The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

Ian –

  Christ, Ian, I really don’t know what to say. I thought that I could just sit down and write this to you rationally, but I am just so goddam pissed off, I’m not sure that’s possible.

  This stunt is exactly the kind of emotional extortion that made it impossible for me to stay near you. What were you thinking? That you could hold her up, maybe wave her around like a flag, and make me come trotting back – we could just stay together for the children’s sake? Our daughter should be more than just the easiest tool for you to get in a dig at me. How could you do this to her?

  If you wanted to make me feel guilty or shamed or selfish, well nice job, Ian. You did.

  Never use her like this again. If it isn’t beneath you, it goddam well should be.

  C.

  The hallway outside the school’s administrative offices had white stucco walls, linoleum flooring worn by millions of footsteps from thousands of students, harsh fluorescent lighting. An old clock – white face yellow with age – reported twenty minutes before the noon bell would ring, the press of small bodies filling the halls like spring tadpoles. When Ian walked in, straightening his tie, swallowing his dread, his footsteps echoed.

  The secretary smiled professionally when he gave her his name, and led him to a smaller room in the back. The placard on the door – white letters on false woodgrain – said that the principal’s name was Claude Bruchelli. The secretary knocked once, opened the door, and stepped aside to let Ian pass through a cloud of her cloying perfume and into the office.

  The principal rose, stretching out a hand, establishing for Diane that the grownups were together, that they had special rules of respect and courtesy. It was the sort of thing Ian remembered with resentment from when he’d been her age, but he shook the man’s hand all the same.

  ‘Thanks for coming, Mr. Bursen. I know it’s hard to just leave work like this. But we have a problem.’

  Diane, sitting on a hardbacked chair, stared at her feet. The way she drummed her heels lightly against the chair legs told him that this was not resentment, but remorse. Ian cleared his throat.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What’s she done?’

  ‘Mr. Bursen, we have some very strict guidelines from the city about fighting.’

  ‘Another fight?’

  The principal nodded gravely. It had been at morning recess. Her friend Kit had been adamant that the other girl had started it, but the teacher who had seen it all reported otherwise. No, there had been no injuries beyond a few scratches. This was, however the third time, which meant a mandatory three-day suspension.

  Diane, stone-faced, seemed to be staring at a banner on the wall that blared ‘We Aim For Excellence! We Expect The Best Of You!’

  ‘All right,’ Ian said. ‘I can get her homework for her and she can do it at home.’

  The principal nodded, but didn’t speak. He looked at Ian from under furrowed brows.

  ‘Mr. Bursen, I have to follow the guidelines. And they’re good as far as they go, but Diane’s anger problems aren’t going to go away. I wish you’d reconsider letting Mrs. Birch…’

  ‘No. I’m sorry, no. I’ve had a certain amount of counseling myself, one time and another. It doesn’t do any good to force a child into it.’

  ‘Perhaps Diane would choose to,’ the principal said as if she wasn’t there, as if her dark, hard eyes weren’t fixed on his wall. Ian shrugged.

  ‘Well, what of it, Diane? Care to see Mrs. Birch?’ He’d meant to say it gently, but the tone when it left his mouth sounded more of sarcasm. Diane shook her head. Ian met the principal’s gaze.

  All the way back home, Diane pressed herself against the car door, keeping as far from Ian as she could. He didn’t try to speak, not until he knew which words were in him. Instead, he ran through all the people he could think of who might be able or willing to look after Diane for the duration of her exile.

  When, that night, he finally spoke, he did it poorly. They were eating dinner – chicken soup and peanut butter sandwiches. He hadn’t spoken, she had sulked. Between them the house had been a bent twig, tension ready to snap.

  ‘I can’t afford to take three days off work,’ he said. ‘They’ll fire me.’

  Diane shrugged, a movement she inherited from him. Her father, who shrugged a lot of feelings away.

  ‘Di, can you at least tell me what this is all about? Fighting at school. It isn’t like you, is it?’

  ‘Lisa started it. She called me a nerd.’

  ‘And so you hit her?’

  Diane nodded and took a bite of her sandwich. Ian felt the blood rushing into his face.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Di. You can’t do this! What…I don’t know what you’re thinking! I am holding on to this house by a thread. I am working every day for you, and you are being a little brat! I don’t deserve this from you, you know that?’

  The bowl sailed across the room, soup arcing out behind it. It shattered where it landed. Diane’s bowl. Ian went silent. She stood on her chair, making small grunting noises as she tore the sandwich and squeezed the bread and butter into paste.

  ‘You never listen to me! You always take everyone else’s side!’

  ‘Diane…’

  ‘When?’ she screamed. ‘Exactly when in all this do I start to matter?’

  It was her mother’s voice, her mother’s tone and vocabulary. Ian’s chest ached suddenly, and the thought came unbidden What has Candice said in front of that drawing? Diane turned and bolted from the room.

  When the shards of their dinner were disposed of, the salt of soup and sweet of sandwich buried alike in the disposal, Ian went to her. In the dark of her room, Diane was curled on her bed. He sat beside her and stroked her hair.

  ‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’ she said, her voice thick with tears. She didn’t mean fighting or throwing soup bowls. She meant that she had done nothing to deserve her mother’s absence.

  ‘I know, sweetie. I know you didn’t.’

  ‘I want to see Mrs. Birch.’

  He felt his hand falter, forced it to keep touching her, keep reassuring her that he was there, that they were a family, that all would be well.

  ‘If you want, sweetie,’ he said. ‘We can do that if you want.’

  He felt her nod. That night, trying to sleep, he thought of every mean-spirited thing he’d ever said to Diane, of every slight and disappointment and failure that he’d added to her burden. Candice’s letter – the private one she’d sent to him – rang in his mind. Diane would be confessing all his sins to someone he’d never met, who would be taking confidences from his daughter that he might never know.

  For all the weeks and months that he’d silently prayed for someone to help, someone to shoulder part of the burden of Diane’s soul, the granting tasted bitter. His fears were unfounded.

  The time came, and Mrs. Birch – a thick woman with a pocked face and gentle voice – became a character in Diane’s tales of her days. He waited with a sense of dread, but no recriminations came back to him from the school, no letters condemning him as a man and a father. In fact, over the weeks, Diane seemed to become more herself. The routine of fight and reconciliation with Kit, the occasional missive from Flat Diane’s latest hosts, the complaints about schoolwork and clothes and how little money he had to spend on her all came almost back to normal. Once, he saw what might have been anger when Diane saw a photograph of her mother. After that he noticed that she had stopped asking when Mommy was coming home. He couldn’t have said, if asked, whether the sorrow, the sense of triumph, or the guilt over that sense was the strongest of his reactions.

  Everything was fine until the night in February when she woke up screaming and didn’t stop.

  The picture is cheap – the color balance is off, giving the man’s face an unnatural yellow tint. He is in his later twenties, perhaps his early thirties, the presentiment of jowls already plucking the flesh of his jaws. His hair is short and pale. His eyes are blue.

  In the picture, Flat Diane has been tape
d around a wide pillar, her arms and legs bending back out of sight. A long black cloth wraps across where the eyes might be, had Ian drawn them in; a blindfold.

  The man who Ian doesn’t know, has never met, is caressing a drawn-in breast. His tongue protrudes from his viciously grinning mouth, its tip flickering distance from the silhouette’s thigh. He looks not like Satan, but like someone who wishes that he were, someone trying very hard to be.

  The writing on the back of the photograph is block letters, written in blue felt-tip.

  It reads: Flat Diane has gone astray.

  A new photograph comes every week. Some might be amusing to another person, most make him want to retch.

  The best trick Hell has to play against its inmates is to whisper to them that this – this now – is the bottom. Nothing can be worse than this. And then to pull the floor away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ian said, refusing to understand. ‘I didn’t catch that.’

  Mrs. Birch leaned back, her wide, pitted face tired and impassive. She laced her hands on her desk. The hiss of the heating system was the only sound while she brought herself to break the news again. This time, she took a less direct approach.

  ‘Diane has always had an anger problem. There’s no good time to lose your mother, but this stage of development is particularly bad. And I think that accounts for a lot of her long-term behaviors. The fighting, the acting out in class, but these new issues…’

  ‘Child protective services?’ Ian said, able at last to repeat the counselor’s statement and plumb the next depth of hell. ‘You called child protective services?’

  ‘The kind of sudden change we’ve seen in her – the nightmares, the anxiety attacks…She’s in fifth grade, Mr. Bursen. No kid in fifth grade should be having anxiety attacks. When she went to the doctor, you and he and two nurses together couldn’t get her to undress, and you say she never had a problem with it before. That kind of sudden change means trauma. Nothing does that but trauma.’

  Ian closed his eyes, the heel of his palm pressed to brow, rubbing deeply. His body shook, but it seemed unconnected to his terrible clarity of mind, like the tremors were something being done to him.

  ‘The Buspar seems to be helping,’ he said. An idiot change of subject, and not at all to the point, but Mrs. Birch shifted in her chair and went there with him.

  ‘There are a lot of anti-anxiety drugs,’ she agreed. ‘Some of them may help. But only with the symptoms, not the problem. And the trauma, whatever it is…it may be something ongoing.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘She’s graduating in a few weeks here. Next year’s middle school, and I won’t be able to see her any more. With CPS, you’ll have a caseworker, someone who isn’t going to change every time she switches schools. And who knows? Maybe the investigation will help. I’m sorry. About all of this. I really am. But it’s the right thing.’

  Now it was Ian’s turn to go silent, to gather himself. Speaking the words was like standing at the edge of a cliff.

  ‘You think I’m fucking my kid.’

  ‘No,’ Mrs. Birch said in the voice of a woman for whom this territory was not new. ‘But I think somebody is.’

  Diane waited for him in the outer office, looking smaller than she was, folded in on herself. He forced himself to look at her as she was, and not as he wanted her to be. She forced a smile and raised a hand, sarcastic and sad. Ian knelt at her feet and took her hand, but Diane would not meet his gaze. Mrs. Birch was a presence he felt behind him, but didn’t see.

  ‘Sweetie,’ he said.

  Diane didn’t look up. He reached out to stroke her hair, but hesitated, pulled back. It was that fear that touching his child would be interpreted as sex that brought home how much they had lost.

  ‘It’s going to be okay, sweetie,’ he said, and Diane nodded, though she didn’t believe it. When he stood, she scooped up her book bag and went out with him. In the hallway, with Mrs. Birch still haunting the door to the office, Diane reached up and put her hand in his. It was a thin victory, hardly any comfort at all.

  The clouds were close, smelling of rain. He drove home slowly, the sense of disconnection, of unreality, growing as the familiar streets passed by. Diane sat alert but silent until they were almost home.

  ‘Are they going to make me live with Mom?’

  A pang of fear so sharp it was hard to differentiate from nausea struck him, but he kept his voice calm. He couldn’t let her think they might lose each other.

  ‘Make you? No, sweet. There’s going to be someone from the state who’s going to want to talk to you, but that’s all.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘They’re going to ask you questions,’ he continued, the words leaking from him like air from a pricked balloon. ‘You just need to tell them the truth. Even if you get embarrassed or someone told you that you shouldn’t tell them something, you should tell them the truth.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He pulled into the driveway, their house – Christ, the mortgage payment was a week late already; he had to remember to mail the check tomorrow – looming in the twilight. The lawn was the spare, pale green of spring.

  ‘You should tell me the truth too,’ he said, amazed by how sane he sounded, how reasonable. ‘Sweetie? Is there anyone who’s doing things to you? Things you don’t like?’

  ‘Like am I getting molested?’

  Amazing too how old she had become. He killed the engine. There had to be some way to ask gently, some approach to this where he could still treat her like a child, still protect her innocence. He didn’t know it, couldn’t find it. The rich scent of spring was an insult.

  ‘Are you?’ he asked.

  Diane’s eyes focused on the middle distance, her face a mask of concentration. Slowly, she shook her head, but her hands plucked at the seat, popping the cloth upholstery in wordless distress.

  ‘If something were happening, Di, you could tell me. There wouldn’t be anything to be afraid of.’

  ‘It’s not so bad during the day,’ she said. ‘It’s at night. It’s like I know things…there’s things I know and things I can almost remember. But they didn’t happen.’

  ‘You’re sure they didn’t?’

  A hesitation, but a nod – firm and certain.

  ‘The doctor’s going to want to examine you,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want him to.’

  ‘Would it be better with a different doctor?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What if it was a woman? Would that make it easier?’

  Diane frowned out the window of the car.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said softly. Then, ‘I don’t want to be crazy.’

  ‘You’re not, sweet. You’re not crazy. No more than I am.’

  They ate dinner together, talking about other things, laughing even. A thin varnish of normalcy that Ian felt his daughter clinging to as desperately as he was. Afterwards, Kit called, and Diane retreated to gossip in privacy while Ian cleaned the dishes. He read her to sleep, watching her chest from the corner of his eye until her breath was steady and deep and calm. He left a night light glowing, a habit she’d returned to recently.

  He sat in the kitchen and slowly, his hands shaking, laid out the pictures of Flat Diane – the ones recently arrived, the ones he hadn’t shown her. He shuffled them, rearranged them, spread them out like tarot.

  It had been stupid, sending out their real address. Ian saw that now, and twisted the thought to better feel the pain of it. What if this mad fucker had tracked down Diane because Ian had as good as sent out directions to her…?

  But no, he didn’t believe that. Or that Tohiro or one of her teachers or some evil pizza delivery man had targeted her. The photographs were too much a coincidence, the timing too precise.

  He recalled vividly his art history teacher back at university, back at home in Scotland. The old man had told each of them to bring in a picture of a person they loved – mother, father, brother, lover, pet. And then, he’d told them to gouge out the eye
s. The shocked silence was the first moment of his lecture on the power of image, the power of art. These were dumb bits of paper, but each of them that touched pen-tip to a beloved eye knew – did not believe, but knew – that the pictures were connected with the people they represented.

  Ian had sent his daughter’s soul voyaging. He hadn’t even considered the risks. It was worse than sending only their address; he might as well have delivered her, trussed and helpless. And now…

  And now Flat Diane had gone astray.

  With a boning knife, he cut out the blond man’s blue eyes, but he felt the effort’s emptiness. Nothing so poetic for him. Instead, he took the envelopes to his study, turned on his computer, and scanned in the bastard’s face. When it was saved, he dropped it into email and then got on the phone.

  ‘Hello?’ Candice said from a thousand miles away. Her voice was uncertain – wondering, he supposed, who would be calling her so late at night.

  ‘It’s Ian. Check your email.’

  The pause would have been strained if he’d cared more. If this had still been about the two of them and what they’d had and lost and why. Only it wasn’t and the hesitation at the far end of the line only made him impatient.

  ‘Ian, what’s this about?’

  ‘Flat Diane, actually. I’ve had a letter for her. Several. I need to know who the man is in the pictures.’

  Another pause, but this one different. Ian could hear it in the way she breathed. Intimacy can lead to this, he supposed. Teach you how to read a woman by her breath on the far end of a phone line.

  ‘You already know,’ he said. ‘Don’t you.’

  ‘My computer’s in another room. I can call you back.’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ he said.

  She was back within five minutes, the hard plastic fumbling as she picked the handset back up giving way to her voice.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ian,’ she said. ‘This is my fault. His name is Stan Leckey. He…he was a neighbor of mine when I came out here. A friend.’

  ‘A lover?’

  ‘No, Ian. Just a friend. But…he started saying things that made me…We had a falling out. I got a restraining order. He moved away eight or nine months ago.’