The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  Poster on the corner: ‘Is it working?’

  Eighth Exhibit:

  Months and months of plague. Bullets disappear from their red and black boxes in Simon’s bureau drawer.

  Ninth Exhibit:

  Simon is caught in a riot. It starts with a puff of alarm, and suddenly everyone is squalling in all directions. Simon moves diagonally through the racing figures, toward the shelter of deserted, burnt-out buildings. Police swarm the streets with keening whistles – Simon trips on the pavement – his gun slides from his pocket across the pavement. The police have seen him, his gun – two or three charge at him. Under the regime of the epidemic there is no due process, the police do as they please – now their eyes have fastened on him.

  Simon dashes into the building, throws shut the door. The lock still works. He sets the chain – recoils as fists thump and bang against the wood. He flings a half-demolished wardrobe and a heavy table in front of the door. He can’t block the windows, but he can lock the hall doors. He checks the back door; it’s painted over, jammed shut; there’s nothing he can open it with. Upstairs the fire escape is on the front of the building. On the roof – it’s too far to jump across to the neighboring house. He tries, peering over the edge, but panic fear he can’t overcome drives him back, nearly paralyzed. Half to himself he is saying ‘I can’t! I can’t do it! I need something else!’ Crashing from downstairs, wood tearing and splintering.

  He goes to the center of the roof, staring at a door that will burst open soon. Simon draws himself up, staring, his mouth set. He tightens into himself, his features crush together. He melts into air…vanishes across renovated buildings, alleys, sterile apartments…bullet spins cold in the sky…continuous wall of heads for the sharp, hollow noise…Louy is still asleep…the other boy watching a white box disappear from the sun, staring at his friend Louy sleep…the boy takes Louy’s head in rain…his thumbs drop nine…two burnt shells, rain dropping from his stick…Simon leans forward, pouring in the dead trees…between two garbage cans he opens his gaze into Louy’s eyes…from her hiding place – the riots – the girl sees she is suddenly alone…billowing urns shoot her in the head, hat and coat…the bullet tugs her to the right street…Simon turns into a wall of the kiosk of flowers…the lobby is the girl, filled with a wide tear in her head above what was the entry way…her shoe drops on a right fence that rings golden light…flake of brick sailing…two boys…the park lying in the carpet smell…

  There is nothing strange about me but my happiness. The only difficulty I have ever given anyone has been to contain someway my dangerous happiness, which makes me thoughtless. My exuberance breaks things, breaks me. It marches me up to people and elicits from me declarations of love, if only to give me the satisfaction of disappointment, to know that I am in love. I am forever building up this edifice of love and happiness, which would get to be as big as the world, or bigger, if it weren’t for the storms, eruptions, convulsions, that tear it all down again. When any of it comes down, it all comes down. Although these catastrophic failures deeply wound me, still I am grateful for the opportunity to rebuild, and to renew my trust with the world. I do everything on the scale of the world, as the only thing commensurate to my happiness.

  Only by understanding my father’s life will you understand my death. I will have to adopt a conversational manner, for the moment, to tell you these everyday things. For most of my childhood, my father worked as a theatre critic. His articles were widely read and his opinions seriously received. I never understood exactly what he did, or why he was so inattentive to us. Over time, he withdrew from us. For reasons I would learn later, he once disappeared altogether for about ten days. We were told he had been depressed; he had thought some time alone would do him good, so he had taken a room at a hotel. I wanted to offer some comfort to him, if he was suffering – he seemed to sense my feeling, and headed it off by adopting an especially frosty manner with me. My mother was mystified by his changes, and her uncertainty unnerved me. While I lacked confidence in my own judgement, it seemed to me my father sullenly avoided us all, stayed away from home.

  I made friends easily, but I always lost them. My exuberance, my complicated games only exasperated and taxed them. Most of the time I kept company with my older brother Louy, whom I very little resembled; while I was nervous, enthusiastic, busy, thoughtless, Louy was ghostly and quiet. He had a gentle, warm little voice like a candle flame, and wet, red lips. He almost always seemed preoccupied and far away, but then he would astonish me with a near-clairvoyant observation about someone or something we had seen: and I would realize again that he missed nothing.

  A few days after Louy’s thirteenth birthday, my mother took me away to visit with her sister for a few days, leaving him alone with my father. When we came back – what had happened to Louy? We found him catatonic in his bed, apparently unable to speak or move. I remember the slack mouth, the frightening dullness of his eyes. A new awkwardness had insinuated itself into his body somehow – he even lay awkwardly in his bed. My mother frantically chafed his hands, his arms, caressed his face, implored him to speak. I was sent to fetch our downstairs neighbor the doctor. He examined Louy carefully and took my mother aside. I never knew what he told her.

  Louy was condemned to lie inert for the rest of his life; thin, frail, he could barely speak. His eyes would sometimes become glassy and seem to flicker under his heavy lids, but this was not the light of intelligence they formerly had had. While I am sure she could not have known what had happened, my mother angrily blamed Louy’s condition on my father, and they separated almost immediately. I seldom saw my father after that; we did not visit together, and my mother never spoke of him.

  When the epidemic broke out the following year, my mother took Louy and me out to the country, to stay with her cousins. We were there for eight months, during which time we never heard from my father. Upon our return to the city, we learned that he had disappeared shortly after the state of emergency was declared. Officers of the health department had already declared him dead, ‘succumbed to the disease.’ The epidemic had maddened the city. Hundreds of people had vanished without a trace in riots or clandestine violence, and the police had done as they pleased with the rest. In the depths of the epidemic, heaps of unidentified bodies were burned or buried in vast pits every day – so my father’s case was not apparently unusual.

  I remember hiding from my friends behind our school’s small library once. I picked up a branch from the dry grass at the edge of the gravel path, but as I raised it I saw that it was a charred bone, nearly as long as my arm. For days after that, I wondered if it had been my father’s.

  The contents of his apartment were boxed and piled away by my grandfather, upon whose death it fell to me to sort them out. My father’s clothes and books were almost entirely ruined by seeping water and mold, but I salvaged what I could – I had always been curious about my father. Under a blanket I found one of my father’s jackets, which, at the time the boxes were packed, had been used as a sort of makeshift bag. His watches, shaving kit, and a few other things had been bundled up inside – a notebook among them. In it, I found many brief sentences like these:

  ‘7 September, three boys.’

  ‘20 September, two boys, very nice.’

  ‘21 September, nothing today, an admonition.’

  ‘29 September, two boys, a girl today, very nice.’

  ‘2 October, necessarily three boys. Last one caused some trouble.’

  ‘10 October, nothing – reprisal.’

  ‘13 October, one boy – misfire, strangle – very memorable expression.’

  Interleaved among these tallying sentences were terse notes:

  ‘I have still the habit of writing – they say your habit of writing is the manufacture of self-incriminating evidence / your habit of writing is a sign of bad conscience / you are to wean yourself of your habit of writing’

  ‘With the epidemic, everything is possible.’

  The earliest entry wa
s dated just before his ten-day disappearance:

  ‘the low sun white and cold, and full of worms. Then a fan of white, gelatinous rays, transparent tubes whose ends mouth the earth. A flat, white opening in the sky, whose light silvered the air, dotted with their shadows. They are the larvae of the sun and will become themselves stars.’

  I had seen this light around my father – vividly I see it now, cold and white, as he sits in his shirtsleeves, the long cuffs bent back, writing; heavy ropes of smoke coil around him. His creased face is drawn, inert, his writing hand palpitates like a bug on the paper.

  ‘My brain shining in the dark like a planet, streaked with long, glistening white clouds that I came to see were worms, beneath the meniscus of brain fluid a translucent sheet under which they tossed and turned. Some lay and some reclined on the tissue, like opulent ladies on perfumed sofas; their puckered heads swayed gently.’

  These were compulsory sacrifices, as I came to understand. There was no quid pro quo, there was no deal or anything like that with the larvae. They addressed him from time to time, directly or by means of fugitive bits of graffiti, or slogans on posters – ‘do not open door’ – ‘dead or alive?’ – ‘focus!’

  ‘I realized what it was necessary to do.’

  He attacked children only because they were easier to kill. The first time he was taken by surprise, guided by the larvae to a house under renovation, a child taking refuge from the rain. ‘Do not swing – you waste energy that way. Thrust.’ – ‘Don’t do it halfway,’ the larvae said. And after – ‘Sloppy.’

  ‘They led me to the gun.’

  ‘It is difficult to talk to you,’ the larvae said, ‘you understand so little.’

  ‘Rain falls, scattering its rings across the puddles – and each death is a drop that makes the mass quiver and thrill, and each drop lends vital force to what would otherwise be an inert, passive, shrinking thing, a body of stillborn larvae.’

  ‘Don’t forget what you owe the larvae of thought,’ the larvae would say. ‘Don’t forget your solar responsibilities.’

  On Louy’s thirteenth birthday, the larvae said: ‘He should be old enough now to help you.’ In his room – ‘Open his eyes. Show him dreams.’ Hopeless – he refuses to understand. ‘Shut him up. Shut him up.’

  ‘The alley flashed at me, the gun tingled…you see how the larvae protect me. “Look at the time.”’

  ‘I don’t feel the murders – would I feel them more if I cut them open and rooted in their entrails, perhaps while they still throb with life, before they lose consciousness? I am told “It is not necessary to feel it, only to see to it.”’

  ‘Glancing up now at the radiator I know I would do it even if it were as abstract and numb a matter as turning that knob – in a windowless closet deep in basements I see three little bodies, heads in a row, weak and dazed from hunger and thirst lying on a metal grill bunk – as I turn the knob the dim, orange-brown light fades and goes out, and the little chamber swiftly fills with a flavorless gas which will lead these children so deep into the mazes of sleep that they will never find their way out again.

  ‘“This is not a matter of gratification, it is a matter of generating numbers.”

  ‘The gun is a magic instrument, converting children to numbers.’

  ‘I know I am now able to will myself out of existence. They have shown me, and told me to extinguish myself if I am threatened with capture. I will not hesitate to do as they ask, not because I feel that my actions are wrong, and that, by them, I have merited my death, but because the situation will then no longer be under my control, or it will be teetering on the brink, about to slip out of my grasp; and by disappearing, I will seal it and keep it – control – perfect forever.’

  I remember the disembodied, unreal feeling I had as I finished reading. His words sank through and past me, and drained out of me.

  I read his words, and the larvae hatched in my mind. (what or how did the larvae appear to me…such questions can only waste our time together. In the water I see the lights trail their long beards that are emaciated gold and silver flames withered to compass needles whose points sway before my feet, everything turns into everything else…For my father they were voices. To me they are shafts of glowing, orating red and gold sunlight walking up and down inside my head) –

  Every week I visit Louy at the hotel de santé. He lies always in a white iron bed in a vast half-deserted ward, whose booming silence solidifies now and then into a moan or a flicker of nurse’s feet, rustle of stiff sheets. I sit beside the bed. Late afternoon light sifts into the room, tall orange projections on the wall, and deep shadows. Louy is lying on his left side, an ungainly body of long bones under the sheet, his head tilted up toward me – a constant tremor wags it from side to side. His rumpled face, the red arch of his lip, and his long wet teeth, wet breaths; the eyes never waver from my face, although there is no expression – his wounded mind no longer has the strength to find its way out to me. I only want to be with him. He grew up like this; his face has aged seventeen years unmarked. In all that time, he has had only one never-ending experience.

  I sit and he lies. A few beds down the ward, a nurse changes the dressing on an injured arm. She takes a roll of fresh linen bandage from a tray on the nightstand, which she has moved away from the wall, out toward the aisle. When I next look up, the nurse is cutting the bandage from the roll – she sets the roll on the tray, and lays the scissors next to the roll. The blades of the scissors are acutely pointed, and, as she had placed them casually on the tray, not quite in alignment. They are tilted up on the linen roll. Those two blades gleam white like mirrors against the shadows of the room. The two very sharp blades are fixed together, they cross each other and are bolted together, cut toward each other. As it drops low in the sky, the sun’s light becomes redder and redder. Tall panels of red light slide down the walls. The two blades of the scissors are two red blazes, I can see the sun reflected in the blade whose polished side faces me. Their brilliance occludes the ward, the nurse, the beds. I see instead another room, with bare walls, no furniture, dead leaves, newspaper – a hallway in front of me. The windows are boarded up. I stand in the room with my shoulders back and my chin up, my arms a little less than fully outstretched. My right hand holds something wet and light; looking I see I am holding the red scissors. My left hand is further down than my right; very gradually I notice it throbs and moves on its own. My left hand is clutching tightly at something, the fingers are aching. I look down at my left hand – it grips the right shoulder of a small boy with a gaping red throat, his struggles communicate up my arm along nerves finely laced around my heart – a hot electric web, hot and fine. I am breathing hard, a feeling is swelling up in me – I can’t stand the imploring, suffering look on the boy’s appalling white face, but it is too beautiful, I have to look at him because I love him, and I pity him, this strange boy I’ve never met, and I need to be close to him and share with him, and this is the only way we can be friends. The boy steadily weakens, but still tugs at my hand. I look down again – I am in the ward, my brother wrings my hand, gazing up into my face. With an imploring look, he rocks back and forth hoisting his upper lip, desperately trying to form words without a voice, with disobedient muscles. My heart glows incandescent through my breast, the little boy’s legs fold under him, I drop the scissors and pick him up, press him to me, so he won’t feel alone. His warm blood seeps through my shirt, I smell his hair, the soap he washed his face with. Louy yanks at my left hand, his eyes push at mine. I place my right hand over his, and clasp it firmly. As the sunlight fades from the scissors on the tray, the boy in my mind drops to the floor, without a sound. Louy’s head falls back on the pillow, with a long despairing sob. A pang of intense love stabs me. I smooth his hair and wipe his face, his eyes, with my handkerchief. The nurse stands at the foot of the bed, telling me softly that visiting hours are over.

  ‘Rest now,’ I say to him.

  Now I am walking. I pass an open alleyway �
� I turn back, go into the alley. It forms a T. I follow the right branch of the T into a little courtyard. This brick is scarred – a round, puckered spot, where my father’s bullet struck it, after passing through the brains of a nameless little girl. Crouching down I put my eye on the level of the spot, looking back toward the courtyard. I see the girl frozen in midstep, one arm forward one arm back, one leg forward one leg back, terror on the blurred features; and beyond her stands my father in his coat and hat, the gun up level at the end of his arm, obscuring his face.

  I go back to my apartment. I climb the stairs and turn right, into my kitchen. Though the room is dark, a knife blazes with reflected sunlight in the sink. From my kitchen window I can see the people in the street blazing, each one with his or her own spotlight. I take off my clothes and go to bed.

  I dream this:

  A brilliant, empty beach – a broad round ramp of yellow land slopes down between shaggy, high cliffs. Even in the dream the light dazzles me; I have an impression of squinting. Sky like blue mercury, sun’s light spawns a billion flakes on the water’s indigo blades. Hundreds of gulls hurtle round in long-winged circles funneling down to my remains lying on my back half in tall grass, my head on the sand toward the sea, one arm up by my right ear the other down in the grass thick as the comforter under which I lie asleep. I lie there and some way I observe too from nearby. Very calm and happy, and now and then trembling with the proximity of an overflowing happiness. I see the beautiful purple water roil on the blonde sand, the gleaming prints of pale lime foam that it leaves, takes back, redeposits, the exuberance of the cartwheeling wind. My face is also blue and green, in places livid, and it sways gently with the tugging of the gulls, who seem to sprout from my body. The cavity is completely torn open, the gulls hop on the exposed edges of my ribs and thrust their heads down, root vehemently and then strut away with shreds of my flesh in their beaks. My arms are wide open for them; my remains are kind, accommodating. One of them plucks the glasses from my face and stalks off with them.