The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  The genius of assassins has no words, but it will address you in a gust of fright. You will know that you are not alone, in a park, or on a subway platform, or at home. Its cry is your mute astonishment at the miracle of violence. Its wings are the murderer’s hands outspread; the hands are organs with the fundamental power to stop organs forever. The killer’s hands will conduct orchestral, organized life through a brief lapse, and into lasting stillness. The same hands that flap on the obscure walls of caves, and whose fingertips are inked in the glare of police stations, mark time by erasing life; flutter and shed soot around the icy, fanatic mask of their genius.

  The Paradise of Murderers

  I’m a lonely so-and-so without much in his day to do, I don’t enjoy reading, I don’t even like standing still when I eat. Boring or not the streets want to feel the tramp of my foot up and down; I like to be obliging. I step out of doors in the morning when all the bells are ringing, and I stop in at my door as best I can when my head is heavy. Now and then I will stop sing dance and drink with this or that so-and-so, but I come and go and it makes no difference. I can sit up with statues or pigeons and trees in the park, headstones and piles of fruit and zoo animals and newspaper bundles and cops.

  Now I take the tram across the Plague Bridge to the Old Island where the streets are lean and full of matted trash – smelly houses, children scatter like pigeons as I come up with a stone head full of matted newspaper fruits zoo cops and piles of animal bundles; drifting past my face the white branches, a park filled with statues of trees. Under the boughs, in the lanes, gutters cough and drains chatter, under the eaves, in the shade of the front porch a woman offers me a drink, shapeless grey dress sweat-patched in the chest hanging off her skinny frame. She’s friendly because I am a neat-looking clean pressed young man. We drink together happily like two old failures. The ice rings the sides of the glasses like cowbell clappers and when I go I am sober but tired, my head droops in waves of crows and cobbled rows warped where the streets have been disrupted.

  Here’s a stoop, and a front door to lean against that falls in as I lean – here’s me, on the floor looking up at yellow-brown water stains on a plaster ceiling. Someone is behind me, behind the crown of my head, lying on voluminous mattresses; fat, sad face slick with perspiration peers curiously at me.

  ‘You startled me!’

  Piercingly sad voice, thin and high.

  I apologize as I pull myself up and right my head; my tumble has shocked me awake. The curtains are all drawn, thin material covered in big brown and yellow blossoms. Bed, table beside the bed, filmy wallpaper. Thin sweet smell like a candy mist – ‘You all right mister?’

  ‘I’m very ill – are you hurt? Perhaps you would like to sit a moment?’

  I sit by the bed – ‘Do you want the door closed?’

  ‘No, I think the air feels good.’

  He looks wanly out the door. I don’t suppose he’s been through it lately. He pours himself a glass of water from the pitcher on the bedside table – ‘There’s a glass for you if you like,’ he points to the kitchen counter across the room.

  ‘No thank you.’

  He leans his head back on a soaking pillow and gazes at the rectangle of sunset in the door, the children flashing by – ‘You think about death much?’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘Ever kill anything?’

  There are certain times when I just need to be alone – I’ve always been like that. I’m not unreasonable about it, but I hate being spied on. When I was a boy, I was pacing up and down once in my room, thinking I was alone, talking to myself and acting out a little scene – then I see our cat is there, watching me from beneath the bed. Incensed by his eyes I went after him, eventually I caught him – I put his head on the windowsill and crushed his throat with the window. His feet flapped a few times against the wall and the sill; then he died.

  A few weeks later, I was lying in bed trying to sleep, when I heard a voice in the hall, speaking muffled words. I opened my door just a crack. I could see the cat sitting in the shadows by the attic door. It was glaring fixedly off into the distance, and this sight, and the nearly inaudible words that sounded from its red regularly throbbing mouth, comforted me against my will, so that everything dark in me drained away, and I went to bed calmly, like a zombie.

  ‘That’s really something,’ he says, and dabs his throat with a napkin. ‘I never heard about anything like that before.’

  He adjusts himself in the bed uncomfortably, and whimpers as he moves. For a moment he lies still, breathing fast because he’s in pain, and he looks up at the stained ceiling still in pain, his eyes look out from pain. When he catches his breath, he asks or tells me, ‘That house – you don’t live in that house anymore, do you?’

  ‘No.’ I look at him for a while. ‘I have a place on the mainland.’

  ‘What do you do?’ He asks distracted, his eyes ticking in their sockets, as though there was some escape for them. When I don’t say anything he turns his head to me a moment. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

  ‘I don’t care. I don’t do anything, I’m a zero.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone is really a zero,’ he says softly, looks at me with concern.

  ‘Well, that’s all right, I’m a zero, and I don’t even care anymore. I don’t care about me, and I don’t think about tomorrow, or anything. I know tomorrow isn’t thinking about me.’

  ‘No family or anything, huh?’

  ‘No, no, not that care, nobody here. I go wherever, I do whatever – what do they care – nothing.’ I just smile, shrug. ‘I’m one of those people, when I die they’re going to find out that I’m dead because some neighbor was investigating a smell.’

  ‘I wish I could die.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you could.’

  ‘No,’ his eyes are ocean-indigo, dark and bright at once. They hold on to me, as though he were clutching my lapels. ‘That’s part of my sickness.’

  ‘I never heard of it,’ I say, blank.

  He looks down at his pudgy hands, toys with the dingy quilt. ‘I wasn’t born here, either – I miss my family. They’re unable to visit me here, unfortunately…How did you end up here?’

  ‘I had to go somewhere. I grew up, I stopped dreaming, I went out into the world, I tried work, I tried women, and – well, well, well…’ I’m just smiling, talking in a quiet voice. ‘And now it’s just me and the drinks…I can’t even make it as a drunk, I drink, I puke, but I don’t get drunk.’

  He leans forward, suddenly avid, and touches my knee, looking up through his thin eyebrows at me. ‘I see now – you’re not a doer, you’re an un-doer. That’s what you are, see? Everybody is something – everybody has to be something.’ He speaks it vicious as the curse it is, glancing bitterly away for a moment. Then, leaning back, he holds me with his gaze. ‘I know something you can un-do.’

  When he doesn’t go on, I shrug.

  ‘Someone like you, you could do me a big favor. I mean you could really help me a lot.’ He holds out his hands, indicating himself. ‘I’m all knotted up, see? That’s my sickness. I’m bound up in a knot – I am the knot,’ he adds vehemently, ‘– and it’s torture for me.’

  ‘You want me to – un-do you?’

  His eyes glistening, he nods, his head resting on the backboard.

  ‘How?’

  ‘If you kill a man – would you do that?’

  ‘Sure, sure, yeah – I mean, I could do that.’

  ‘Really? You could, really?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Any man at all, it doesn’t matter. If you go outside the city here, there are a lot of farms and roadside places, people do all kinds of things alone out there – I’m sure you could find somebody.’

  ‘OK, sure.’

  He opens a carved wooden case on the nightstand and pulls out a shining stylus, long and thin. ‘When he’s dead, write the circle on the ground with his blood – use this.’ He hands me the stylus. It’s cool, it’s actually cold, w
ith a film of condensation on it. ‘You’ll have to find a flat spot.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I put the stylus in my breast pocket.

  ‘Please hurry – do it today, please.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll do it today. I mean, I’ll try – I’ll go now.’

  ‘Do you want any water?’

  ‘No, thanks – I’ll just get going.’

  There are a number of thin metal plinth-bridges, that connect the island on this side with the mainland. From there, it’s only a brief walk to the edge of town, where there’s a chain-link fence mounded over with ivy. The suburbs for which these roads were laid out never happened; the ancient farms crumble under their eaves and sagging roofs, flopped out on their overgrown lots, now plotted on an incongruous grid of dirt roads sighing dust. I start at the nearest corner of the grid and round off square by square. The day is warm. Everything is warm and tilted and eternal and infinite, I’ll walk these rounds of unbuilt blocks forever with the white sun spreading its hot grey mane there above my left shoulder, my shoes scuff blonde furry ground tufted with leaves of paralyzed grass that are flames the emerald color of lime flesh.

  Now here’s an A-frame farmhouse with chickens clucking in the yard. I see a woman and two little ones far away, bobbing in the waist-high corn, heading in the direction of town. I walk unevenly up the dirt path, wobbling a little on my ankles. As I come around the woodpile toward the porch a man appears and starts at the sight of me. I see his face and so I cut it – there is a hatchet there on the pile and I take it up. I swing once overhand and chop into his face through the center, pull it out with a yank of my wrist. It goes in easily and my arm is not strained. He bends, and I catch him once again backhanded through the cheekbones making a cross. He falls on the ground, his tongue hanging from his mouth. He mumbles in his blood. I straddle him but I’m facing the wrong way so I turn straddling him standing. He does not die until I strike him twice again over the head with the back of the hatchet. I drop the hatchet, and pick him up, carry him a few feet to a bare spot of ground where a moment ago the chickens were scratching. The blood seeps out from his hair with a quiet sound like a guitar being gently strummed, flows on the ground. I take out the stylus and stop –

  I don’t know what I’m doing –

  ‘Yes you do!’

  I begin crooning words I don’t know. I draw the circle in his black blood, which slips out from his head in laps. I write around the borders of the circle in unfamiliar letters.

  ‘Yes that’s right – that’s right – don’t stop!’

  The aching song wavers from my tense mouth, filled with longing, in waves that roll my body back and forth as though I stand waist deep in surf. The language isn’t mine but the words yearn in my throat – here come branches, bare and sooty, up around me, and the chiming of tiny bells – I run down a waist-high groove cut in the ground, lined with stones, black wire boughs steeple their fingers just above my head, my hands make scoops in the air, right then left then right again, before my chest as I run making the world streak – now I am out in the open on pale green grass so soft it turns to powder as I tread on it, my cuffs are wet with dew and slap my ankles, I only run faster still. Here are rolling hills, copses and a high caer above the salt flats and tidal flats and inky bogs and iridescent brown bogs – emerging from the bogs are great plumed anemonoids, their gelatin arms waving rapturously singing in every part. These are nurtured on human sacrifices: lovingly the tendrils snatch the victim up into the screening white branches, which are swiftly streaked with red…the cries of the victims are audible for hours, and the trees sing blithely, their leaves flickering in the breeze like shining coins.

  Their path will cross my own – that line of men, running arm in arm, in white shirts and black trousers, black bow ties and white aprons. Their hair glistens pomaded sleek and fragrant on their heads, their legs swing perfectly synchronized; these men dressed as waiters are my fellow killers, my blood brothers. The line swings away from me. Our paths won’t cross after all. I’m breathing too hard to shout after them. I’ve never seen such speed. Their scissoring legs seem to kick them weightless over the ground like ballet dancers, and even where the ground is uneven their coordination never breaks. My heart bangs against my ribs. Any moment the flutter at my side will flare and stitch my lung, my throat thickens – they’re only a few feet before me now! Still in my ears though not from my throat the yearning voice pleads and sighs its song, if I could speak I would beg them not to leave me behind – I can almost reach to the shoulder of the rightmost runner – now it’s happening, I’m coming up alongside, I can see the looped arm held out to me by the rightmost runner, and as I slip my arm through it I slot into step with them, my apron pressed flat against me, my shoulders jerking up and down as I run, my legs flying, my head thrown back I can feel the cool tracks of my tears stream back from my eyes into my pomaded hair – the voice is singing now still but its yearning sound is joyful to me now – we fly so fast and faster still always faster, but effortlessly, speeding up the slope of the high caer, toward the spot where the slope is broken off in midair high above the sweet rocks and creamy surf.

  In voluminous sighs the fat man smiles beatifically and spreads his hands. His body comes apart into silver wires and bells, swells like a great, white tree.

  The Whitest Teeth

  When I was a boy, my friend Kajetan and I lived in the same U-shaped apartment building, with a common area within the loop of the U. This common area was a lumpy mattress of lawn that never completely dried out. Even in the summertime, it was dank and shady, an assembly of clumps of grass and big sinuous puddles.

  Our families lived opposite each other. All the apartments were the same, porcelain floors in the bathrooms, kitchens, hallways, and in the other rooms a dingy chitin of pressed ivory shavings, suspended in a crinkly sheath of yellowing resin, had been laid down. The same, fantastically heavy burgundy curtains, with thick, burdensome golden fringes, hung over every window, shutting out all trace of daylight. Kajetan and I would meet in front of his door every morning and walk to the Lycée together; we attended different classes, but we always ate lunch together. He was a quiet, fawning boy; he never had a teacher who didn’t instantly love him. No one in the school was as fair as Kajetan. His hair, his flesh, except for his lips, were all white, and he had a blazing, retiring smile, like the dazzle of daylight on drifted snow.

  That day, the day I am thinking of, I had been gloating over some dirty postcards that I had found somewhere. I pored over the grey bodies, the black eyes and lips, the dark islands and white prominences, filled with riddles, all bordered with dark burgundy red, and gold braid. I was too young to be aroused by these images, but I was aflame with curiosity about them. After devouring a card with my eyes, I would hand it to Kajetan, who kneeled beside me in the mud. We studied together in silence. Here were all my postcards, the grey, supine, obliging or oblivious bodies, scattered on the muddy ground. I was reaching to gather them up when I felt something cool on my upper lip. I looked down, and saw drops of my blood falling into one of the puddles. The drops bloomed when they struck the water, making little billows of fine red threads. Two more drops, big ones, fell, and sank to the bottom. They hovered there, conspiring together in the depths, without dissolving. I crushed my nostril shut and tilted my head back. After a few minutes, I stopped pressing on my nostril, and it opened slowly, tearing through the membrane of candied blood that had congealed over it. The bleeding had stopped. Kajetan had noticed my problem, looked at the last couple of postcards, then put them aside and sat with his hands in his lap, his eyes on the ground.

  He’d had a nightmare, he said after a few minutes – a horrible, frog-like man with a huge, round, smiling face, hiding in the reeds by a pond, or a pool. This man hadn’t threatened him at all – he had only smiled, with closed lips. He had attacked Kajetan with the sight of this wide, wide smile.

  ‘You won’t have nightmares any more when you grow up.’ I solemnly believed this.


  He looked at me levelly, and said softly, ‘When I grow up, I’m going to kill you.’ His smile slowly came out then, like the sun in a winter cloud.

  In my memory, the sentence stretches, and seems to be said a hundred times not quite at once. That sentence has its own particular, special moment in time, which lasts until now.

  Kajetan made me this promise, but he was not the one who would go on to take life. That might have been his calling, but he failed to answer, and I was chosen instead.

  I was the energetic one. Kajetan was lazy. He spent his time with me because I always had some project in the works. After his sister’s health collapsed, and his parents separated, he moved away, and thereafter I saw him only in my dreams, sliding into the shadows of an arched doorway in a stone wall…which the rain had marked with grey-brown stains…his white head gleaming in the dusky light…fluorescing, like a will-o-the-wisp, as he floated into the dark.

  That wall and doorway, I soon discovered, belong to the estate by the sea; a palace of gnarled stone surrounded by black pines and beech trees. The gloom of the place drew me strongly; on the grounds, the sound of the surf is audible, but the sea is not visible. The underbrush here is thick and elastic, the leaves made rubbery by the salt wind, and difficult to penetrate. One follows the sound of the waves, and eventually the soil becomes sandy and thin, the vegetation more sparse, and then the dunes and the horizon appear together. The house looms above the level of the beach on a slanted promontory of rock, its shuttered windows refusing to open on the sea. I have the impression the place is in probate, some sort of protracted dispute; it is empty and neglected. Only occasional trespassers from town make use of it. I secretly oblige the owners, whoever they are, by killing these trespassers.