are short and I never get along much faster than a trot; I meant to stay in the grass beside the road, but I guess I didn’t. The motorcycle had a shield on to protect the rider from the wind, and the bottom of that shield hit me just beneath my ears. My body went numb right away, and I wish I had stayed in the grass beside the road.’

  I stood cradling him over the dark gape of the trunk, but he wouldn’t say anything else. Finally I gently lowered him in beside the spare tire. A muffled sound like gravel in a twisting sock came from inside his neck when I pulled back the arm that had been supporting his head.

  I drove back toward Barberville, thinking: This is it, Chris is taking his toll.

  When my son Chris was twelve years old, he knew more about chemotherapy and bone marrow and white blood counts than any twelve year old should. The doctors had diagnosed him just before he turned eleven. Very rare form, they said. Not responsive to traditional treatments, they said. Give me everything you’ve got, Chris said.

  God, he was a beautiful kid.

  Shortly after his twelfth birthday we all knew. So I quit my job and Sarah took three months off, and we took Chris all around the states, everywhere he’d wanted to go: DC, Denver, San Francisco. We went skiing in Aspen, walked through a stand of redwoods in Washington state, and visited Mark Twain’s home in Hartford, Connecticut. The Museum of Modern Art in Chicago, the Alamo, the Liberty Bell, and the beach in San Diego all bored him. He loved Sea World, Pike’s Peak, the view from the Sears tower in Chicago, and the arch in St Louis.

  Before we could make it to New York City, Chris started fading. We brought him home, and in ten days he was gone. We buried him six weeks before the broken-necked dog spoke to me in gruff, phlegmy English.

  As I drove back towards home with a dead dog in my trunk, I thought my grief had finally undone me. I’m not particularly good at expressing emotion. I had only cried a few times since Chris’s death, but every night I went to bed with a heavy, brittle feeling in my chest, and every morning it was there waiting for me when I got up. Every day, on my way to work, I would ask myself: How long will this last? How long can I stand it?

  And now, here was an answer. I fully expected to hear more voices on the trip home. The moss that hangs in grey clumps from trees alongside the road might whisper my name. The garage door opener, clinging to my visor just above and in front of my left ear, might tell me where to drive next. The sly windshield wipers might softly counsel suicide.

  But I heard no voices on my way home.

  I live alone in a small house with a back yard that slopes down to a small lake. Sarah and I had been in the process of splitting up when Chris was diagnosed. The funeral was the last time we had seen each other.

  I got a shovel from the dusty-quiet garage and buried the basset in the back yard, in the shade of my magnolia tree.

  Eight days went by before the next dead animal spoke to me. I heard it at the exact moment I saw it, a huddled mass in the opposite lane, yearning to breathe, period.

  ‘A station wagon hit me,’ it said, ‘and my intestines blew out my asshole.’

  The words came slower than the basset’s had, and they were carefully enunciated.

  I pulled over shakily, and when no cars were coming I pulled across the road and parked in the grass. It was a cat, grey and thick-necked, an unfixed male. Its intestines were where it said they were. It didn’t have anything else to say.

  I buried it beside the basset under the magnolia. The intestines had made transport and burial difficult and unpleasant. Since then I keep a plastic tarp in any vehicle I drive, and I never travel without a pair of long rubber gloves.

  I am not the type to hear dead animals’ voices in my head. Which is to say, I’m not crazy. I don’t fit the profile of someone who is susceptible to the allure of the superstitions and mass-market voodoo of marginalised humanity. I’ve never bought a magazine in a supermarket checkout line, and I never read the horoscope, even for ‘fun’. I don’t believe in ouija boards, seances or tarot cards; I’ve never had my palm read; I’ve never even made a wish before I blow out the candles on a birthday cake. I don’t believe that aliens live and walk among us. I do believe in God, but I manage to ignore Him until some disaster hits. Even then I am held in the grip of a cowardly self-consciousness, and I can’t bring myself to pray with any fervor.

  And yet.

  Over the last four months I’ve buried nearly thirty members of the animal kingdom under my magnolia, and every one of them spoke a few well-chosen words to me, post-demise and pre-burial. I’ve interred a half-dozen cats, eight dogs, four raccoons (two couples, united in death just feet apart), three squirrels, and two armadillos.

  I saw a man pulling a deer around toward the back of his pickup once. I stopped, suspicious that he had somehow hit the animal on purpose, not sure what I would do if he had. But the deer set my mind at ease.

  ‘He couldn’t help it,’ said the deer, a medium-sized male with an unimpressive rack. ‘I was running through the woods and I got carried away. I know better than to leap without looking, especially near a road. But I can feel God in me when I leap; I was meant for it
. This man tried to miss me, and my feeling is: better to have leapt and lost…’

  The deer wasn’t the only dead animal with a sense of humor. Although two armadillos don’t constitute a large enough sample from which to generalize about a whole species, I’d have to say the armadillo has a healthy, good-humored sense of the absurdity of its position in the world.

  ‘Look at me,’ the first one I found said. ‘I’m basically a dinosaur, unchanged for millions of years. I should be sharing the road with a 1993 Saturn? That car has a micro-computer that controls its electrical systems; I’ve got scales, for God’s sake. It’s not easy being an anachronism.’

  The second armadillo I found was severely mangled, a condition made more horrible by the animal’s already naked, pink-and-grey vulnerability. I had to carry it by its tough rope of a tail; parts of it seeped and sagged all the way to my new truck.

  ‘My only natural defense is to curl up into an armored ball and outwait my opponent,’ the armadillo said. ‘Not too effective against steel-belted radials.’

  I never did go back to work full time after my last trip with Chris. I was a financial planner with one partner in our own small but reasonably prosperous practice. Two small business clients, a total of forty-five employees, plus a handful of couples that had been referred to us. I did a little of everything: set up IRAs, mutual funds, individual deferred comp packages, some tax planning. Sarah is a mid-level administrator and RN in an Ocala hospital, and we did okay. I put everything I could away, invested in the stock market. IBM in the mid-70s, Apple in the early 80s, small bio-medical research companies in the late 80s, tobacco stocks all the time.

  When Chris was diagnosed I decided I didn’t need to work anymore. When I finally came back, I kept a handful of clients whom I like and cut back to two mornings a week in a small office in Ocala. After the funeral and Sarah’s departure, we went through a very adult divorce. Sold the house, didn’t fight over money; we both have enough. I bought this medium-sized lot on the lake, with the little house on it, and Sarah bought a modest two-bedroom near her hospital.