The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  Up ahead, Candy Bill came racing out of the back door, barking his shrill bark and wagging his whole rear end back and forth the way Scotties do when they’re excited. I couldn’t wait any longer; hope and anxiety bubbled up in my throat like foam. I broke away from my father and ran to the house, still lugging his creel and still convinced, in my heart of hearts, that I was going to find my mother dead on the kitchen floor with her face swelled and purple like Dan’s had been when my father carried him in from the west field, crying and calling the name of Jesus.

  But she was standing at the counter, just as well and fine as when I had left her, humming a song as she shelled peas into a bowl. She looked around at me, first in surprise and then in fright as she took in my wide eyes and pale cheeks.

  ‘Gary, what is it? What’s the matter?’

  I didn’t answer, only ran to her and covered her with kisses. At some point my father came in and said, ‘Don’t worry, Lo – he’s all right. He just had one of his bad dreams, down there by the brook.’

  ‘Pray God it’s the last of them,’ she said, and hugged me tighter while Candy Bill danced around our feet, barking his shrill bark.

  ‘You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to, Gary,’ my father said, although he had already made it clear that he thought I should – that I should go back, that I should face my fear, as I suppose folks would say nowadays. That’s very well for fearful things that are make-believe, but two hours hadn’t done much to change my conviction that the man in the black suit had been real. I wouldn’t be able to convince my father of that, though. I don’t think there was a nine-year-old that ever lived who would have been able to convince his father he’d seen the Devil come walking out of the woods in a black suit.

  ‘I’ll come,’ I said. I had walked out of the house to join him before he left, mustering all my courage in order to get my feet moving, and now we were standing by the chopping-block in the side yard, not far from the woodpile.

  ‘What you got behind your back?’ he asked.

  I brought it out slowly. I would go with him, and I would hope the man in the black suit with the arrow-straight part down the left side of his head was gone…but if he wasn’t, I wanted to be prepared. As prepared as I could be, anyway. I had the family Bible in the hand I had brought out from behind my back. I’d set out just to bring my New Testament, which I had won for memorizing the most psalms in the Thursday night Youth Fellowship competition (I managed eight, although most of them except the Twenty-third had floated out of my mind in a week’s time), but the little red Testament didn’t seem like enough when you were maybe going to face the Devil himself, not even when the words of Jesus were marked out in red ink.

  My father looked at the old Bible, swelled with family documents and pictures, and I thought he’d tell me to put it back, but he didn’t. A look of mixed grief and sympathy crossed his face, and he nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Does your mother know you took that?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  He nodded again. ‘Then we’ll hope she doesn’t spot it gone before we get back. Come on. And don’t drop it.’

  Half an hour or so later, the two of us stood on the bank looking down at the place where Castle Stream forked, and at the flat place where I’d had my encounter with the man with the red-orange eyes. I had my bamboo rod in my hand – I’d picked it up below the bridge – and my creel lay down below, on the flat place. Its wicker top was flipped back. We stood looking down, my father and I, for a long time, and neither of us said anything.

  Opal! Diamond! Sapphire! Jade! I smell Gary’s lemonade! That had been his unpleasant little poem, and once he had recited it, he had thrown himself on his back, laughing like a child who has just discovered he has enough courage to say bathroom words like shit or piss. The flat place down there was as green and lush as any place in Maine that the sun can get to in early July…except where the stranger had lain. There the grass was dead and yellow in the shape of a man.

  I looked down and saw I was holding our lumpy old family Bible straight out in front of me with both thumbs pressing so hard on the cover that they were white. It was the way Mama Sweet’s husband Norville held a willow-fork when he was trying to dowse somebody a well.

  ‘Stay here,’ my father said at last, and skidded sideways down the bank, digging his shoes into the rich soft soil and holding his arms out for balance. I stood where I was, holding the Bible stiffly out at the ends of my arms like a willow-fork, my heart thumping wildly. I don’t know if I had a sense of being watched that time or not; I was too scared to have a sense of anything, except for a sense of wanting to be far away from that place and those woods.

  My Dad bent down, sniffed at where the grass was dead, and grimaced. I knew what he was smelling: something like burnt matches. Then he grabbed my creel and came on back up the bank, hurrying. He snagged one fast look over his shoulder to make sure nothing was coming along behind. Nothing was. When he handed me the creel, the lid was still hanging back on its cunning little leather hinges. I looked inside and saw nothing but two handfuls of grass.

  ‘Thought you said you caught a rainbow,’ my father said, ‘but maybe you dreamed that, too.’

  Something in his voice stung me. ‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘I caught one.’

  ‘Well, it sure as hell didn’t flop out, not if it was gutted and cleaned. And you wouldn’t put a catch into your fisherbox without doing that, would you, Gary? I taught you better than that.’

  ‘Yes, sir, you did, but–’

  ‘So if you didn’t dream catching it and if it was dead in the box, something must have come along and eaten it,’ my father said, and then he grabbed another quick glance over his shoulder, eyes wide, as if he had heard something move in the woods. I wasn’t exactly surprised to see drops of sweat standing out on his forehead like big, clear jewels. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’

  I was for that, and we went back along the bank to the bridge, walking quick without speaking. When we got there, my Dad dropped to one knee and examined the place where we’d found my rod. There was another patch of dead grass there, and the lady’s slipper was all brown and curled in on itself, as if a blast of heat had charred it. While my father did this, I looked in my empty creel. ‘He must have gone back and eaten my other fish, too,’ I said.

  My father looked up at me. ‘Other fish!’

  ‘Yes, sir. I didn’t tell you, but I caught a brookie, too. A big one. He was awful hungry, that fella.’ I wanted to say more, and the words trembled just behind my lips, but in the end I didn’t.

  We climbed up to the bridge and helped one another over the railing. My father took my creel, looked into it, then went to the railing and threw it over.

  I came up beside him in time to see it splash down and float away like a boat, riding lower and lower in the stream as the water poured in between the wicker weavings.

  ‘It smelled bad,’ my father said, but he didn’t look at me when he said it, and his voice sounded oddly defensive. It was the only time I ever heard him speak just that way.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘We’ll tell your mother we couldn’t find it. If she asks. If she doesn’t ask, we won’t tell her anything.’

  ‘No, sir, we won’t.’

  And she didn’t and we didn’t and that’s the way it was.

  That day in the woods is eighty-one years gone, and for many of the years in between I have never even thought of it…not awake, at least. Like any other man or woman who ever lived, I can’t say about my dreams, not for sure. But now I’m old, and I dream awake, it seems. My infirmities have crept up like waves which will soon take a child’s abandoned sand castle, and my memories have also crept up, making me think of some old rhyme that went, in part, ‘Just leave them alone/And they’ll come home/Wagging their tails behind them.’ I remember meals I ate, games I played, girls I kissed in the school cloakroom when we played Post Office, boys I chummed with, the first drink I ever took, the first
cigarette I ever smoked (cornshuck behind Dicky Hammer’s pig-shed, and I threw up). Yet of all the memories, the one of the man in the black suit is the strongest, and glows with its own spectral, haunted light. He was real, he was the Devil, and that day I was either his errand or his luck. I feel more and more strongly that escaping him was my luck – just luck, and not the intercession of the God I have worshipped and sung hymns to all my life.

  As I lie here in my nursing-home room, and in the ruined sand castle that is my body, I tell myself that I need not fear the Devil – that I have lived a good, kindly life, and I need not fear the Devil. Sometimes I remind myself that it was I, not my father, who finally coaxed my mother back to church later on that summer.

  In the dark, however, these thoughts have no power to ease or comfort. In the dark comes a voice which whispers that the nine-year-old boy I was had done nothing for which he might legitimately fear the devil either…and yet the Devil came. And in the dark I sometimes hear that voice drop even lower, into ranges which are inhuman. Big fish! it whispers in tones of hushed greed, and all the truths of the moral world fall to ruin before its hunger. Biiig fiiish!

  The Devil came to me once, long ago; suppose he were to come again now? I am too old to run now; I can’t even get to the bathroom and back without my walker. I have no fine large brook trout with which to propitiate him, either, even for a moment or two; I am old and my creel is empty. Suppose he were to come back and find me so?

  And suppose he is still hungry?

  The Snow Pavilion

  Angela Carter

  Angela Carter (1940–1992) was an English writer of fantastical fiction ranked tenth by The Times in 2008 on their list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’. Always a maverick, Carter filtered a love for weird fiction, folktales, and surrealists like Leonora Carrington through a feminist lens to create abidingly unique stories and novels that rank amongst the best of the twentieth century. Carter’s classics include The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and Nights at the Circus (1984), along with several iconic story collections, especially Fireworks (1974) and The Bloody Chamber (1979). ‘The Snow Pavilion’ (1995) is a later story and perhaps the most evocative expression of the weird in her short fiction.

  The motor stalled in the middle of a snowy landscape, lodged in a rut, wouldn’t budge an inch. How I swore! I’d planned to be snug in front of a roaring fire, by now, a single malt on the mahogany wine-table (a connoisseur’s piece) beside me, the five courses of Melissa’s dinner savourously aromatising the kitchen; to complete the décor, a labrador retriever’s head laid on my knee as trustingly as if I were indeed a country gentleman and lolled by rights among the chintz. After dinner, before I read our customary pre-coital poetry aloud to her, my elegant and accomplished mistress, also a connoisseur’s piece, might play the piano for her part-time pasha while I sipped black, acrid coffee from her precious little cups.

  Melissa was rich, beautiful and rather older than I. The servants slipped me looks of sly complicity; no matter how carefully I rumpled my sheets, they knew when a bed hadn’t been slept in. The master of the house had a pied-à-terre in London when the House was sitting and the House was sitting tight. I’d met him only once, at the same dinner party where I’d met her – he’d been off-hand with me, gruff. I was young and handsome and full of promise; my relations with husbands rarely prospered. Wives were quite amother matter. Women, as Mayakovosky justly opined, are very partial to poets.

  And now her glamorous motor car had broken down in the snow. I’d borrowed it for a trip to Oxford, ostensibly to buy books, utilising, with my instinctual cunning, the weather as an excuse. Last night, the old woman had been shaking her mattress with a vengeance – such snow! When I woke up the bedroom was full of luminous snow light, catching in the coils of Melissa’s honey-coloured hair, and I’d experienced, once again, but, this time, almost uncontrollably, the sense of claustrophobia that sometimes afflicted me when I was with her.

  I’d said, let’s read some snowy poetry together, after dinner tonight, Melissa, a tribute of white verses to the iconography of the weather. Any excuse, no matter how far fetched, to get her out of the house – too much luxury on an empty stomach, that was the trouble. Always the same eyes too big for his belly, as grandma used to say; grandma spotted the trait when this little fellow lisped and toddled and pissed the bed before he knew what luxury was, even. Cultural indigestion, I tell you, the gripe in the bowels of your spirit. How can I get out of here, away from her subtly flawed antique mirrors, her French perfume decanted into eighteenth-century crystal bottles, her inscrutably smirking ancestresses in their gilt, oval frames? And her dolls, worst of all, her blasted dolls.

  Those dolls that had never have been played with, her fine collection of antique women, part of the apparatus of Melissa’s charm, her piquant originality that lay well on the safe side of quaint. A dozen or so of the finest lived in her bedroom in a glass-fronted, satinwood cabinet lavishly equipped with such toyland artefacts and miniature sofas and teeny-tiny grand pianos. They had heads made of moulded porcelain, each dimple and bee-stung underlip sculpted with loving care. Their wigs and over-lifelike eyelashes were made of real hair. She told me their eyes had been manufactured by the same craftsman in glass who made those terribly precious paperweights filled with magic snowstorms. Whenever I woke up in Melissa’s bed, the first thing I saw were a dozen pairs of shining eyes that seemed to gleam wetly, as if in lacrimonious accusation of my presence there, for the dolls, like Melissa, were perfect ladies and I, in my upwardly social mobile nakedness – a nakedness that was, indeed, the essential battledress for such storm-troopers as I! – patently no gentleman.

  After three days of that kind of style, I badly needed to sit in a public bar, drink coarse pints of bitter, swap double entendres with the barmaid; but I could hardly tell milady that. Instead, I must use my vocation to justify my day off. Lend me the car, Melissa, so that I can drive to Oxford and buy a book of snowy verses, since there’s no such book in the house. And I’d made my purchase and managed to fit in my bread, cheese and badinage as well. A good day. Then, almost home again and here I was, stuck fast.

  The fields were all brim-full of snow and the dark sky of late afternoon already swollen and discoloured with the next fall. Flocks of crows wheeled endlessly upon the invisible carousels of the upper air, occasionally emitting a rusty caw. A glance beneath the bonnet showed me only that I did not know what was wrong and must get out to trudge along a lane where the mauve shadows told me snow and the night would arrive together. My breath smoked. I wound Melissa’s husband’s muffler round my neck and dug my fists into his sheepskin pockets; his borrowed coat kept me snug and warm, although the cold made the nerves in my forehead hum with a thin, high sound like that of the wind in telephone wires.

  The leafless trees, the hillside quilted by intersections of dry-stone walling – all had been subdued to monochrome by the severity of last night’s blizzard. Snow clogged every sound but that of the ironic punctuation of the crows. No sign of another presence; the pastoral cows were all locked up in the steaming byre, Colin Clout and Hobbinol sucked their pipes by the fireside in pastoral domesticity. Who would be outside, today, when he could be warm and dry, inside.

  Too white. It is too white, out. Silence and whiteness at such a pitch of twinned intensity you know what it must be like to live in a country where snow is not a charming, since infrequent, visitor that puts its cold garlands on the trees so prettily we think they are playing at blossoming. (What an aptly fragile simile, with its Botticellian nuance. I congratulated myself.) No. Today is as cold as the killing cold of the perpetually white countries; today’s atrocious candour is that of those white freckles that are the stigmata of frostbite.

  My sensibility, the exquisite sensibility of a minor poet, tingled and crisped at the sight of so much whiteness.

  I was certain that soon I’d come to a village where I could telephone Melissa; then she would se
nd the village taxi for me. But the snow-fields now glimmered spectrally in an ever-thickening light and still there was no sign of life about me in the whole, white world but for the helmeted crows creaking down towards their nests.

  Then I came to a pair of wrought-iron gates standing open on a drive. There must be some mansion or other at the end of the drive that would offer me shelter and, if they were half as rich as they ought to be, to live in such style, then they would certainly know Melissa and might even have me driven back to her by their own chauffeur in a warm car that would smell deliciously of new leather. I was sure they must be rich, the country side was lousy with the rich; hadn’t I flattened a brace of pheasants on my way to Oxford? Encouraged, I turned in between the gate-posts, on which snarled iron gryphons sporting circumcision caps of snow.

  The drive wound through an elm copse where the upper limbs of the bare trees were clogged with beastly lice of old crows’ nests. I could tell that nobody had come this way since the snow fell, for only rabbit slots and the cuneiform prints of birds marked surfaces already crisping with frost. The drive took me uphill. My shoes and trouser bottoms were already wet through; it grew darker, colder and the old woman must have given her mattress a tentative shake or two, again, for a few more flakes drifted down and caught on my eyelashes so I first saw that house through a dazzle as of unshed tears, although, I assure you, I was out of the habit of crying.

  I had reached the brow of a hill. Before me, in a hollow, magically surrounded by a snowy formal garden, lay a jewel of a mansion in a voluptuous style of English renaissance and every one of its windows blazed with light. I imagined myself describing it to Melissa – ‘a vista like visible Debussy’. Enchanting. But, though lights streamed out in every direction, all was silent except for the crackling of the frosty trees. Lights and frost; in the winter sky above me, stars were coming out. Especially for my cultured patroness, I made an elision of the stars in the mansion of the heavens and the lights of the great house. So who was it, this snowy afternoon, who’d bagged a triad of fine images for her? Why, her clever boy! How pleased she’d be. And now I could declare the image factory closed for the day and get on with the real business of living, the experience of which that lovely house seemed to promise me in such abundance.