The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  ‘Which chimney is the nursery chimney?’ Claire says.

  The babysitter points to the nearest righthand stack. ‘That one,’ she says. ‘It runs up through the ballroom on the first floor, the library, the nursery.’

  Hanging from a nail on the nursery chimney is a long black object. It looks lumpy and heavy, as if it were full of things. The babysitter takes it down, twirls it on her finger. There are holes in the black thing and it whistles mournfully as she spins it. ‘The Specialist’s hat,’ she says.

  ‘That doesn’t look like a hat,’ says Claire. ‘It doesn’t look like anything at all.’ She goes to look through the boxes and trunks that are stacked against the far wall.

  ‘It’s a special hat,’ the babysitter says. ‘It’s not supposed to look like anything. But it can sound like anything you can imagine. My father made it.’

  ‘Our father writes books,’ Samantha says.

  ‘My father did too.’ The babysitter hangs the hat back on the nail. It curls blackly against the chimney. Samantha stares at it. It nickers at her. ‘He was a bad poet, but he was worse at magic.’

  Last summer, Samantha wished more than anything that she could have a horse. She thought she would have given up anything for one – even being a twin was not as good as having a horse. She still doesn’t have a horse, but she doesn’t have a mother either, and she can’t help wondering if it’s her fault. The hat nickers again, or maybe it is the wind in the chimney.

  ‘What happened to him?’ Claire asks.

  ‘After he made the hat, the Specialist came and took him away. I hid in the nursery chimney while it was looking for him, and it didn’t find me.’

  ‘Weren’t you scared?’

  There is a clattering, shivering, clicking noise. Claire has found the babysitter’s bike and is dragging it towards them by the handlebars. The babysitter shrugs. ‘Rule number three,’ she says.

  Claire snatches the hat off the nail. ‘I’m the Specialist!’ she says, putting the hat on her head. It falls over her eyes, the floppy shapeless brim sewn with little asymmetrical buttons that flash and catch at the moonlight like teeth. Samantha looks again and sees that they are teeth. Without counting, she suddenly knows that there are exactly fifty-two teeth on the hat, and that they are the teeth of agoutis, of curassows, of white-lipped peccaries, and of the wife of Charles Cheatham Rash. The chimneys are moaning, and Claire’s voice booms hollowly beneath the hat. ‘Run away, or I’ll catch you and eat you!’

  Samantha and the babysitter run away, laughing as Claire mounts the rusty, noisy bicycle and pedals madly after them. She rings the bicycle bell as she rides, and the Specialist’s hat bobs up and down on her head. It spits like a cat. The bell is shrill and thin, and the bike wails and shrieks. It leans first towards the right and then to the left. Claire’s knobby knees stick out on either side like makeshift counterweights.

  Claire weaves in and out between the chimneys, chasing Samantha and the babysitter. Samantha is slow, turning to look behind. As Claire approaches, she keeps one hand on the handlebars and stretches the other hand out towards Samantha. Just as she is about to grab Samantha, the babysitter turns back and plucks the hat off Claire’s head.

  ‘Shit!’ the babysitter says, and drops it. There is a drop of blood forming on the fleshy part of the babysitter’s hand, black in the moonlight, where the Specialist’s hat has bitten her.

  Claire dismounts, giggling. Samantha watches as the Specialist’s hat rolls away. It picks up speed, veering across the attic floor, and disappears, thumping down the stairs. ‘Go get it,’ Claire says. ‘You can be the Specialist this time.’

  ‘No,’ the babysitter says, sucking at her palm. ‘It’s time for bed.’

  When they go down the stairs, there is no sign of the Specialist’s hat. They brush their teeth, climb into the ship-bed, and pull the covers up to their necks. The babysitter sits between their feet. ‘When you’re Dead,’ Samantha says, ‘do you still get tired and have to go to sleep? Do you have dreams?’

  ‘When you’re Dead,’ the babysitter says, ‘everything’s a lot easier. You don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to. You don’t have to have a name, you don’t have to remember. You don’t even have to breathe.’

  She shows them exactly what she means.

  When she has time to think about it (and now she has all the time in the world to think), Samantha realizes with a small pang that she is now stuck indefinitely between ten and eleven years old, stuck with Claire and the babysitter. She considers this. The number 10 is pleasing and round, like a beach ball, but all in all, it hasn’t been an easy year. She wonders what 11 would have been like. Sharper, like needles maybe. She has chosen to be Dead, instead. She hopes that she’s made the right decision. She wonders if her mother would have decided to be Dead, instead of dead, if she could have.

  Last year they were learning fractions in school, when her mother died. Fractions remind Samantha of herds of wild horses, piebalds and pintos and palominos. There are so many of them, and they are, well, fractious and unruly. Just when you think you have one under control, it throws up its head and tosses you off. Claire’s favorite number is 4, which she says is a tall, skinny boy. Samantha doesn’t care for boys that much. She likes numbers. Take the number 8 for instance, which can be more than one thing at once. Looked at one way, 8 looks like a bent woman with curvy hair. But if you lay it down on its side, it looks like a snake curled with its tail in its mouth. This is sort of like the difference between being Dead and being dead. Maybe when Samantha is tired of one, she will try the other.

  On the lawn, under the oak trees, she hears someone calling her name. Samantha climbs out of bed and goes to the nursery window. She looks out through the wavy glass. It’s Mr. Coeslak. ‘Samantha, Claire!’ he calls up to her. ‘Are you all right? Is your father there?’ Samantha can almost see the moonlight shining through him. ‘They’re always locking me in the tool room. Goddamn spooky things,’ he says. ‘Are you there, Samantha? Claire? Girls?’

  The babysitter comes and stands beside Samantha. The babysitter puts her finger to her lip. Claire’s eyes glitter at them from the dark bed. Samantha doesn’t say anything, but she waves at Mr. Coeslak. The babysitter waves too. Maybe he can see them waving, because after a little while he stops shouting and goes away. ‘Be careful,’ the babysitter says. ‘He’ll be coming soon. It will be coming soon.’

  She takes Samantha’s hand, and leads her back to the bed, where Claire is waiting. They sit and wait. Time passes, but they don’t get tired, they don’t get any older.

  Who’s there?

  Just air.

  The front door opens on the first floor, and Samantha, Claire, and the babysitter can hear someone creeping, creeping up the stairs. ‘Be quiet,’ the babysitter says. ‘It’s the Specialist.’

  Samantha and Claire are quiet. The nursery is dark and the wind crackles like a fire in the fireplace.

  ‘Claire, Samantha, Samantha, Claire?’ The Specialist’s voice is blurry and wet. It sounds like their father’s voice, but that’s because the hat can imitate any noise, any voice. ‘Are you still awake?’

  ‘Quick,’ the babysitter says. ‘It’s time to go up to the attic and hide.’

  Claire and Samantha slip out from under the covers and dress quickly and silently. They follow her. Without speech, without breathing, she pulls them into the safety of the chimney. It is too dark to see, but they understand the babysitter perfectly when she mouths the word, Up. She goes first, so they can see where the finger-holds are, the bricks that jut out for their feet. Then Claire. Samantha watches her sister’s foot ascend like smoke, the shoelace still untied.

  ‘Claire? Samantha? Goddammit, you’re scaring me. Where are you?’ The Specialist is standing just outside the half-open door. ‘Samantha? I think I’ve been bitten by something. I think I’ve been bitten by a goddamn snake.’ Samantha hesitates for only a second. Then she is climbing up, up, up the nursery chimney.

&nbs
p; A Redress for Andromeda

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964–) is an American author who has steadily moved beyond a reputation as an heir to the legacy of H. P. Lovecraft and Southern Gothic literature, to become one of the most original and audacious weird writers of her generation. In addition to her many award-winning novels and stories, Kiernan has written scientific papers that reflect her love of herpetology and paleontology, also reflected in her fiction. Perhaps more than any other writer of the past thirty years, Kiernan places the reader somewhere alien and inhabits points of view that seem both luminous and edgy. ‘A Redress for Andromeda’ (2000) is a perfect example of Kiernan’s ability to portray the uncanny in original and terrifying ways.

  Where the land ends and the unsleeping, omnivorous Pacific has chewed the edge of the continent ragged, the old house sits alone in the tall grass, waiting for Tara. She parks the rented car at the edge of the sandy dirt road and gets out, staring towards the house and the sea, breathing the salt and the night, the moonlight and all the wine- and apple-crisp October smells. The wind whips the grass, whips it into tall waves and fleeting troughs the way it whips the sea, and Tara watches the house as the house watches her. Mutual curiosity or wary misgiving, one or the other or both, and she decides to leave the car here and walk the rest of the way.

  There are a few other cars, parked much closer to the house, though not as many as she expected, and the porch is burning down in a mad conflagration of jack-o’-lanterns, a hundred candle-lit eyes and mouths and nostrils, or at least that’s how it looks to her. Walking along the sandy road as it curves towards the ocean and the high gabled house with its turrets and lightning rods, that’s how it looks; the house besieged by all those carved and flaming pumpkins, and she takes her time, walking slowly, listening to the wind and the sea slamming itself against the headland. The wind is colder than Tara thought it would be, and all she’s wearing is a white dress, one of her simple shirt-waist dresses fashionable forty or forty-five years ago, a dress her mother might have worn when she was a girl; the white dress with its sensible cuffs and collars, and black espadrilles on her feet, shoes as plain as the dress because Darren said to keep it simple. It isn’t a masquerade, he told her. Nothing like that at all. Just be yourself. But she wishes she’d remembered her coat. It’s lying on the passenger seat of the rental car. She thinks about going back for it, and then decides she can stand the chill as far as the front door.

  Tara knows a little of this house’s history, but only what Darren has told her about it. She knows it’s called the Dandridge House, because the man who built it in 1890 was named Machen Dandridge. Back in the sixties it was one of those places that hippies and occultists liked to haunt, someplace remote enough that nobody would notice if you sacrificed a farm animal now and then. Darren told her ghost stories, too, since a house like this has to have a few ghost stories, but she took two Xanax on the drive up from Monterey, and the stories have all run together in her head.

  It’s not much farther before a narrow, sandy trail turns off the sandy road. There’s a rusty mailbox on a post that’s fallen over, and no one’s bothered to set it right again. Tara follows the trail towards the wide, pumpkin-crowded porch that seems to wrap itself all the way around the house. Her shoes are already full of sand, sand getting in between her toes, and she stops and looks back towards her car, all alone at the edge of the road. The car seems far, far away.

  There’s a black-haired woman sitting on the porch steps, smoking a cigarette and watching her. When Tara smiles the woman returns the smile.

  ‘You must be Tara,’ the woman says and holds out her hand. ‘Darren told us that you’d be late. I thought someone should wait out here for you. A friendly face in the wilderness, you know.’

  Tara says thank you and shakes the woman’s hand. This close, the jack-o’-lanterns seem to have grown even brighter. They hurt her eyes after so many miles of night. She squints at them and nods to the woman on the steps of the house.

  ‘You didn’t have any trouble finding us?’ the woman asks.

  ‘No,’ Tara says. ‘No trouble at all. Darren gives good directions.’

  ‘Well, it’s not as if there’s much of anything else out here,’ the woman says. She releases Tara’s hand and glances past all the jack-o’-lanterns towards the cliffs and the sea. ‘You just keep going until there’s nowhere left to go, and here it is.’

  ‘Who carved all these?’ Tara asks. ‘There must be a hundred of them.’ She points at one of the jack-o-lanterns, and the woman on the steps smiles again and takes another drag off her brown cigarette, exhaling smoke that smells like cloves and cinnamon.

  ‘One hundred and eleven, actually,’ she says. ‘They’re like birthday candles. One for every year since the house was built. We’ve been carving them for a week.’

  ‘Oh,’ Tara says, because she doesn’t know what else to say. ‘I see.’

  ‘You should go on inside,’ the woman tells her. ‘They’ll be waiting. It’s getting late,’ and Tara says nice to meet you, we’ll talk some more later, something polite and obligatory like that. She steps past the smoking woman, towards the front door, past and between the grinning and grimacing and frowning pumpkin faces.

  ‘Yes, she’s the one that I was telling you about last week,’ Darren is saying to them all, ‘the marine biologist.’ He laughs, and Tara shakes someone else’s hand. It’s getting hard to keep them straight, all these pale people in their impeccable black clothing. She feels like a pigeon dropped into a flock of crows. Sure, it’s not a masquerade, not a costume party, but she could have at least had the good sense to wear black. A tall, painfully thin woman with a thick French accent touches the back of Tara’s hand. The woman’s nails are lacquered the red-brown color of kelp, and her smile is as gentle as was the woman’s out on the porch.

  ‘It’s always so nice to see a new face,’ the French woman says. ‘Especially when it’s such a fine and splendid face.’ The woman kisses the back of Tara’s hand, and then Darren’s introducing her to a short, fat man wearing an ascot the color of a stormy summer sky.

  ‘Ah,’ he says, and shakes Tara’s hand so forcefully it hurts. ‘A scientist. That’s grand. We’ve had so few scientists, you know.’ She isn’t sure if his accent is Scots or Irish, but it’s heavy, like his wide, jowly face.

  ‘We’ve had medical doctors, yes,’ the fat man continues. ‘Lots and lots of medical doctors. Once we had a neurologist, even. But I’ve never thought doctors were quite the same thing. As scientists, I mean. Doctors aren’t really much more than glorified mechanics, are they?’

  ‘I never really thought of it that way,’ Tara says, which isn’t exactly true. She manages to slip free of the fat man’s endless, crushing handshake without seeming rude, then glances towards Darren, hoping that he can read the discomfort, the unease, in her eyes.

  ‘If you’ll all please excuse us for a moment,’ he says, so she knows that he’s seen, that he understands, and he puts one of his long arms around her shoulders. ‘I need to steal her away for just a few minutes.’ There’s a splash of soft, knowing laughter from the little crowd of people.

  He leads her from the front parlor into what might once have been a dining room, and Tara’s beginning to realize how very empty the house is. The way it looked from the outside, she expected the place to be full of antiques, perhaps neglected antiques gone just a bit shabby, a threadbare and discrepant mix of Edwardian and Victorian. But still, she thought that it would be furnished. These rooms are almost empty, not even carpets on the floors or drapes on the tall windows; the velvet wallpaper is faded and torn in places, hanging down in strips here and there, like a reptile shedding its skin. And there’s no electricity, as far as she can tell, just candles and old-fashioned gaslight fixtures on the walls, warm and flickering light held inside frosted crystal flowers.

  ‘They can be somewhat intimidating at first, I know that,’ Darren says. ‘It’s a pretty close-knit group.
I should have warned you.’ But she shakes her head, smiles and tells him no, it’s fine, it’s not a problem.

  ‘They’re probably as anxious about your being here,’ he says, ‘as you are about meeting them.’ He rubs his hands together in a nervous sort of way, and glances back towards the crows milling about in the parlor, whispering among themselves. Are they talking about me? Tara wonders. Are they asking each other questions about me?

  ‘I trust you didn’t have any trouble finding the house?’ Darren asks. ‘It’s pretty far off the beaten track. We had someone get lost once.’

  ‘No,’ she replies. ‘Finding the house was easy. With all those jack-o-lanterns, it’s almost like a lighthouse.’ And she thinks that’s probably exactly what it would look like to a ship passing in the night, to fishermen or a tanker passing on their way north or south, an unblinking lighthouse perched high on the craggy shore.

  ‘The pumpkins. That’s one of the traditions,’ Darren says, brushing his long black bangs away from his face. It’s not exactly a handsome face, something more honest than handsome. She thinks maybe that’s one of the reasons she finds him attractive.

  ‘One of the traditions? Are there many others?’ ‘A few. I hope all this isn’t freaking you out.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ she replies, and turns her head towards a window, towards the moonlight shining in clean through the glass, shining white off the sea. ‘Not at all. It’s all very dignified, I think. Not like Halloween in the city. All the noisy drunks and drag queens, those gaudy parades. I like this much better than that. I wish you’d told me to wear black, though,’ and he laughs at her then.

  ‘I don’t think it’s funny,’ she says, frowning slightly, still watching the moon riding on the waves, and he puts a hand on her arm. ‘I must stick out like a sore thumb.’