The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  When the sun comes up and the doors groan open and the flag struggles up into the pale air above her, she’s ready. By the time the buses come marching in disciplined formation up the drive, he’s awake. He doesn’t seem alarmed by his abduction; just sleepy and bewildered and quiescent. They get his overalls on and his velcro firmly strapped. He observes the patterns described by the hundreds of small milling bodies with grave interest. She holds onto his hand as far as the classroom door. For some time she sits in the car and watches, but nothing comes or goes until she does.

  Alone in the house, the friend trickles from room to room, carried by a draught that floats past the curtains, through the walls, and around the doors. The molecules of the air bruise the friend’s body and it suffers this.

  In her car, driving, the mother thinks of the friend with shaken pity, and in his classroom the boy draws a picture with a blank face and long arms like tangled ropes and a sky full of dashes like rain falling like arrows or like shooting stars.

  The friend drifts into a cobweb and clings there till its weight rends the strands and it resumes its meandering course. Where it drags along the floor, dust gathers on its skin, smothering the pores. The eyes of the friend empty and its mouth consumes itself. At last, with a sigh, it disperses.

  At the end of the day, the mother watches to see that the boy files out with the others, and then in her car she shoots out ahead of the schoolbus to be ready to greet him when he jumps down the steps to disembark at the end of their drive. He’s glowing like a new penny and he navigates the yard in a series of bounds. He has a collage for the fridge, of black horses pasted on a picture of a coral reef, and he has a caterpillar made of pipe cleaners. The mother and the boy nestle the caterpillar in the grass at the base of the sycamore to protect the treehouse.

  There are mimeographed lists from the teacher, of Things to Buy and Things to Do, and the boy has won a ribbon for thinking of the most words beginning with A. At lunchtime the other children had raised an outcry over the boy’s purple pickled egg, and the mother promises that tomorrow he will have a white-bread sandwich cut in triangles and an apple with a leaf still on the stem. For recess they learned to jump rope while singing songs and afterward the teacher read a story that the boy had never heard, about a child who flies on the back of the wind. The boy runs about the house, visiting the attic and the basement and the bathroom, as if to see how different they’ve become. He told a girl in his class about the pond and the girl didn’t believe that he has one and the mother says that the girl can come and see for herself, with some other of the boy’s classmates, if he would like.

  During dinner the boy bounces up and down, upsetting the jar of cucumber salad. He runs out twice to make sure that he has everything in his backpack that he’ll need at school the next day, and three times to check that the caterpillar is still in place, guarding the treehouse. He doesn’t mention the friend, and his eyes are the color that the mother remembers.

  By bedtime the boy is exhausted and the mother tucks him in and sings mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey and he accompanies her in a contented blur of humming that spins around the edge of the tune. When she turns out the light and clicks closed the door he’s already quite asleep.

  He wakes not because of the volume of the breathing in the room or because of its horrible wet crackling and sucking, but because of the heat the breath gives off, a heat like an anvil, which crushes him into the bed. The windows are fogged over and the moon leaks through the droplets on the glass in weak smears of sickly light, like the ghosts of murdered stars.

  He knows his waking has been noticed, for whatever it is is now holding its breath. He can hear the interminable, deliberate creak of the floorboards where something is shifting its weight under the bed with infinite caution and cunning. Then a terrible quiet. The boy quakes and his spasmodic gasp is like a slap cracking across the silent face of the darkness. The longest pause. At last the bed begins to joggle teasingly and then to rock violently so he can barely keep from sliding off. Every time his hand or foot slips over the side of the mattress he sobs with terror and feels the humid wind where something has just missed its snatch at him. The earthquake in the bed is because the thing is shaking with laughter. Whatever is under the bed is laughing.

  Then the laughter stops, and the smell comes up, dank and congealed, and he can feel the putrefying odor worming inside his pyjamas and bloating his skin with its stink, and the monster stretches itself. The room tilts as the monster ripples its spine, voluptuous; and the flayed leather of its body rustles and sucks as it moves, and it unfurls from under the bed, he sees its arm creep out, as if on a thousand little millipedal feet, right there before him, in the same air that’s burning and lashing against his own starting eyeballs, and the nails of the thing shred whatever faint moonlight has crept through the steam in the room, and the boy knows, he knows, its head is coming out next, and he hears the cut and the thrust and the singing of its teeth as they emerge, smiling and smiling and smiling.

  The Lion’s Den

  Steve Duffy

  Steve Duffy (1963–) is a contemporary British writer who has lived in Norfolk and London, but is currently living and working on the North Wales coast. He is a recipient of the International Horror Guild Award for the story ‘The Rag-and-Bone Men’ and has published two short story collections, Tragic Life Stories and The Moment of Panic. Duffy’s work has appeared in several of Datlow and Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies. ‘In the Lion’s Den’ (2009) is one of those most difficult of weird fictions to write: a tale in which references to modern technology add to, rather than detract from, the rising sense of unease.

  It’s so familiar now, that grainy digital footage of the lions’ den. We’ve rerun it a hundred times, picked over it obsessively, advanced it frame by fuzzy frame. I’m sure all the experts, the psychologists, the security consultants that were brought in to analyse the clip (but who failed entirely in their glib attempts to explain it all away), feel in some way that they themselves experienced the whole thing. It’s easy to forget that only a few people actually witnessed the incident first-hand, that Thursday afternoon in the late autumn of the last year of the old century. I was one of them. My colleagues and I saw it all firsthand. It gave us the edge on all the rest; we saw and heard and felt things no camera could catch, let alone one being operated by an overexcited amateur. But even we remain at a loss to explain exactly what happened…

  Perhaps we’re all trying too hard. Most people have written it off long since as fundamentally inexplicable – just one of those things. The boy was mad, they said, to do what he did: simple as that. But since when has madness been synonymous with simplicity? Granted, the incident was simple enough, on the face of it. Maybe it was precisely that simplicity which for some of us made the whole thing impossible, even then, to dismiss.

  The zoo sits amongst quiet leafy suburbs, out where the city begins to lose interest in itself. Built in the 1960s, its enclosures are adequate – at a pinch – to the animals’ needs, in terms of size and layout. Iron railings and concrete moats surround modest expanses of grassy slope and pruned-back leafless trees. An artificial river runs through the grounds, with an observation barge that sails on the hour, every hour; there are nocturamas for the insects, aviaries for the birds. On a day like that November day, a dull grey weekday nipped with the coming of winter, there will be only a handful of visitors. And I remember there were no school parties of screaming preteens, no coachloads of the elderly: only a handful of people wandering the broad tarmac paths between the enclosures, consulting their guides, adjusting the lenses on their cameras as the animals blinked listlessly back at them through the bars.

  In the observation tower above the main block is the surveillance post, with its panoramic view across the whole of the compound. Further out, beyond the perimeter walls, the rooftops of a thousand bungalows, chimney-tops and satellite dishes peeking through the screens of quick-growing leyla
ndii; beyond these, raw winter ground-mist on the plain, and the grey smudge of the distant city tower blocks. The view always depresses me, during my shifts in the tower. Maybe anyone who spends long enough around cages, whether as captive or keeper, will sooner or later feel the need for liberty, for transcendence; will at the very least catch himself gazing beyond the bars, meditating on the interconnected concepts of inside-outside. Reminding us where our duties lie, the CCTV cameras flick monotonously through their cycles of the main perimeter, pen to pen, avenue to avenue. Up in the God-seat we follow the sequence, indiscriminately surveilling animal and human, spectacle and spectator.

  As familiar as some of the animals are the regulars, those people who visit the zoo so frequently as to become instantly recognisable to the security staff. We have nicknames for them, and in some instances their photos pinned up on the cork-board, with cautionary Post-It notes attached. It’s our job to watch them and decide whether their interest in this or that animal goes beyond innocent curiosity; the endless enthralment of seeing a creature in its cage.

  Inevitably, you see, a zoo will attract certain types of people, over and above its core visitor group. These range from the mostly harmless – the lonely and inadequate, the homeless, the community-care brigade – through to the more problematic types, the obsessives, the neurotics, and in extreme instances the dangerously, even suicidally unhinged. With the former, our job consists mostly of moving them on at closing time, rousing them if they try to sleep in the dark musty tunnels of the nocturama or the vivarium, making sure they don’t present a nuisance to the staff or to other zoo users. With the latter, it can be very different.

  Most identify with a particular animal, usually to the exclusion of all others. Often, it’ll be monkeys, of which we have several species, or the great apes. They stand gripping the bars, watching as the simians dangle from their tyre swings or munch their way phlegmatically through buckets of bruised fruit. Occasionally, one will try to make contact: a hand will be thrust through the bars, and we need to be sure nothing is being passed that might be harmful, intentionally or otherwise. We took off one such woman a notepad and pencil; perhaps she expected the ape to communicate with her in some way or another, to provide some signifying rebus of his existence. On the pad she’d drawn herself, to a high degree of anatomical detail, in the pose of Leonardo’s Universal Man. Above the self-portrait she’d scrawled the words look monkey. In the enclosure the ape sighed, settled back into his flaccid hairy old-man’s pelt, scratched at his fleas with melancholy acceptance. Who knows? Perhaps he felt resentful that we’d confiscated the pad and pencil, denied him even this meagre opportunity for self-affirmation. They say an ape in the Paris zoo, given paintbrush and paper, once made a painting of the bars of his cage. But that’s another matter entirely. We’re keepers, first and foremost, not art critics. Before anything, it’s our job to keep the animals out of harm’s way.

  Some people, you see, come armed with more than pencils. We’ve confiscated knives from people, air-rifles; apples with razor-blades stuck inside them, more than once. Out-and-out mutilators are pretty uncommon, thank god, but all zoo staff are perpetually on their guard against them. Why would anyone do a thing like that? It’s well known that sadism presents early in life as a predilection for harming animals, but I’ve wondered sometimes: might there be a weird sort of jealousy mixed up with it too?

  Consider for a moment the lot of your average zoo animal. They need no affirmation, know no doubt; existentially, they’ve got it cracked. Even without the identifying plaque in front of its enclosure, an ape is still an ape, unchallengeable in the fact of its apehood. No insecurity, no inadequacy to speak of outside the basic social dynamics of the group: the ranking ladder, who gets to mate with which females, who’s in charge and who’s not. And what have these sad sacks of humans got, the ones who mock and throw stones? Not even a plaque in front of their enclosure. Perhaps it’s easier being a caged monkey then a caged man? But even so, it’d still be a pretty weak excuse. Just because an ape may have the existential edge on you is no reason to feed it a sandwich full of rat poison. We’re always on the lookout for these suspect types, the vagrant ones, the loiterers, the sunken-eyed prowlers round cages and pens.

  That day – that day and a thousand others, before and since – I was up in the God-seat, cycling through the CCTV feeds around the site. It was late in the afternoon; another two hours and we’d be closed. It hadn’t been a particularly busy day, and there were fewer than thirty people spread out across the whole expanse of the zoo. A minibus-full of teenagers with Down’s syndrome from a nearby sheltered-housing group; half-a-dozen students from the local college of art with folders and easels; two or three elderly couples; and a handful of unclassifiable adults. The kids were well-behaved enough for me not to worry about them getting up on top of walls or climbing fences, and the pensioners looked about ready to call it a day. I was concentrating on picking out the loners, the singletons.

  And that’s how I came to notice him on the CCTV: the boy, standing alongside the wall of the lion compound. He seemed young, not much older than a teenager, and at first I took him for one of the art students. But he had no sketchpad, no portfolio. As I looked, two or three of the students went past, and none of them acknowledged him, nor he them. I activated the manual override on the camera controls, and zoomed in on the boy.

  He was facing slightly away from the camera, so I tried another angle from a different side of the compound. That didn’t give me enough of a close-up. Back on the original camera, all I could make out was his clothing. He was wearing jeans and a camouflage jacket, and his sunbleached hair was hacked into a spiky straggling brush. Come on, sonny, I found myself muttering, show yourself. Obligingly he half-turned, and for the first time I got a look at his face.

  Stubble, a scrappy sort of beard; but it’s been a while now since stubble signified anything. He might have been sleeping rough, or he might have been a fashion model. It cut both ways. He was gaunt-looking, hollow-cheeked, but reasonably clean. His behaviour didn’t strike me as particularly furtive, which went in his favour, but neither did he seem like one of those people who stand by the cage long enough to watch the animals do their tricks, then wander off in search of the cafeteria and the gift shop. I was sufficiently interested to keep the live camera on him, while at the same time spooling back through the last half-hour of lion-enclosure footage on the auxiliary monitor.

  There he was. He’d hardly moved in all that time: as I glanced from the main monitor to the auxiliary, only the time-stamp on the latter showed up the difference. I was going to call it down on the walkie-talkie to one of the guards on the ground, but we were a man short that day anyway, so I decided to have a look myself. I handed over the control system to my colleague Graham Morris, told him where I was going and why, and picked up an on-charge walkie-talkie from the rack. I did briefly look at the firearms cabinet, where the guns and tranquilliser darts were kept, but decided against it. No sense in alarming anyone.

  Clanking down the metal steps from the surveillance post I had three or four possibilities in mind concerning our mystery visitor, assuming that he wasn’t some innocent sightseer who just happened to have a thing for lions. One, believe it or not, was drugs. I know it sounds ridiculous, not to say sick in the extreme, but we’ve had that problem in the past. A few years back one of our chimpanzees was slipped a dose of LSD, we think inside an apple. She went into an extended psychotic fugue, kept slamming her head into the bars till the vets had to put her down. That was radical by any standards: not particularly common, granted, but I hated to think what a tripping lion might do before we managed to sedate it.

  Another (and you shouldn’t get the wrong idea about this) was sex. Now I don’t mean to suggest I thought the boy was going to try anything directly with a lion – though it’s happened with most of the smaller mammals in the past, and at sea zoos practically all the time with porpoises and dolphins, so I’m told. There are all sorts of wa
ys to get your jollies, and we’ve dragged our fair share of flashers and masturbators away from the railings, before and since. What all that’s about I don’t pretend to know, except that sex is at the bottom of so much, one way or another. When something goes wrong inside, then it’s as likely to show up in a sexual context first as it is any other way, I suppose. But a lion…surely a lion would be a daunting enough proposition to make most people think twice?

  Of course there was the animal-rights angle, which from what I’d seen on the CCTV seemed a distinct possibility. The boy did have that look of the zealot about him, I thought, as I swiped my smartcard through the security lock on the way out of the staff compound; a definite whiff of high ideals and crazy dreams. But then the timing was all wrong for an attempted release. Animal-rights activists tend (for obvious reasons) to hit a zoo at night, but since we’d beefed up our perimeter security with trip alarms and night vision, the Animal Liberation Front might find it a more tempting option to hide in the light, so to speak. Or it might not be a jailbreak, but a demonstration of some kind – though to whom he was planning to demonstrate, in an all but empty zoo, I couldn’t quite imagine.

  As I crossed the main piazza there was still another possibility in the back of my mind, grimmer than the others, probably the one which was worrying me the most. Every day someone out there comes to the end of his tether, decides he can’t carry on any more, and starts looking for a really good method to end it all. How do you do it? Let me count the ways.