The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘No?’ said Gous. ‘Thash too bad.’

  ‘Do you want to hear about it?’ asked Kline.

  ‘About what?’ asked Ramse.

  ‘The investigation,’ said Kline. The bartender put the drink on the counter before him and he took it up in his left hand and drank from it.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Ramse. ‘You can’t tell Gous anything.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Gous. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Gous is a one,’ said Ramse. ‘We can’t bring a one in.’ ‘I was a one,’ said Kline. ‘They brought me in.’

  ‘I’m not a one,’ said Gous, lifting up his hand. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Still,’ said Ramse. ‘You’re not much. You’re what you are and we love you for it, but you’re not much.’

  ‘It’s all right, Ramse,’ said Kline. ‘Trust me.’

  ‘I just don’t think –’

  ‘– Ramse,’ said Kline. ‘Trust me and listen.’

  Ramse opened his mouth, then closed it again.

  ‘Aline is dead,’ Kline said.

  ‘Aline is dead?’ said Ramse, his voice rising.

  ‘Is that possible?’ said Gous. ‘How is that possible?’

  ‘Or not,’ said Kline. ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘Well,’ said Gous. ‘Which is it?’

  ‘What did you say about Aline?’ asked the bartender.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Kline.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Ramse, shaking his head. ‘Dear God.’

  ‘Aline is either dead or not dead,’ said Gous to the bartender.

  ‘Be quiet, Gous,’ said Kline.

  ‘Well, which is he?’ asked the bartender. ‘Dead or not dead? There’s a big difference, you know.’

  ‘That,’ said Gous, stabbing the air with his stump. ‘Is what I intend to find out.’

  ‘You don’t think there’s a big difference?’ asked Ramse.

  ‘Ramse,’ said Kline. ‘Look at me. Why am I here? What am I investigating?’

  ‘What?’ said Ramse. ‘Smuggling.’

  ‘Smuggling?’ Gous, Kline noticed, was watching them more intently.

  ‘Somebody smuggled out pictures.’

  ‘What sorts of pictures?’

  ‘Sex pictures,’ said Ramse. ‘Of people missing limbs. Somebody stealing them and selling them without the proceeds benefitting the community.’

  ‘That,’ said Kline, ‘in your opinion, is why I am here?’

  Ramse nodded.

  ‘No,’ said Kline. ‘I’m here because of Aline.’

  ‘Who’s either dead or not dead.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Kline.

  ‘There’s a big difference,’ said Gous. ‘That’s what we intend to find out.’

  ‘What?’ said Ramse.

  ‘That,’ said Gous.

  ‘What?’ said Ramse, looking around. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Kline. ‘That’s what I want to know.’

  VIII

  There were two possibilities, he thought, as he was escorted on his way to visit Borchert the next morning, a hungover Ramse on one side of him, a hungover Gous on the other side. He was coming at Borchert’s request. Possibility one, Aline is dead. Possibility two, Aline is alive. Perhaps Ramse was right, perhaps he really did know something and the reason he, Kline, was here was because of smuggling or theft. But if it was smuggling, why hadn’t he been told? Why had Borchert told him he was investigating a murder? Certainly, considering what Kline’s speciality had been before, it seemed more logical that they would recruit him to investigate a smuggling operation.

  Perhaps Borchert himself had a vested interest, had reasons to stop the smuggling from being investigated.

  But even so, why declare Aline dead? Why suggest there is a murder to be investigated? Why not simply suggest something a little more benign?

  And here he was, standing alone in front of Borchert, with Gous and Ramse abandoned at the gate, the one-armed, one-legged man looking grimly at him from his chair.

  ‘I thought we had an agreement,’ Borchert was saying.

  ‘What agreement?’

  ‘I asked you not to speak about the case with those who didn’t need to know. Instead, you’ve been spreading rumors.’

  ‘Look,’ said Kline. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here. What exactly am I investigating?’

  ‘Aline’s death.’

  ‘I don’t believe Aline is dead.’

  ‘No,’ said Borchert. ‘You’ve made that quite clear.’

  ‘What about the smuggling?’

  ‘The smuggling,’ said Borchert. ‘A cover story. Something we agreed to tell people like Ramse.’

  ‘And Andreissen?’

  ‘We talked about that,’ said Borchert. ‘I give my solemn word that if you simply have one or two more amputations, Andreissen will change his story. Why didn’t you speak to any of the others? Perhaps one of them would tell you the truth.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  Borchert sighed. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but you’re a stubborn bastard and have your own particular way of conducting business. You’d be better off if you were willing to take some things on faith, but Thou woulds’t doubt, as Jesus said, and for the doubting there’s nothing but what you can touch.’ He turned his head, gestured with his chin to the counter behind. ‘There’s a gun there,’ he said. ‘In the drawer. No bullets in it, but the guard outside Aline’s door doesn’t need to know that. If you need to go see for yourself, go see for yourself. I wouldn’t advise it, but neither will I prevent you.’

  Kline took the gun and left. He could see, as soon as he opened the door to the hall, the guard in front of what he had been told by Andreissen was Aline’s door. Was it the door Borchert expected him to go to as well? he wondered. Or was he being told to visit the room where Borchert had led him before, the faked crime scene?

  ‘Is this the door to Aline’s room?’ Kline asked the guard.

  The guard did not reply. Kline realized the man’s lone eye was directed downward, fixed on his hand, and then Kline remembered the gun. He lifted his hand, pointed the gun at the man’s head.

  ‘Please open the door,’ he said.

  The guard shook his head.

  ‘I’ll kill you,’ said Kline.

  ‘Then kill me.’

  Kline hit the guard hard in the face with his stump, then raked the pistol across his jaw. The guard took two awkward steps, wavering into the door, and Kline struck him with the pistol, just behind the ear. The man went down in a heap.

  The door was unlocked. He opened it and went in, locking it behind him.

  Inside, it was dark. He felt around on the wall to either side of the door for a switch, only found one after his eyes had adjusted enough to see it, low on the wall, at knee level.

  The room was as simple as Borchert’s. A counter and a small kitchen in the back of the room. A single chair, this one with a sort of net webbing draped over it. A bed, in this case, three feet long, flush to the floor, pushed against one wall.

  In the bed, a mutilated head rode on the pillow, the rest of the body covered by a blanket. He knelt down beside it. The eyes had been dug out, the lids cut off as well. The ears had been shorn away to leave two whirls of slick pink flesh. The nose, too, was gone, leaving a dark gaping hole. The lips seemed to have been gnawed mostly away, perhaps by the teeth that now loomed through their gap.

  As he watched, the flesh on the face shivered and the head turned slightly, the missing eyes seeming to bore into his own eyes. He broke the gaze and then, grabbing the blanket, tugged it off the body.

  Underneath was only a torso, all limbs gone, nipples cut away, penis severed. He sat watching the chest rise and fall, air whistling between the teeth. There was something wrong with the way the body lay, he realized, and he pushed it over onto the side a little, enough to see that the buttocks had been shaved away.

  The mouth said something urgently but
he couldn’t understand what because most of the tongue was gone. He let go of the body. He looked away, let himself slip from his knees to lie on the floor. Behind him, he could hear someone pounding at the door. He stayed there, staring up at the ceiling, listening to Aline babble, until they came and dragged him away.

  ‘So,’ said Borchert, ‘now you’ve seen for yourself.’ He was standing using a cane, precariously grounded in his palm to support himself. Kline was in the chair now, Borchert’s chair, having been brought there by the guards after they had dragged him by the feet out of Aline’s room and down the stairs, his head bumping against each step.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked Borchert. ‘You look feverish.’ ‘Aline’s alive,’ said Kline.

  ‘Of course he’s alive,’ said Borchert. ‘I must apologize for lying, Mr. Kline, but trust I had my reasons.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why, Mr Kline?’ Borchert turned, moved closer by hopping slightly. ‘You want to know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Borchert smiled. ‘Knowledge is the most valuable of commodities,’ he said. ‘Shall we trade? I’ll trade you knowledge for a limb.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me,’ said Borchert. ‘Knowledge for a limb. You choose the limb. Or even just a hand or foot. That should be enough.’

  ‘No,’ said Kline.

  ‘That’s you’re problem,’ said Borchert. ‘You don’t want to know badly enough.’

  ‘I want to know,’ said Kline.

  ‘Truth or flesh,’ said Borchert. ‘Which is more important?’

  Kline didn’t answer.

  ‘Or say just a digit,’ said Borchert. ‘A single finger or toe. What does a finger or toe matter? You’ve already lost eight digits. What difference would one more make?’

  Kline stood up, made for the door. He could hear Borchert behind him, chuckling.

  ‘The offer stands, Mr. Kline,’ he said. ‘Come back any time.’

  He lay in bed, thinking. With the light off he kept seeing Aline’s mutilated face, the head riding up on the pillow, blankets tucked just below the chin. Eventually he got up and turned the light on.

  His foot ached. It was still weeping blood and fluid where the toes had been, and the foot itself was oddly dark, seemed swollen. He put it on a pillow, kept it elevated, which seemed to help a little.

  What was the truth? he wondered. How important was it to know? And once he knew, what then?

  He looked at his stump. He could still, sometimes, feel the hand there. And, when Borchert had drugged him, he had been able to see it as well, half-present, like a ghost. He tried to will himself to see it again, could not.

  Maybe there was someone who could give him something for his foot, he thought, an anti-inflammatory or perhaps something more, before the foot became too swollen, too painful, to walk on. He would take that, and then stay in bed, waiting for the toes to heal.

  Why? he wondered, again seeing Aline’s face despite the light still being on. Why had Borchert lied to him? What did he have to gain by pretending Aline was dead when he was actually alive?

  He kept turning the question around in his head.

  And when, at last, he came up with an answer, he realized he was in very great trouble indeed.

  IX

  The guard at the gate didn’t want to admit him when he arrived, but Kline told him he was coming for an amputation, that Borchert had invited him to return. The guard consulted his fellow behind the door and then waited with Kline at the gate in the dark while the latter guard went upstairs to consult Borchert.

  ‘It’s very late,’ said the guard.

  ‘He’ll see me,’ said Kline. ‘He told me to come.’

  And, indeed, when the other guard returned he was admitted.

  He went with the other guard, up the stairs, to Borchert’s room. The guard knocked. When Borchert called back, he opened the door, allowed Kline to enter alone.

  ‘Well,’ said Borchert. ‘Truth is important to you after all, Mr. Kline.’

  He was sitting in his chair, a gun in his hand gripped awkwardly with his remaining fingers. ‘Please stay right there, Mr. Kline,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not loaded,’ said Kline.

  ‘No?’ said Borchert. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘The gun you gave me wasn’t,’ said Kline.

  ‘No, it wasn’t,’ said Borchert, ‘but wasn’t that perhaps because I was giving it to you?’

  Kline didn’t answer.

  ‘Care to tell me what you know?’ asked Borchert.

  ‘You’re planning to kill Aline,’ said Kline.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And planning to make it look like I killed him.’

  ‘You’ve been most obliging in that regard,’ said Borchert. ‘You’ve acted your role nicely. A documented penchant for violence. A certain obsession with Aline, dead or alive. You’re only wrong in one particular, that being that I’ve already killed Aline.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Not long after you last left. For a limbless man he put up quite a fight.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Borchert. ‘Mr. Kline, I doubt if I can make you understand.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Try me, Mr. Kline? How colloquial of you. It was a matter of belief. Aline and I disagreed on certain particulars, questions of belief. Either he or I had to be done away with for the good of the faith in a way that would leave the survivor blameless. Otherwise there would have been a schism. Naturally, I, in my position, preferred that he be done away with rather than I.’

  ‘You were enemies.’

  ‘Not at all. Each of us admired the other. It was simply an expedient political move, Mr. Kline. It had to be done.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Why you, Mr. Kline? Simply because you were there, and because God had touched you with his grace, had chosen you by removing your hand. You’ll of course be rewarded in heaven for your role in all this. Whether you’ll be rewarded in this life, though, is entirely another matter.’

  ‘Perhaps I should go,’ said Kline.

  ‘A good question, Mr. Kline. Do I kill you or do I let you go? Hmmm? What do you think, Mr. Kline? Shall I let you go? Shall we flip a coin?’

  Kline did not answer.

  ‘No coin?’ asked Borchert. ‘Do you care to express an opinion?’

  ‘I’d like to go,’ said Kline.

  ‘Of course you would,’ said Borchert. ‘And so you shall. Today shall be a day for mercy, not justice. Perhaps, with a little luck, you’ll even be able to make it out the gate and past the guards to the so-called freedom of the outside world.’

  Kline turned toward the door.

  ‘But then again,’ he heard from behind him, ‘surely justice must temper mercy, Mr. Kline. Am I right? So perhaps you’d care to leave a little something we can remember you by.’

  Kline stood still. And then, without turning around, he reached slowly for the door handle.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ said Borchert. ‘I hate to shoot a man in the back.’

  Kline stopped, turned to face him.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘You know exactly what I want,’ said Borchert, his eye steady. ‘Flesh for knowledge.’

  ‘No,’ said Kline.

  ‘You told the guard you’d come up here for an amputation,’ said Borchert. ‘There’s a cleaver on the counter. The same cleaver you used on my finger. Where the hand is gone, the arm shall follow. Otherwise I shoot you. It makes honestly no difference to me, Mr. Kline. You’ve accomplished your purpose. Technically, you’re no longer needed.’

  Kline started slowly for the back of the room. Borchert watched him go, pushing at the floor with his foot to turn his chair around.

  There was a cleaver there, embedded in the butcher’s block.

  ‘Go ahead, Mr. Kline. ‘Take it by the cronge and tug it free.’

  He took the cleaver. ‘What’s to stop me from killi
ng you?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you really know how to throw a cleaver, Mr. Kline? Where does one learn such skills? Some sort of Vo-Tec? Can you imagine you’d be able to hit me, let alone hit me so that the blade itself will stick? And even if you did, I imagine I’d be able to squeeze off a shot beforehand –’

  ‘– assuming the gun is loaded.’

  ‘Assuming the gun is loaded,’ agreed Borchert affably. ‘A shot that would bring the guards running and that would get you killed. So, Mr. Kline, you’d be trading the possibility of killing me for your own life. Is that really what you want to do?

  No? Now be a good boy and cut off your arm.’

  He turned on the burner in the countertop, waited for it to heat up. The cleaver seemed sharp enough, though he realized it might have some difficulty cutting through bone. If he hit the joint just right it probably wouldn’t matter, though he shouldn’t forget he was cutting left-handed; did he have sufficient force in his left hand to cut all the way through in a single blow?

  He lined the cleaver along the crease of his elbow, found the flesh to run from one end of the blade to the other. He would have to hit it exactly right.

  In his mind’s eye, the cleaver is already coming swiftly down, beginning to bite through skin and flesh and bone. He will be washed over with pain and will stagger, but before going down he must remember to thrust the new end of his arm against the burner to cauterize it, so that he doesn’t bleed to death. And then, if he is still standing, he may manage to stagger from the room and down the stairs and eventually out of the compound altogether, where, limping, feverish, in pain, he will make his way out into the lone and dreary world.

  And this, he realizes, is only the best possible outcome. In all probability it will be much worse. The hatchet will strike wrong and he will have to strike a second time. He will wooze and fall before cauterizing the wound and then lie on the floor bleeding to death from the wound. The guards will catch him at the gate and kill him. Or even worse, all will go well, the arm coming smoothly off, but Borchert, smiling, will say ‘Very good, Mr. Kline. But why stop there? What shall we cut off next?’

  He raises the cleaver high. His whole life is waiting for him. He only needs to bring the cleaver down for it to begin.