The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  Kline ate a little of the candy bar. It was chocolate, something crispy inside it. He chewed. Ramse, he realized, was holding his remaining hand up, toward the other man.

  ‘Gous?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’ the man said. ‘Yes, right,’ Gous said. ‘Sorry.’

  With his single hand he reached out and took Ramse’s remaining hand and twisted it. Kline watched the hand circle about and break free. Ramse rubbed his two stumps against each other. Gous reached out and took hold of Ramse’s ear, tore it off. It came free, leaving a gaping unwhelked hole behind.

  ‘There,’ said Ramse. ‘That’s better.’ He looked at Kline in the rearview mirror, lifted up both stumps. ‘Like you,’ he said, smiling. ‘Only more so.’

  They drove, the city slowly dissolving around them and breaking up into fields and trees. Gous kept rummaging in the glove box, passing back food. There was another candy bar, a plastic bag of broken pretzels, a tin of sardines. Kline took a little of each, left what remained on the seat beside him. He was beginning to feel a little more alert. Outside, the sun was high; even through the tinted glass it looked hot outside. They turned right and went up a ramp and entered the freeway, the car quickly gaining speed.

  ‘Where are we?’ Kline asked.

  ‘Here we go,’ said Gous, ignoring him.

  ‘Smooth sailing from here on out,’ said Ramse. ‘For a while anyway.’

  ‘But,’ said Kline. ‘Where, I don’t –’

  ‘Mr. Kline,’ said Gous. ‘Please sit back and enjoy the ride.’

  ‘What else?’ asked Kline.

  ‘What else?’ said Gous.

  ‘What do you mean what else?’ asked Ramse.

  ‘What else comes off?’

  ‘Besides the hands and the ear?’ said Ramse. ‘Some toes,’ he said, ‘but they’re already off. Three gone from one foot, two from the other.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Kline.

  ‘What do you mean what happened, Mr. Kline? Nothing happened.’

  ‘We don’t do accidents,’ said Gous. ‘Accidents and acts of God don’t mean a thing, unless they’re followed later by acts of will. Pretzel?’ he asked.

  ‘Your own case was hotly debated,’ said Ramse. ‘Some wanted to classify it as accident.’

  ‘But it was no accident,’ said Gous.

  ‘No,’ said Ramse. ‘Others argued, successfully, that it was no accident but instead an act of will. But then the question came An act of will on whose part? On the part of the gentleman with the hatchet, surely, no denying that, but responsibility can hardly rest solely with him, can it now, Mr. Kline?’ He turned a little around as he said it, pivoting his missing ear toward Kline. ‘All you had to do was tell him one thing, Mr. Kline, just a lie, and you would have kept your hand. But you didn’t say a thing. A matter of will, Mr. Kline. Your will to lose the hand far outweighed your will to retain it.’

  Outside the highway had narrowed to a two lane road, cutting through dry scraggled woods, the road’s shoulder heaped in dust.

  ‘What about you?’ Kline asked Gous.

  ‘Me?’ said Gous, blushing. ‘Just the hand,’ he said. ‘I’m still new.’

  ‘Have to start somewhere,’ said Ramse. ‘We brought him along because the powers that be thought you might be more comfortable with someone like you.’

  ‘He’s not like me.’

  ‘You have one amputation, he has one amputation,’ said Ramse. ‘Yours is a hand, his is a hand. In that sense, he’s like you. When you start to look closer, well…’

  ‘I used anesthetic,’ said Gous.

  ‘You, Mr. Kline, did not use anesthetic. You weren’t given that option.’

  ‘It’s frowned upon,’ said Gous, ‘but not forbidden.’

  ‘And more or less expected for the first several amputations,’ said Ramse. ‘It makes you exceptional, Mr. Kline.’

  Kline looked at the seat next to him, the open tin of sardines, the filets shining in their oil.

  ‘I’m exceptional as well,’ said Ramse. ‘I’ve never been anesthetized.’

  ‘He’s an inspiration to us all,’ said Gous.

  ‘But that you cauterized your wound yourself, Mr. Kline,’ said Ramse. ‘That makes you truly exceptional.’

  ‘I’d like to get out of the car now,’ said Kline softly.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mr. Kline,’ said Gous, grinning. ‘We’re in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘I could count the number of people who self-cauterize on one finger of one hand,’ said Ramse.

  ‘If he had a hand,’ said Gous.

  ‘If I had a hand,’ said Ramse.

  They drove for a while in silence. Kline stayed as still as he could in the back seat. The sun had slid some little way down the horizon. After a while it vanished. The tin of sardines had slid down the seat and were now at an angle, their oil leaking slowly out. He straightened the tin, then rubbed his fingers dry on the floor carpeting. It was hard not to stare at Ramse’s missing ear. He looked down at his own stump, looked at Gous’ stump balanced on the seat’s back. The two stumps were actually quite different, he thought. The end of Gous’ was puckered. His own had been puckered and scarred from the makeshift cauterization; after the fact, a doctor had cut a little higher and smoothed it off, planed it. Outside, the trees, already sparse, seemed to vanish almost entirely, perhaps partly because of the gathering darkness but also the landscape was changing. Ramse pushed one of his stumps into the panel and turned on the headlights.

  ‘Eight,’ said Ramse, gesturing his head slightly backwards.

  ‘Eight?’ asked Kline. ‘Eight what?’

  ‘Amputations,’ said Ramse. Kline watched the back of his head. ‘Of course that doesn’t mean a thing,’ he said. ‘Could be just eight toes, all done under anesthetic, the big toes left for balance. That should hardly qualify for an eight,’ he said.

  Gous nodded next to him. He held up his stump, looked over the back. ‘This counts as a one,’ he said. ‘But I could have left the hand and cut off all the fingers and I’d be a four. Five if you took the thumb.’

  They were waiting for Kline to say something. ‘That hardly seems fair,’ he offered.

  ‘But which is more of a shock?’ asked Ramse. ‘A man losing his fingers or a man losing his hand?’

  Kline didn’t know if he was expected to answer. ‘I’d like to get out of the car,’ he said.

  ‘So there are eights,’ said Ramse, ‘and then there are eights.’ They came to a curve. Kline watched Ramse post the other hand on the steering wheel for balance, turning the wheel with his cupped stump. ‘Personally I prefer a system of minor and major amputations, according to which I’d be a 2/3.

  ‘I prefer by weight,’ said Gous. ‘Weigh the lopped off organ, I say.’

  ‘But you see,’ said Ramse, ‘bled or unbled? And doesn’t that give a certain advantage to the corpulent?’

  ‘You develop standards,’ said Gous. ‘Penalties and handicaps.’

  ‘Why do you need me?’ asked Kline.

  ‘Excuse me?’ asked Ramse.

  ‘He wants to know why we need him,’ said Gous.

  ‘That’s easy,’ said Ramse. ‘A crime has been committed.’

  ‘Why me?’ asked Kline.

  ‘You have a certain amount of experience in investigation,’ said Gous.

  ‘Not investigation exactly, but infiltration,’ said Ramse.

  ‘And you don’t flinch, Mr. Kline,’ said Gous.

  ‘No, he doesn’t flinch.’

  ‘But –’ said Kline.

  ‘You’ll be briefed,’ said Ramse. ‘You’ll be told what to do.’

  ‘But the police –’

  ‘No police,’ said Ramse. ‘It was hard enough to get the others to agree on you.’

  ‘If it hadn’t been for the hand,’ said Gous.

  ‘If it hadn’t been for the hand,’ said Ramse, ‘you wouldn’t be here. But you’re one of us, like it or not.’

  III

  He woke
up when the car stopped before a set of metal gates. It was fully dark outside.

  ‘Almost there,’ said Ramse from the front.

  The gate opened a little and a small man stepped out, turning pale and white in the overbright halogen glow of the headlights. The man came over to the driver’s door. Kline could see he was missing an eye, one closed lid seeming flat and deflated. He was wearing a uniform. Ramse rolled down the window, and the man peered into the car.

  ‘Mr. Ramse,’ said the guard. ‘And Mr. Gous. Who’s in the back?’

  ‘That would be Mr. Kline,’ said Ramse. ‘Hold up your arm, Mr. Kline,’ said Ramse.

  Kline lifted his hand.

  ‘No, the other one,’ said Ramse.

  He lifted the stumped arm and the guard nodded. ‘A one?’ he asked.

  ‘Right,’ said Ramse. ‘But self-cauterized.’

  The guard whistled. He made his way away from the window and back to the gates, which he drew open wide just enough for the car to pass through. Through the rear window, Kline watched him draw it shut after them.

  ‘Welcome home, Mr. Kline,’ said Ramse.

  Kline didn’t say anything.

  They passed a row of houses, turned down a smaller road where the houses were a little more spread out, then down a third smaller tree-lined alley that dead ended in front of a small, two story building. Ramse stopped the car. The three of them climbed out.

  ‘You’ll be staying here, Mr. Kline,’ said Ramse. ‘First floor, second door to the left once you go through the entrance.

  ‘There’s probably an hour or two of night left,’ he said. ‘We’ll see you in the morning. For now, why don’t you try to get some sleep?’

  When he went in, he couldn’t figure out how to turn the hall light on so, instead, wandered down the dark hall dragging his hand along the wall, feeling for doorways. His fingers stuttered past one. He lifted his fingers from the wall and brought them near his face. They smelled of dust. He went on until he came to another doorframe, fumbled around for the handle.

  Inside, he found a switch. It was a small windowless room, containing a narrow single bed with a thin, ratty blanket. In one corner was a metal cabinet. The floor was linoleum, a streaked blue. The light, he saw, was a naked bulb, hanging from the center of the ceiling. The walls’ paint was cracking.

  Welcome home, he thought.

  He closed the door. There was no lock on it. He opened the cabinet. It was full of stacks of calendars, each month featuring a woman in various states of undress, smiling furiously. He looked at the first picture for some time before realizing the girl was missing one of her thumbs. With each month, the losses became more obvious and more numerous, March losing a breast, July missing both breasts, a hand, and a forearm. The December girl was little more than a torso, her breasts shaved off, wearing nothing but a thin white cloth banner from one shoulder to the opposite hip, reading Miss Less is More.

  He put the calendar back and closed the cabinet. Turning off the light he lay in the bed, but kept seeing Miss Less is More’s face contorted with joy. There was Ramse’s face too, his mutilated ear just above the car seatback angling itself toward him. His own stump was tingling. He got up and turned on the light, tried to sleep with it on.

  He dreamt that he was sitting at the table again, the gentleman with the cleaver standing before him, cleaver coming down. Only in his dream he wasn’t just the man losing his hand but also the man with the cleaver. He watched himself bring the cleaver down and the hand come free and the fingers pulse. The sheared plane of his wrist grew pale and then suddenly puffed, blood pulsing out. He stripped off his belt with his remaining hand and tightened it quickly around his arm until the bleeding slowed and mostly stopped. He watched himself do it, holding the cleaver in his hand. Then he watched himself, pale, holding the belt tight, go to the stove and turn it on, wait for the coils of the burner to smoke and begin to glow. He put his stump down and heard it sizzle and smelt the burnt flesh, and when he lifted the stump away it was smoking. Bits of flesh and blood were stuck to the burner and smouldering.

  Then then, with his left hand, face livid with pain, he took out his gun and, left-handed, shot himself through the eye. It was a hell of a thing to watch, a hell of a thing to feel. And as soon as it was over it started again, and kept starting until he forced himself awake.

  Gous and Ramse were in the room, the first standing at the open cabinet looking through the calendar, rubbing at his crotch with his stump, the second standing near the bed, looking at Kline.

  ‘Rise and shine,’ said Ramse.

  Kline sat on the edge of the bed, pulling his pants on awkwardly with stump and arm. Ramse watched. Only when he was done did he say,

  ‘There’s new clothes for you.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Kline.

  ‘Gous has them,’ said Ramse. ‘Gous?’ he said, louder.

  ‘What?’ said Gous, turning stiffly away from the calendar, face red with shame or heat, or perhaps both.

  ‘Clothes, Gous,’ said Ramse.

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Gous, and picking up a pile of clothing near his feet, threw it to Kline.

  Kline stripped out of the clothes he had just put on as Ramse watched. The new clothing consisted of a pair of gray slacks, a white shirt, a red clip-on tie. The buttons weren’t easy one-handed, particularly since the shirt was freshly starched, but after the first three it got easier. He tried to leave the tie on the bed, but Ramse stopped him.

  ‘Put it on,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m wearing one, Gous is wearing one,’ said Ramse. And indeed, Kline had failed to notice, their outfits were the same as his: white shirts, gray slacks, red clip-on tie. He found himself wondering how Ramse had managed to put on his shirt by himself. Perhaps he hadn’t.

  ‘Look,’ said Ramse, once they were out the door and walking down the drive. ‘Things are done in certain way here. We hope you’ll try to respect that.’

  ‘All right,’ said Kline.

  ‘The other thing,’ said Ramse. ‘The investigation.’

  ‘He’s taking you to Borchert,’ said Gous.

  ‘I’m taking you to Borchert,’ said Ramse. ‘He’ll tell you about the investigation.’

  ‘Who’s Borchert?’

  ‘It’s not who’s Borchert,’ said Ramse, ‘but what he is. And what he is is a twelve.’

  ‘A twelve?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Gous, then rattled off in a schoolboy’s voice, ‘Leg, toe, toe, toe, toe, toe, left arm, finger, finger, ear, eye, ear.’

  ‘A twelve,’ said Ramse. ‘Of course that includes a lot of digits, but when you add in two lopped limps, it’s impressive.’

  ‘He’s second in command,’ said Gous. ‘After Aline.’

  ‘I see,’ said Kline. ‘What’s the investigation about?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Gous.

  ‘Borchert will tell you,’ said Ramse.

  ‘You don’t know?’ asked Kline.

  ‘I know a little. I should know more,’ said Ramse wistfully. ‘I’m an eight. There’s no reason to keep me in the dark. Gous is another story.’

  ‘I’m just a one,’ admitted Gous.

  ‘He’s just a one,’ said Ramse, smiling. ‘At least for now.’

  ‘I’m a one too,’ said Kline.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Gous to Ramse. ‘He’s a one but he’s going to find out.’

  ‘He’s an exception,’ said Ramse. ‘He’s the exception that proves the rule.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Kline. They came to a small path cutting away from the road, paved with crushed white shells. Ramse and Gous stepped onto it, Kline followed.

  ‘Yes, why?’ asked Gous.

  ‘How the hell should I know,’ asked Ramse. ‘I’m an eight. They don’t always tell me very much. Maybe because he’s a self-cauterizer.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Kline. ‘I’ll see Borchert and talk to him, but that’s it. I’m not interested in staying.’

 
‘Borchert can be very persuasive,’ said Ramse.

  ‘Don’t insult Borchert,’ said Gous. ‘Be polite to him, listen to him, don’t talk back.’

  ‘He’s a twelve,’ said Ramse. ‘Plus his leg’s amputated at the hip. That’s commitment for you, eh?’

  He stayed awake for the operation,’ said Gous.

  ‘But he had anesthetic,’ said Ramse.

  ‘Still,’ said Gous.

  ‘What about cauterization?’ asked Kline.

  ‘The cauterization?’ asked Gous. ‘Don’t know. Ramse, was he anesthetized for that too?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Ramse. ‘Probably. In any case, he didn’t self-cauterize.’ ‘Almost nobody does,’ said Gous.

  ‘Really nobody but you,’ said Ramse.

  The path moved back into trees, descending into a sort of depression. Kline saw, affixed to an old oak, a security camera. Then the path took a sharp curve and started uphill again. It widened into a tree-lined avenue, at the end of which was what looked like an old manor house, or a boarding school, made of gray stone. Kline counted six sets of windows in rows three tall.

  They came to the gate, Kline listening to the shells crunching beneath his feet. A guard came out from behind a pillar of the house and stood on the opposite side of the gate, watching them with a single eye.

  ‘What is wanted?’ he asked, his hands folded.

  ‘Cut it out,’ said Ramse. ‘This isn’t ceremonial. We’re here to see Borchert.’

  ‘Borchert?’ said the guard. ‘What is wanted?’

  ‘Cut it out,’ said Ramse. ‘This is Kline.’

  ‘Kline?’ said the guard, unfolding his arms to reveal hands shorn of all but a thumb, a forefinger, and a middle finger. He took hold of the key and fitted it to the lock. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ the guard said. ‘Let him enter.’

  ‘Are all the guards missing an eye?’ asked Kline.

  ‘Yes,’ Gous said happily. ‘All of them.’