The Weird

by Ann

  But how much farther would that be?

  He ground his teeth together, feeling the pulsing at his temples. He struggled to remember the last sign.

  The next town. It might be a mile. Five miles. Fifty.

  Think! He said it, he thought it, he didn’t know which.

  If he could pull over, pull over right now and lie down for a few minutes.

  He seemed to see clear ground ahead. No rocks, no ditch. The shoulder, just ahead.

  Without thinking he dropped into neutral and coasted, aiming for it.

  The car glided to a stop.

  God, he thought.

  He forced himself to turn, reach into the back seat.

  The lid to the chest was already off. He dipped his fingers into the ice and retrieved two half-melted cubes, lifted them into the front seat, and began rubbing them over his forehead.

  He let his eyes close, seeing dull lights fire as he daubed at the lids, the rest of his face, the forehead again. As he slipped the ice into his mouth and chewed, it broke apart as easily as snow.

  He took a deep breath. He opened his eyes again.

  At that moment a huge tanker roared past, slamming an aftershock of air into the side of the car. The car rocked like a boat at sea.

  No. It was no good.

  So. So he could always turn back, couldn’t he? And why not? The Rest Area was only twenty, twenty-five minutes behind him. (Was that all?) He could pull out and hang a U and turn back, just like that. And then sleep. It would be safer there. With luck, Evvie wouldn’t even know. An hour’s rest, maybe two; that was all he would need.

  Unless – was there another Rest Area ahead?

  How soon?

  He knew that the second wind he felt now wouldn’t last, not for more than a few minutes. No, it wasn’t worth the chance.

  He glanced in the rearview mirror.

  Evvie was still down, a lumpen mound of blanket and hair.

  Above her body, beyond the rear window, the raised headlights of another monstrous truck, closing ground fast.

  He made the decision.

  He slid into first and swung out in a wide arc, well ahead of the blast of the truck, and worked up to fourth gear. He was thinking about the warm, friendly lights he had left behind.

  He angled in next to the Firebird and cut the lights.

  He started to reach for a pillow from the back, but why bother? It would probably wake Evvie, anyway.

  He wadded up his jacket, jammed it against the passenger armrest, and lay down.

  First he crossed his arms over his chest. Then behind his head. Then he gripped his hands between his knees. Then he was on his back again, his hands at his sides, his feet cramped against the opposite door.

  His eyes were wide open.

  He lay there, watching chain lightning flash on the horizon.

  Finally he let out a breath that sounded like all the breaths he had ever taken going out at once, and drew himself up.

  He got out and walked over to the rest room.

  Inside, white tiles and bare lights. His eyes felt raw, peeled. Finished, he washed his hands but not his face; that would only make sleep more difficult.

  Outside again and feeling desperately out of synch, he listened to his shoes falling hollowly on the cement.

  ‘Next week we’ve got to get organized…’

  He said this, he was sure, because he heard his voice coming back to him, though with a peculiar empty resonance. Well, this time tomorrow night he would be home. As unlikely as that seemed now.

  He stopped, bent for a drink from the water fountain.

  The footsteps did not stop.

  Now wait, he thought, I’m pretty far gone, but –

  He swallowed, his ears popping.

  The footsteps stopped.

  Hell, he thought, I’ve been pushing too hard. We. She. No, it was my fault, my plan this time. To drive nights, sleep days. Just so. As long as you can sleep.

  Easy, take it easy.

  He started walking again, around the corner and back to the lot.

  At the corner, he thought he saw something move at the edge of his vision.

  He turned quickly to the right, in time for a fleeting glimpse of something – someone – hurrying out of sight into the shadows.

  Well, the other side of the building housed the women’s rest room. Maybe it was Evvie.

  He glanced toward the car, but it was blocked from view.

  He walked on.

  Now the parking area resembled an oasis lit by firelight. Or a western camp, the cars rimming the lot on three sides in the manner of wagons gathered against the night.

  Strength in numbers, he thought.

  Again, each car he passed looked at first like every other. It was the flat light, of course. And of course they were the same cars he had seen a half-hour ago. And the light still gave them a dusty, abandoned look.

  He touched a fender.

  It was dusty.

  But why shouldn’t it be? His own car had probably taken on quite a layer of grime after so long on these roads.

  He touched the next car, the next.

  Each was so dirty that he could have carved his name without scratching the paint.

  He had an image of himself passing this way again – God forbid – a year from now, say, and finding the same cars parked here. The same ones.

  What if, he wondered tiredly, what if some of these cars had been abandoned? Overheated, exploded, broken down one fine midday and left here by owners who simply never returned? Who would ever know? Did the Highway Patrol, did anyone bother to check? Would an automobile be preserved here for months, years by the elements, like a snakeskin shed beside the highway?

  It was a thought, anyway.

  His head was buzzing.

  He leaned back and inhaled deeply, as deeply as he could at this altitude.

  But he did hear something. A faint tapping. It reminded him of running feet, until he noticed the lamp overhead.

  There were hundreds of moths beating against the high fixture, their soft bodies tapping as they struck and circled and returned again and again to the lens; the light made their wings translucent.

  He took another deep breath and went on to his car.

  He could hear it ticking, cooling down, before he got there. Idly he rested a hand on the hood. Warm, of course. The tires? He touched the left front. It was taut, hot as a loaf from the oven. When he took his hand away, the color of the rubber came off on his palm like burned skin.

  He reached for the door handle.

  A moth fluttered down onto the fender. He flicked it off, his finger leaving a streak on the enamel.

  He looked closer and saw a wavy, mottled pattern covering his unwashed car, and then he remembered. The rain, yesterday afternoon. The rain had left blotches in the dust, marking the finish as if with dirty fingerprints.

  He glanced over at the next car.

  It, too, had the imprint of dried raindrops – but, close up, he saw that the marks were superimposed in layers, over and over again.

  The Firebird had been through a great many rains.

  He touched the hood.

  Cold.

  He removed his hand, and a dead moth clung to his thumb. He tried to brush it off the hood, but other moth bodies stuck in its place. Then he saw countless shriveled, mummified moths pasted over the hood and top like peeling chips of paint. His fingers were coated with the powder from their wings.

  He looked up.

  High above, backed by banks of roiling cumulous clouds, the swarm of moths vibrated about the bright, protective light.

  So the Firebird had been here a very long time.

  He wanted to forget it, to let it go. He wanted to get back in the car. He wanted to lie down, lock it out, everything. He wanted to go to sleep and wake up in Los Angeles.

  He couldn’t.

  He inched around the Firebird until he was facing the line of cars. He hesitated a beat, then started moving.

 
A LeSabre.

  A Cougar.

  A Chevy van.

  A Corvair.

  A Ford.

  A Mustang.

  And every one was overlaid with grit.

  He paused by the Mustang. Once – how long ago? – it had been a luminous candy-apple red; probably belonged to a teenager. Now the windshield was opaque, the body dulled to a peculiar shade he could not quite place.

  Feeling like a voyeur at a drive-in movie theater, McClay crept to the driver’s window.

  Dimly he perceived two large outlines in the front seat.

  He raised his hand.

  Wait.

  What if there were two people sitting there on the other side of the window, watching him?

  He put it out of his mind. Using three fingers, he cut a swath through the scum on the glass and pressed close.

  The shapes were there. Two headrests.

  He started to pull away.

  And happened to glance into the back seat.

  He saw a long, uneven form.

  A leg, back of a thigh. Blonde hair, streaked with shadows. The collar of a coat.

  And, delicate and silvery, a spider web, spun between the hair and collar.

  He jumped back.

  His leg struck the old Ford. He spun around, his arms straight. The blood was pounding in his ears.

  He rubbed out a spot on the window of the Ford and scanned the inside.

  The figure of a man, slumped on the front seat.

  The man’s head lay on a jacket. No, it was not a jacket. It was a large, formless stain. In the filtered light, McClay could see that it had dried to a dark brown.

  It came from the man’s mouth.

  No, not from the mouth.

  The throat had a long, thin slash across it, reaching nearly to the ear.

  He stood there stiffly, his back almost arched, his eyes jerking, trying to close, trying not to close. The lot, the even light reflecting thinly from each windshield, the Corvair, the van, the Cougar, the LeSabre, the suggestion of a shape within each one.

  The pulse in his ears muffled and finally blotted out the distant gearing of a truck up on the highway, the death-rattle of the moths against the seductive lights.

  He reeled.

  He seemed to be hearing again the breaking open of doors and the scurrying of padded feet across paved spaces.

  He remembered the first time. He remembered the sound of a second door slamming in a place where no new car but his own had arrived.

  Or – had it been the door of his car slamming a second time, after Evvie had gotten back in?

  If so, how? Why?

  And there had been the sight of someone moving, trying to slip away.

  And for some reason now he remembered the Indian in the tourist town, slipping out of sight in the doorway of that gift shop. He held his eyelids down until he saw the shop again, the window full of kachinas and tin gods and tapestries woven in a secret language.

  At last he remembered clearly: the Indian had not been entering the store. He had been stealing away.

  McClay did not yet understand what it meant, but he opened his eyes, as if for the first time in centuries, and began to run toward his car.

  If I could only catch my goddamn breath, he thought.

  He tried to hold on. He tried not to think of her, of what might have happened the first time, of what he may have been carrying in the back seat ever since.

  He had to find out.

  He fought his way back to the car, against a rising tide of fear he could not stem.

  He told himself to think of other things, of things he knew he could control: mileages and motel bills, time zones and weather reports, spare tires and flares and tubeless repair tools, hydraulic jack and Windex and paper towels and tire iron and socket wrench and waffle cushion and traveler’s checks and credit cards and Dopp Kit (toothbrush and paste, deodorant, shaver, safety blade, brushless cream) and sunglasses and Sight Savers and tear-gas pen and fiber-tip pens and portable radio and alkaline batteries and fire extinguisher and desert water bag and tire gauge and motor oil and his money-belt with identification sealed in plastic.

  In the back of his car, under the quilt, nothing moved, not even when he finally lost his control and his mind in a thick, warm scream.

  The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats

  James Tiptree, Jr.

  James Tiptree, Jr. (1915–1987) was an award-winning American speculative fiction writer whose visionary stories and novels often seemed to have no antecedent. The author’s real name, not known publicly until 1977, was Alice Bradley Sheldon, which she termed ‘good camouflage’. Although Sheldon gained a sterling reputation within the science fiction field, winning the Hugo Award, her fantastical Quintana Roo stories set on the Yucatan Peninsula are also very powerful. Occasionally she would write within or at the edges of recognizable traditions of weird fiction, as exemplified by the very dark ‘The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats’ (1976).

  He comes shyly hopeful into the lab. He is unable to suppress this childishness which has deviled him all his life, this tendency to wake up smiling, believing for an instant that today will be different.

  But it isn’t; is not.

  He is walking into the converted cellars which are now called animal laboratories by this nationally respected university, this university which is still somehow unable to transmute its nationwide reputation into adequate funding for research. He squeezes past a pile of galvanized Skinner boxes and sees Smith at the sinks, engaged in cutting off the heads of infant rats. Piercing squeals; the headless body is flipped onto a wet furry pile on a hunk of newspaper. In the holding cage beside Smith the baby rats shiver in a heap, occasionally thrusting up a delicate muzzle and then burrowing convulsively under their friends, seeking to shut out Smith. They have previously been selectively shocked, starved, subjected to air blasts and plunged in ice water; Smith is about to search the corpses for appropriate neuroglandular effects of stress. He’ll find them, undoubtedly.

  Eeeeeeee – Ssskrick! Smith’s knife grates, drinking life.

  ‘Hello, Tilly.’

  ‘Hi.’ He hates his nickname, hates his whole stupid name: Tilman Lipsitz. He would go nameless through the world if he could. If he even could have something simple, Moo or Urg – anything but the absurd high-pitched syllables that have followed him through life: Tilly Lipsitz. He has suffered from it.

  Ah well. He makes his way around the pile of Purina Lab Chow bags, bracing for the fierce clamor of the rhesus. Their Primate Room is the ex-boiler room, really; these are tenements the university took over. The rhesus scream like sirens. Thud! Feces have hit the grill again; the stench is as strong as the sound. Lipsitz peers in reluctantly, mentally apologizing for being unable to like monkeys. Two of them are not screaming, huddled on the steel with puffy pink bald heads studded with electrode jacks. Why can’t they house the creatures better, he wonders irritably for the nth time. In the trees they’re clean. Well, cleaner, anyway, he amends, ducking around a stand of somebody’s breadboard circuits awaiting solder.

  On the far side is Jones, bending over a brightly lighted bench, two students watching mesmerized. He can see Jones’s fingers tenderly roll the verniers that drive the probes down through the skull of the dog strapped underneath. Another of his terrifying stereotaxes. The aisle of cages is packed with animals with wasted fur and bloody heads. Jones swears they’re all right, they eat; Lipsitz doubts this. He has tried to feed them tidbits as they lean or lie blear-eyed, jerking with wire terrors. The blood is because they rub their heads on the mesh; Jones, seeking a way to stop this, has put stiff plastic collars on several.

  Lipsitz gets past them and has his eye rejoiced by the lovely hourglass-shaped ass of Sheila, the brilliant Israeli. Her back is turned. He observes with love the lily waist, the heart-lobed hips that radiate desire. But it’s his desire, not hers; he knows that. Sheila, wicked Sheila; she desires only Jones, or perhaps Smith,
or even Brown or White – the muscular large hairy ones bubbling with professionalism, with cheery shop talk. Lipsitz would gladly talk shop with her. But his talk is different, uninteresting, is not in the mode. Yet he too believes in ‘the organism,’ believes in the miraculous wiring diagram of life; he is naively impressed by the complexity, the intricate interrelated delicacies of living matter. Why is he so reluctant to push metal into it, produce lesions with acids or shock? He has this unfashionable yearning to learn by appreciation, to tease out the secrets with only his eyes and mind. He has even the treasonable suspicion that such procedures might be more efficient, more instructive. But what holistic means are there? Probably none, he tells himself firmly. Grow up. Look at all they’ve discovered with the knife. The cryptic but potent centers of the amygdala, for example. The subtle limbic homeostats – would we ever have known about these? It is a great knowledge. Never mind that its main use seems to be to push more metal into human heads, my way is obsolete.

  ‘Hi, Sheila.’ ‘Hello, Tilly.’

  She does not turn from the hamsters she is efficiently shaving. He takes himself away around the mop stand to the coal-cellar dungeon where he keeps his rats – sorry, his experimental subjects. His experimental subjects are nocturnal rodents, evolved in friendly dark warm burrows. Lipsitz has sensed their misery, suspended in bright metal and plexiglas cubes in the glare. So he has salvaged and repaired for them a stack of big old rabbit cages and put them in this dark alcove nobody wanted, provoking mirth among his colleagues.

  He has done worse than that, too. Grinning secretly, he approaches and observes what has been made of his latest offering. On the bottom row are the cages of parturient females, birthing what are expected to be his experimental and control groups. Yesterday those cages were bare wire mesh, when he distributed to them the classified section of the Sunday Post. Now he sees with amazement that they are solid cubic volumes of artfully crumpled and plastered paper strips. Fantastic, the labor! Nests; and all identical. Why has no one mentioned that rats as well as birds can build nests? How wrong, how painful it must have been, giving birth on the bare wire. The little mothers have worked all night, skillfully constructing complete environments beneficient to their needs.