ODD?

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “I have very little left to feel pain with but inside, yes, I feel this.”

  “Anguish is not pain and neither is regret.”

  “But it hurts.”

  “That will all go soon.”

  “But I don’t want it to.”

  He steps back while assistants pull away long, dark loops all held together with white webbing. They pulse and throb.

  “You want balance,” he says.

  “Everybody wants balance.” Balance is all we have. I’ve always wanted balance.

  He takes a dark bag from inside me. That’s my stomach, all of my final meal inside there. “They said I could have that.”

  “You had it. Now you give back. That’s balance.”

  “Did you know that in the days before protein vats there used to be an animal called lamb? It was an actual, live little beast with legs and a face. It stood under the sky and ate plants. People ate it. Killed it and ate the meat inside it.”

  The doctor does not look at me.

  “Did you know that the sky is blue?” The doctor’s eyes are also blue. He should know this. He should know that inside he has the sky and that he shows it to everyone who sees him, everyone he sees.

  One of the assistants has gone to the machine on the wall, now. Unlooping coils of white plastic and filling them with a clear liquid. Another is doing something to my neck. I still feel so strong. I make my hands into fists, I feel the muscles in my arms bunching up.

  “What are you doing?”

  The assistants look at each other. They don’t speak to me.

  “What are you doing? Why don’t you tell me? Tell me what you’re doing. What’s he doing?”

  “This is old technology,” the doctor says. “From the days when people were opened up and repaired by having organs of the dead transplanted into their bodies. This machine performs the action of heart and lungs.” He shakes his head as if he thinks this is barbaric.

  “It hurts. It all hurts.”

  “Tell me where.”

  “Inside me. In my stomach. In my guts.” I hold my hands over my belly but he can’t see them. Invisible hands over a space that has nothing in it to hurt.

  “What you feel is regret.”

  “No! She was wonderful and glorious and nothing and everything. I hated her. It was her fault. Why am I being punished for something that wasn’t my fault? That filthy little feral wasn’t my fault. It started inside her.” The assistant standing beside me is doing something to my neck and jaw so that when I say inside, the word comes out crushed. A blue hand blots at my face, clears my vision. My tears are getting in his way. “You have to. You have to listen. Don’t lose anything. Don’t drop anything, I’m going to need that. I’m going to need it all back.”

  The doctor turns, formally, to the mirror, the window. “We are proceeding to the penultimate stage.”

  The magistrate’s voice comes through the speakers, strong and steady. The sort of voice that would placate women and soothe their screaming, blatant, feral, fry. She sounds so kind. ‘Balance to be restored according to Section III, Chapter VII.’

  “Things will change, now,” the doctor says, “and you won’t be able to speak any more.”

  I hear assistants whispering and there’s a low hum from the machine. Red fills the tubes, rushes away from me into the machine. I watch as spinning pumps turn red across the face of the machine. A second set of tubes lead back to me. For a moment they are filled with clear liquid and then the red comes racing back and the circuit is complete.

  “Is there anything you would like to say?” There is a line of sweat sticking the doctor’s hair to his forehead.

  “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t mean it. I loved her.”

  He raises a pair of shears. The mouth of them curved like the beak of a predatory bird.

  “There were seagulls,” I say.

  He pauses. “Seagulls?” A slight inflection to his voice. Curiosity. Doubt? “What are seagulls?”

  “In the sky. At the beach. Birds. Flying birds. Flying, squawking birds. They were all around us. White and silver and red.”

  He turns his gaze down and I hear him breathe, a low hiss. He cuts with his shears. Crack. Snap.

  “We both saw them!” I want to say more, I want to tell him, but I can’t. He’s broken me. My mouth and tongue still work but no air is going through. I make the word birds with my lips but nobody sees.

  They were more wonderful than anything from books or TV. They stood on the shore and squabbled about. Their feet were broad and flat, they didn’t sink into the sand the way ours did. I can feel the sand. I can feel it between my toes. We ran at them and the birds lifted so easily into the air. I wanted to follow them. She laughed and we ran along the beach, flapping our arms.

  The doctor holds up something that looks like part of a cage. People used to keep birds in cages. I’ve seen pictures of that. I spread my arms out from the sides of the table and flap them. Nothing moves. The doctor has something red in his hands. It moves and twitches. It is a bird. It’s trying to escape. He puts it into a bowl and I don’t see it any more. Why doesn't it just fly up?

  There’s silence inside my head and I realise that up until now, for every day and hour and minute and second of my life, I’ve been hearing my blood pulsing around through me, past the membranes of my ears. Now there’s just the sound of the ocean. All this time I’ve had the ocean right here with me. I laugh out loud and nobody hears me.

  He lifts something else. Wings! I had wings. All along I had the method of escape inside me—small, grey wings. Why didn’t anybody ever tell me about the wings? The assistant brings a cart across, on it is the biggest tub. The doctor stands aside and assistants gather to pick up something large. I see it for a moment before they put it in the tub. A red cage. Empty.

  “We are increasing the anaesthetic load now,” the doctor says. “You won’t be able to move your lips any more.”

  I can still hear, though. Buzz. Buzzzzzzzz. Bees became extinct in 2025. Except for here. Hair is raining past me. It hangs in my eyelashes. I blink and blink but the hair stays there. I wait for one of them to brush it away so that I can see properly, but they don’t. My view of the bench changes. They are tipping me forward. A hand covers my face.

  My face. There is still a difference for me between I and my face, even though face is all I have. When the hand comes away, I am blinded a second time, just for a moment. Then I can see again. One of the assistants walks away, carrying a bowl so heavy his hands shake with the weight of it. I try to blink but I cannot. Everything is so very, very bright.

  Over there, on the bench, there are bowls and buckets and basins and tubs with me in them. But I'm over here. No. Am I over here, looking at them, or am I over there, being watched by an eye? Eye or I? I or eye?

  The doctor leans in. He’s got a power tool. He’s a powerful tool. He’s a tool for the power. “This will be very loud for you,” he says. “There’s nothing we can do about the noise. I apologise.”

  I do not accept his apology.

  It screams at me. The room turns into a silver-blue blur. A terrible smell of burning has entered the cavity of my nostrils and been carried back inside my head. Hot, sawn bone. What if I could escape along the wavelength of the vibration back into the past or break it open so that the ocean spilled out into the corridors and cubicles and meeting rooms and agoras? What if I could undo that thing I did? That crime they say I committed? Unmake them the way they are unmaking me? One life, one mouth, one more tiny need in all our thousands?

  The doctor holds something in front of me, a shallow bowl, pink and red. “I believe that you can still hear me. We will leave your right eye.”

  Blue hands pass before me. The colour of the sky. I see a jawbone, teeth and tongue being taken away, but they are not mine. I can still feel mine. I am still me inside here. Somewhere. I am still somewhere here.

  I can smell the ocean, fresh and salt. Feel the cold spray and windblown sand.


  Their hands come close and the room revolves. I can no longer hear their footsteps over the roar of ocean and the cries of the gulls.

  A man with blue skies is looking down at me.

  A man with blue hands walks to a machine. Its red flow is all in balance.

  It isn’t too late.

  I’m still here.

  I’m still me inside here.

  I’m still me, thinking. I am a puzzle, constructed, disassembled, rebuilt. None of them have noticed that my arms have turned into wings. The birds of bones are filled with air. Red goes surging away from me and pure, clear, emptiness comes rushing up the tube towards me. It is all too easy and too wonderful. Then a hand and then nothing. Nothing. Not darkness, just nothing, only me. There’s still me. There’s still me thinking. I think, therefore I am. I think. I still think. I think, therefore I am. I think, therefore I am. I think, therefore—

  Can they see me with their cameras now? Can they see me lifting above them? Can they hear the ocean and smell it? And me in the eye-blue sky all full of wings.

  THE HEAD

  Karl Hans Strobl

  Translated by Gio Clairval

  Karl Hans Strobl (1877 — 1946) published a number of dark, strange, often hallucinogenic tales during his career, as well as the cult classic Lemuria. As the editor of Der Orchideengarten, the European equivalent of Weird Tales, he helped influence early twentieth century weird fiction. Strobl’s active role with the Nazis led to his work being banned by the Allied forces, but stories like “The Head” (1906) demonstrate the odd and enduring power of his work. This is a new translation of “The Head” commissioned specially for this anthology.

  The room was completely dark . . . all curtains pulled . . . not a flicker of light from the street, and quite still. My friend, myself and the stranger held each other’s hands in a spasmodic, quivering grasp. Utter terror lingered about us, within us . . .

  And then . . . a white, skeletal, luminescent hand pierced the darkness, moving toward us, and began writing with the pencil set on the table around which we were seated. We could not see what the hand was writing, and still we felt the words inside us . . . as they were written . . . printed in letters of fire before our eyes . . .

  It was the story of the hand, and of the person to whom the hand had once belonged, that the white, luminescent hand was scribbling on the paper, in the deepest darkness of midnight:

  —As I climb the red-carpeted steps . . . a strange sensation grips my heart. Something swings back and forth in my chest . . . a large pendulum. The edges of the pendulum are as sharp as razor blades, and each time the pendulum grazes my ribs, I feel a searing pain . . . an oppression trying to force a scream out of me. But I clamp my teeth shut so that no sound can pass my lips, and clench my fists, tied together behind my back; so hard do I clench them that blood spurts from under my fingernails.

  Now I am at the top. —Everything is ready; all they are waiting for is me. —Unable to move, I let them shave the nape of my neck. Then I ask for permission to speak to the people one last time. Permission is granted . . . I turn around to take in the sea of bystanders crowding together, heads touching heads, at the foot of the guillotine, all those stolid, dull, bestial faces, some filled with smug ignorance, some with obscene lust, the mass of beings, this outrageous mockery of humanity, and all of a sudden the whole business strikes me as so ridiculous I burst into enormous laughter.

  And then I see my executioners’ officious faces tense with disapproving lines . . . How impudent of me not to take the matter seriously, to dismiss the drama with my carefree laughs! . . . I do not wish to irritate these good souls further, and I begin my speech:

  “Citizens,” I say, “citizens, it is for you and for Liberty that I die. You haven’t followed my lead, and you have condemned me . . . but I love you. As a token of my affection, listen to my testament. Everything in my possession shall be yours. Here . . .”

  And turning my back to them, I make an unmistakable gesture . . .

  . . . All around me arise indignant cries . . . quickly, and with a sigh of relief, I lay my head across the half-moon-shaped yoke . . . a quick hissing noise . . . I feel an icy burn on my neck . . . My head falls into the basket.

  Then I feel as if I had immersed my head in water, and the water had filled my ears. The sounds of the outside world come to me muffled and indistinct, a whispering and rustling around my temples. My neck tingles in the area that was sectioned, as if rubbed with a large amount of ether that is now evaporating.

  I know, my head is in the basket—my body lies up there, on the scaffold, but I do not feel the complete separation yet. I sense that my body, feebly shaking, has collapsed to the left, that my clenched fists, tied behind my back, are still twitching slightly, and that my fingers stretch out and then flex convulsively. I also sense blood spurting out of my sectioned neck and I know that, as the blood flows, my movements become weaker and weaker. The awareness of my body diminishes until, under the sectioned neck, everything dwindles into blackness.

  I have lost my body. In the utter darkness growing below the neck, I suddenly glimpse red spots. These red spots glow like fires in a black, stormy night. They dissolve and spread like oil droplets on still waters. . . When the edges of two spots touch, I feel mild electric shocks in my eyelids, and my hair stands up on my head. And now the red spots spin, faster, ever faster. . . uncountable roiling wheels of fire, solar discs of molten embers . . . all that is left is a swelling of furious whirls licked by streaming tongues of fire, and I have to close my eyes. But I still feel the burning wheels inside me; between my teeth are grains of sand like vitrified, dry glass. Finally, the discs of fire pale, their mad swirling slows down; they flicker out, one after the other, and for the second time darkness erases everything below my sectioned neck.

  A pleasant weariness takes hold of me and I let myself go, unconcerned; my eyelids grow heavy and I cannot lift them any longer, but I see everything around me. It is as if my eyelids were transparent, like glass. I see everything through a milky veil laced with pale-red thin arteries. My sight is sharper, its scope wider than before, when I had a body. My tongue rests—still, paralyzed, indolent, as heavy as clay—in the hollow of my mouth.

  In contrast, my sense of smell is a thousand times sharper; not only do I see things but I can also smell them, each different, with its own distinctive odor.

  In the wicker basket, beneath the guillotine blade, rest three other heads apart from my own, the heads of two men and one woman. I notice two beauty spots on the woman’s rouged cheeks, a golden harrow stuck through her tall, coiffured mass of powdered hair, and two exquisite diamond rings in the delicate earlobes. The two men’s heads lie face down in a pool of half-dried blood. Across one runs an old gash badly healed; the hair of the other are already graying and sparse. The woman’s head has eyes screwed tight and is motionless. I know that she is watching me through her closed eyelids.

  We lie there for hours. My gaze follows the sunlight as it inches upward along the guillotine. Evening comes and I begin to feel chilly. My nose is stiff and cold, and the coolness of evaporating ether on my neck is becoming unpleasant.

  All of a sudden, a savage racket breaks out. It comes near, quite near. A vigorous fist grabs my hair and pulls me out of the basket. Then a sharp object pierces my neck, a spear point. A mob of drunken sans-culottes and harridans has fallen upon our heads. In the hands of a robust, red-faced fellow, the spear with my head on top swings high above this wild, frenzied crowd that screams and jeers.

  A tangle of men and women is fighting over the jewels ripped off from the woman’s hair and ears. They throw themselves at one another’s throats—a struggle of hands and feet, teeth and fingernails.

  Now the scuffle is over. The tangle separates—those who have secured a part of the spoils are surrounded by envious partners in crime . . .

  The head is lying on the ground, disfigured and begrimed, showing the marks of blows. The violent dispute over the earrings
has torn the ears to shreds; powdered strands of deep-gold hair trail in the dust, fallen from the exquisite coiffure, now disheveled. Some sharp blade has slit a nostril open. The forehead bears the mark of a boot heel. The eyelids are half open, the blank, glassy eyes staring fixedly ahead.

  Finally, the crowd sets forth. Four heads are stuck on top of long spears. The people’s fury is directed mainly at the man with graying hair. He must have been particularly unpopular. I do not know him. They spit and throw filth at him. Now a handful of garbage hits him in the ear. What is it? Did he not twitch? Very slightly, almost imperceptibly, a muscle in his cheek moved, and I am the only one to notice.

  Night comes. They have placed our heads in a row on the iron bars of a palace gate. I do not recognize the place. Paris is a big city. In the courtyard, citizens in arms camp around a huge bonfire. Tavern songs, jokes, roars of laughter. The smell of roast mutton reaches me. The fire gives off a scent of precious rosewood. The crazed crowd has dragged all the furniture outside and is burning it, piece by piece. Now they carry out an elegant, gracious sofa with delicate scrollwork . . . but they hesitate and do not throw it into the flames. A young woman with crude features, bodice unfastened and shift open to reveal the curves of her full breasts, addresses the men with brisk gestures.

  Is she trying to coax them into letting her have the expensive sofa? Has she suddenly felt the desire to play the duchess?

  The men are still hesitating.

  The woman points to the railing where our heads perch and then back to the sofa.

  The men hesitate—finally she pushes them aside, unsheathes one of the men’s sabers, kneels down and, using the blade, busies herself leveling out the tiny enameled nails with which the thick upholstery is attached to the frame. Now the men are helping her.

  Again she points to our heads.

  One of the men moves with half-hearted steps over to the railing. He looks for the one she wants. He shimmies up an iron bar and takes down the ill-treated, mutilated head of the woman.

  The man shudders with horror but appears to be acting under compulsion. One would think that the young woman over there, near the fire, that woman in a red petticoat and shirt opened to reveal her breasts, keeps all these men around her enthralled, with her lusty, wild gaze, like a beast of prey. His arm stretched out stiffly, holding the head by the hair, he carries it near the fire. With a savage squeal of delight, the woman grabs the lifeless head. Grasping the long hair, she waves the head about and swings it over the flames one, two, three times.