The Weird

by Ann

  Beneath him lay a low stone room. Its walls glistened darkly. The place was full of debris: bricks, planks, broken lengths of wood. Draping the debris, or tangled beneath it, were numerous old clothes. Threads of a white substance were tethered to everything, and drifted feebly now the door was opened.

  In one corner loomed a large pale bulk. His light twitched toward it. It was a white bag of some material, not cloth. It had been torn open; except for a sifting of rubble, and a tangle of what might have been fragments of dully painted cardboard, it was empty.

  The crying wailed, somewhere beneath the planks. Several sweeps of the light showed that the cellar was otherwise deserted. Though the face mouthed behind him, he ventured down. For God’s sake, get it over with; he knew he would never dare return. A swath had been cleared through the dust on the steps, as though something had dragged itself out of the cellar, or had been dragged in.

  His movements disturbed the tethered threads; they rose like feelers, fluttering delicately. The white bag stirred, its torn mouth worked. Without knowing why, he stayed as far from that corner as he could.

  The crying had come from the far end of the cellar. As he picked his way hurriedly over the rubble he caught sight of a group of clothes. They were violently coloured sweaters, which the Rainbow Man had worn. They slumped over planks; they nestled inside one another, as though the man had withered or had been sucked out.

  Staring uneasily about, Blackband saw that all the clothes were stained. There was blood on all of them, though not a great deal on any. The ceiling hung close to him, oppressive and vague. Darkness had blotted out the steps and the door. He caught at them with the light, and stumbled toward them.

  The crying made him falter. Surely there were fewer voices, and they seemed to sob. He was nearer the voices than the steps. If he could find the creatures at once, snatch them up and flee – He clambered over the treacherous debris, toward a gap in the rubble. The bag mouthed emptily; threads plucked at him, almost impalpably. As he thrust the flashlight’s beam into the gap, darkness rushed to surround him.

  Beneath the debris a pit had been dug. Parts of its earth walls had collapsed, but protruding from the fallen soil he could see bones. They looked too large for an animal’s. In the centre of the pit, sprinkled with earth, lay a cat. Little of it remained, except for its skin and bones; its skin was covered with deep pockmarks. But its eyes seemed to move feebly.

  Appalled, he stooped. He had no idea what to do. He never knew, for the walls of the pit were shifting. Soil trickled scattering as a face the size of his fist emerged. There were several; their limbless bodies squirmed from the earth, all around the pit. From toothless mouths, their sharp tongues flickered out toward the cat. As he fled they began wailing dreadfully.

  He chased the light toward the steps. He fell, cutting his knees. He thought the face with its gleaming eyes would meet him in the hall. He ran from the cellar, flailing his flashlight at the air. As he stumbled down the street he could still see the faces that had crawled from the soil: rudimentary beneath translucent skin, but beginning to be human.

  He leaned against his gatepost in the lamplight, retching. Images and memories tumbled disordered through his mind. The face crawling over the roofs. Only seen at night. Vampire. The fluttering at the window. Her terror at the hedge full of spiders. Calyptra, what was it, Calyptra eustrigata. Vampire moth.

  Vague though they were, the implications terrified him. He fled into his building, but halted fearfully on the stairs. The things must be destroyed: to delay would be insane. Suppose their hunger brought them crawling out of the cellar tonight, toward his flat – Absurd though it must be, he couldn’t forget that they might have seen his face.

  He stood giggling, dismayed. Whom did you call in these circumstances? The police, an exterminator? Nothing would relieve his horror until he saw the brood destroyed, and the only way to see that was to do the job himself. Burn. Petrol. He dawdled on the stairs, delaying, thinking he knew none of the other tenants from whom to borrow the fuel.

  He ran to the nearby garage. ‘Have you got any petrol?’

  The man glared at him, suspecting a joke. ‘You’d be surprised. How much do you want?’

  How much indeed! He restrained his giggling. Perhaps he should ask the man’s advice! Excuse me, how much petrol do you need for – ‘A gallon,’ he stammered.

  As soon as he reached the back street he switched on his flashlight. Crowds of rubble lined the pavements. Far above the dark house he saw his orange light. He stepped over the debris into the hall. The swaying light brought the face forward to meet him. Of course the hall was empty.

  He forced himself forward. Plucked by the flashlight, the cellar door flapped soundlessly. Couldn’t he just set fire to the house? But that might leave the brood untouched. Don’t think, go down quickly. Above the stairs the stain loomed.

  In the cellar nothing had changed. The bag gaped, the clothes lay emptied. Struggling to unscrew the cap of the petrol can, he almost dropped the flashlight. He kicked wood into the pit and began to pour the petrol. At once he heard the wailing beneath him. ‘Shut up!’ he screamed, to drown out the sound. ‘Shut up! Shut up!’

  The can took its time in gulping itself empty; the petrol seemed thick as oil. He hurled the can clattering away, and ran to the steps. He fumbled with matches, gripping the flashlight between his knees. As he threw them, the lit matches went out. Not until he ventured back to the pit, clutching a ball of paper from his pocket, did he succeed in making a flame that reached his goal. There was a whoof of fire, and a chorus of interminable feeble shrieking.

  As he clambered sickened toward the hall, he heard a fluttering above him. Wallpaper, stirring in a wind: it sounded moist. But there was no wind, for the air clung clammily to him. He slithered over the rubble into the hall, darting his light about. Something white bulked at the top of the stairs.

  It was another torn bag. He hadn’t been able to see it before. It slumped emptily. Beside it the stain spread over the wall. That stain was too symmetrical; it resembled an inverted coat. Momentarily he thought the paper was drooping, tugged perhaps by his unsteady light, for the stain had begun to creep down toward him. Eyes glared at him from its dangling face. Though the face was upside down he knew it at once. From its gargoyle mouth a tongue reached for him.

  He whirled to flee. But the darkness that filled the front door was more than night, for it was advancing audibly. He stumbled, panicking, and rubble slipped from beneath his feet. He fell from the cellar steps, onto piled stone. Though he felt almost no pain, he heard his spine break.

  His mind writhed helplessly. His body refused to heed it in any way, and lay on the rubble, trapping him. He could hear cars on the avenue, radio sets and the sounds of cutlery in flats, distant and indifferent. The cries were petering out now. He tried to scream, but only his eyes could move. As they struggled, he glimpsed through a slit in the cellar wall the orange light in his kitchen.

  His flashlight lay on the steps, dimmed by its fall. Before long a rustling darkness came slowly down the steps, blotting out the light. He heard sounds in the dark, and something that was not flesh nestled against him. His throat managed a choked shriek that was almost inaudible, even to him. Eventually the face crawled away toward the hall, and the light returned. From the corner of his eye he could see what surrounded him. They were round, still, practically featureless: as yet, hardly even alive.

  The Autopsy

  Michael Shea

  Michael Shea (1946–) is an American writer of horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction who has won the World Fantasy Award several times. Shea’s unique work includes novels like Nifft the Lean (1982) that are influenced by Jack Vance but stand on their own for the intensity of their imagery and grotesquery of their situations. The Color Out of Time (1984) is similarly an homage to H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Color Out of Space’ that has its own unique appeal. At the short length, Shea has written several masterpieces, including ‘The Autopsy’
(1980), a Hugo and Nebula award finalist. Clinical, precise, humane, and terrifying, ‘The Autopsy’ plays with the idea of demonic possession from a weird science fiction perspective.

  Dr Winter stepped out of the tiny Greyhound station and into the midnight street that smelled of pines. The station’s window showed the only light, save for a luminous clockface several doors down and a little neon beer logo two blocks farther on. He could hear a river. It ran deep in a gorge west of town, but the town was only a few streets wide and a mile or so long, and the current’s blurred roar was distinct, like the noise of a ghost river running between the banks of dark shop windows. When he had walked a short distance, Dr Winters set his suitcase down, pocketed his hands, and looked at the stars – thick as cobblestones in the black gulf.

  ‘A mountain hamlet – a mining town,’ he said. ‘Stars. No moon. We are in Bailey.’

  He was talking to his cancer. It was in his stomach. Since learning of it, he had developed this habit of wry communion with it. He meant to show courtesy to this uninvited guest, Death. It would not find him churlish, for that would make its victory absolute. Except, of course, that its victory would be absolute, with or without his ironies.

  He picked up his suitcase and walked on. The starlight made faint mirrors of the windows’ blackness and showed him the man who passed: lizard-lean, white-haired (at fifty-seven), a man traveling on death’s business, carrying his own death in him, and even bearing death’s wardrobe in his suitcase. For this was filled – aside from his medical kit and some scant necessities – with mortuary bags. The sheriff had told him on the phone of the improvisations that presently enveloped the corpses, and so the doctor had packed these, laying them in his case with bitter amusement, checking the last one’s breadth against his chest before the mirror, as a woman will gauge a dress before donning it, and telling his cancer:

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s plenty roomy enough for both of us!’

  The case was heavy, and he stopped frequently to rest and scan the sky. What a night’s work to do, probing pungent, soulless filth, eyes earthward, beneath such a ceiling of stars! It had taken five days to dig the ten men out. The autumnal equinox had passed, but the weather here had been uniformly hot. And warmer still, no doubt, so deep in the earth.

  He entered the courthouse by a side door. His heels knocked on the linoleum corridor. A door at the end of it, on which was lettered NATE CRAVEN, COUNTY SHERIFF, opened well before he reached it, and his friend stepped out to meet him.

  ‘Dammit, Carl, you’re still so thin they could use you for a whip. Gimme that. You’re in too good a shape already. You don’t need the exercise.’

  The case hung weightless from the Sheriff’s hand, imparting no tilt at all to his bull shoulders. Despite his implied self-derogation, he was only moderately paunched for a man his age and size. He had a rough-hewn face, and the bulk of brow, nose, and jaw made his greenish eyes look small until one engaged them and felt the snap and penetration of their intelligence. In the office he half filled two cups from a coffee urn and topped both off with bourbon from a bottle in his desk. When they had finished these, they had finished trading news of mutual friends. The sheriff mixed another round and sipped from his, in a silence clearly prefatory to the work at hand.

  ‘They talk about rough justice,’ he said. ‘I’ve sure seen it now. One of those…patients of yours that you’ll be working on? He was a killer. Christ, “killer” doesn’t half say it. A killer’s the least of what he was. The blast killing him, that was the justice part. Those other nine, they were the rough. And it just galls the hell out of me, Carl! If that kiss-ass boss of yours has his way, the rough won’t even stop with their being dead! There won’t even be any compensation for their survivors! Tell me – has he broke his back yet? I mean, touching his toes for Fordham Mutual?’

  ‘You refer, I take it, to the estimable Coroner Waddleton of Fordham County.’ Dr Winters paused to sip his drink. With a delicate flaring of his nostrils he communicated all the disgust, contempt, and amusement he had felt in his four years as pathologist in Waddleton’s office. The sheriff laughed.

  ‘Clear pictures seldom emerge from anything the coroner says,’ the doctor continued. ‘He took your name in vain. Vigorously and repeatedly. These expressions formed his opening remarks. He then developed the theme of our office’s strict responsibility to the letter of the law, and of the workmen’s compensation law in particular. Death benefits accrue only to the dependants of decedents whose deaths arise out of the course of their employment, not merely in the course of it. Victims of a maniacal assault, though they die on the job, are by no means necessarily compensable under the law. We then contemplated the tragic injustice of an insurance company – any insurance company – having to pay benefits to unentitled persons, solely through the laxity and incompetence of investigating officers. Your name came up again, and Coroner Waddleton subjected it to further abuse. Fordham Mutual, campaign contributor or not, is certainly a major insurance company and is therefore entitled to the same fair treatment that all such companies deserve.’

  Craven uttered a bark of wrathful mirth and spat expertly into his wastebasket. ‘Ah, the impartial public servant! What’s seven widows and sixteen dependent children, next to Fordham Mutual?’ He drained his cup and sighed. ‘I’ll tell you what, Carl. We’ve been five days digging those men out and the last two days sifting half that mountain for explosive traces, with those insurance investigators hanging on our elbows, and the most they could say was that there was “strong presumptive evidence” of a bomb. Well, I don’t budge for that because I don’t have to. Waddleton can shove his “extraordinary circumstances.” If you don’t find anything in those bodies, then that’s all the autopsy there is to it, and they get buried right here where their families want ’em.’

  The doctor was smiling at his friend. He finished his cup and spoke with his previous wry detachment, as if the sheriff had not interrupted his narrative.

  ‘The honorable coroner then spoke with remarkable volubility on the subject of Autopsy Consent forms and the malicious subversion of private citizens by vested officers of the law. He had, as it happened, a sheaf of such forms on his desk, all signed, all with a rider clause typed in above the signatures. A cogent paragraph. It had, among its other qualities, the property of turning the coroner’s face purple when he read it aloud. He read it aloud to me three times. It appeared that the survivors’ consent was contingent on two conditions: that the autopsy be performed in loco mortis, that is to say in Bailey, and that only if the coroner’s pathologist found concrete evidence of homicide should the decedents be subject either to removal from Bailey or to further necropsy. It was well written. I remember wondering who wrote it.’

  The sheriff nodded musingly. He took Dr Winters’s empty cup, set it by his own, filled both two-thirds with bourbon, and added a splash of coffee to the doctor’s. The two friends exchanged a level stare, rather like poker players in the clinch. The sheriff regarded his cup, sipped from it.

  ‘In loco mortis. What-all does that mean exactly?’

  ‘“In the place of death.”’

  ‘Oh. Freshen that up for you?’

  ‘I’ve just started it, thank you.’

  Both men laughed, paused, and laughed again, some might have said immoderately.

  ‘He all but told me that I had to find something to compel a second autopsy,’ the doctor said at length. ‘He would have sold his soul – or taken out a second mortgage on it – for a mobile X-ray unit. He’s right, of course. If those bodies have trapped any bomb fragments, that would be the surest and quickest way of finding them. It still amazes me your Dr Parsons could let his X-ray go unfixed for so long.’

  ‘He sets bones, stitches wounds, writes prescriptions, and sends anything tricky down the mountain. Just barely manages that. Drunks don’t get much done.’

  ‘He’s gotten that bad?’

  ‘He hangs on and no more. Waddleton was right there, not deputizing him path
ologist. I doubt he could find a cannonball in a dead rat. I wouldn’t say it where it could hurt him, as long as he’s still managing, but everyone here knows it. His patients sort of look after him half the time. But Waddleton would have sent you, no matter who was here. Nothing but his best for party contributors like Fordham Mutual.’

  The doctor looked at his hands and shrugged. ‘So. There’s a killer in the batch. Was there a bomb?’

  Slowly the sheriff planted his elbows on the desk and pressed his hands against his temples, as if the question had raised a turbulence of memories. For the first time the doctor – half hearkening throughout to the never-quite-muted stirrings of the death within him – saw his friend’s exhaustion: the tremor of hand, the bruised look under the eyes.

  ‘When I’ve told you what we have, I guess you’ll end up assuming what I do about it. But I think assuming is as far as any of us will get with this one. It’s one of those nightmare specials, Carl. The ones no one ever does get to the bottom of.

  ‘All right, then. About two months ago, we had a man disappear – Ronald Hanley. Mine worker, rock-steady, family man. He didn’t come home one night, and we never found a trace of him. OK, that happens sometimes. About a week later, the lady that ran the laundromat, Sharon Starker, she disappeared, no trace. We got edgy then. I made an announcement on the local radio about a possible weirdo at large, spelled out special precautions everybody should take. We put both our squad cars on the night beat, and by day we set to work knocking on every door in town collecting alibis for the two times of disappearance.

  ‘No good. Maybe you’re fooled by this uniform and think I’m a law officer, protector of the people, and all that? A natural mistake. A lot of people were fooled. In less than seven weeks, six people vanished, just like that. Me and my deputies might as well have stayed in bed round the clock, for all the good we did.’ The sheriff drained his cup.