The Weird

by Ann

  Then I heard the door open and shut again.

  In the village everything had a voice and everything spoke at me. Sounds and voices assaulted me and my ears began to ache. Then slowly my sight returned. At first it was like seeing through milk. When my vision cleared, the voices stopped. Then I saw the village as I had not seen it before.

  I went out of the place I was staying and walked around in bewilderment. Some of the people of the village had their feet facing backwards. I was amazed that they could walk. Some people came out of tree-trunks. Some had wings, but they couldn’t fly. After a while I got used to the strangeness of the people. I ceased to really notice their three legs and elongated necks. What I couldn’t get used to were the huts and houses that were walled round with mirrors on the outside. I didn’t see myself reflected in them as I went past. Some people walked into the mirrors and disappeared. I couldn’t walk into them.

  After some time of moving around, I couldn’t find my way back to where I stayed. I went about the village listening for the voice of the woman who had been taking care of me. I stopped at a communal water-pump and a woman came up to me and said:

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m lost.’

  ‘I’ll take you back.’

  I followed her.

  ‘So you can see now?’ she asked, turning her head right round to me as she walked.

  ‘Yes.’

  And then I had the distinct and absurd feeling that I knew her. She was a robust figure, with a face of jagged and familiar beauty. She wore a single flowerprint wrapper and was barefoot. Her skin was covered in native chalk. Her eyes radiated a strange light which dazzled like a green mirror.

  ‘Who are you?’

  She didn’t answer my question. When we got to an obeche tree she opened a door on the trunk. Inside I saw a perfect interior, neat and compact and warm.

  ‘I’m not going in there,’ I said.

  She turned her head towards me, her face was expressionless.

  ‘But this has been your new home,’ she said.

  ‘It can’t be. It’s too small.’

  She laughed almost affectionately.

  ‘When you come in you will find it is large enough.’

  It was very spacious when I went in. I sat down on the wooden bed. She served me food in a half calabash. The rice seemed to move on the plate like several white maggots. I could have sworn it was covered in spider’s webs. But it tasted sweet and was satisfying. The cup from which I was supposed to drink bled on the outside. After she had cleared the food from the table, I pretended to be asleep. Before she left I heard her say:

  ‘Sleep well and regain your strength. The meeting is taking place tonight.’

  I sat up.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  She shut the door gently behind her.

  I waited for some time before I got up and left the tree. I was intent on fleeing, but I didn’t want to betray it. As I wandered round the village looking for the way out, I heard people dancing, I heard some disputing the village principles, I heard others reciting a long list of names, and I heard beautiful voices telling stories behind the trees. But I could not see any of the people.

  And then as I passed a hut, from which came the high-pitched laughter of shy young girls, I noticed that a one-eyed goat was staring at me intently. I hurried on. Dogs and chickens gazed at me. I experienced the weird sensation that people were staring at me through the eyes of the animals. I passed the village shrine. In front of it there was the mighty statue of a god with big holes for eyes. I was convinced the god was spying on me.

  I wandered for a long time looking for the exit. I heard disembodied voices saying that the big meeting would soon begin. The lights hadn’t changed. I came to a frangipani tree full of white birds. Beyond the tree was the village square and beyond the square was the entrance. I pushed on till I came to the hut. Sitting on the chair outside the hut was a man who had three eyes on his face. He kept staring at me and I was forced to greet him.

  ‘Don’t greet me,’ he said.

  He went on staring at me, as though he expected me to recognize him. His three eyes puzzled and disorientated me. But when I concentrated on the two normal eyes I suddenly did recognize him. He was my vanished neighbour.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘A soldier shot me.’

  ‘Shot you?’ I asked, surprised.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To kill me. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He laughed.

  ‘They will tell you at the meeting.’

  ‘What is the meeting about?’

  ‘Life and death.’

  ‘What life, what death?’

  He laughed again, but more explosively. There was something about his mouth, the way his eyes moved, that gradually made things clear to me. I backed away in terror.

  ‘You better not try and escape,’ he said maliciously.

  That was all I needed. I ran towards the entrance and things got scrambled up as I ran. And then I found that I was moving not forwards, but backwards. I passed the white ochred huts and the blinding skyscraper. I heard the high-pitched scream of a woman. Talking drums sounded in frenzies. When I stopped and ran backwards, I found I was actually running forwards. Then I saw the woman who had screamed, and for the first time I recognized her as my dead wife. She tore after me in great distress. Men and women and disembodied voices came after me with their wings that didn’t help them fly and their feet which were turned backwards. I fled past the trees that were upside down and the cornfields outside the village entrance. The cornplumes were golden and beautiful. The people of the village pursued me all the way to the boundary.

  I crossed the river. Birds came at me from the forest. I ran for a long time without stopping till I came to my car that had smashed through the branches of the tree and devastated the anthill. I am not sure what happened next but when I came to I found myself in the wreckage of the car. I was covered with ants and they bit me mercilessly. The twisted wreck of metal seemed to have grown on me and I could feel my blood drying on the seat. There were cuts and broken glass on my face. I spent a very long time struggling to get out of the car. When I did I felt about as wrecked as the car and my body felt like it had already died. I staggered through the forest. I ate lemon grass leaves. As I pushed my way through the forest I became aware that I could see spirits. It was morning before I could find the main road. After a while of stumbling down the road I saw a car coming towards me. I stuck out my hand and waved furiously and was surprised when the car stopped. There was a young man at the wheel. He wound down his side window and I said:

  ‘Don’t go that way. Find where you can be happy.’

  But the young man looked me over, nodded, and drove straight on. I watched the car till it had disappeared. Then I trudged on with the hope of reaching the old man’s shack before I died.

  The Boy in the Tree

  Elizabeth Hand

  Elizabeth Hand (1957–) is an American writer of cross-genre fiction who grew up in New York State. She has won the World Fantasy award, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, Nebula Award, and Shirley Jackson Award for novels and short fiction. Hand has long had an interest in outsider artists, and even her mainstream novel Generation Loss (2007) deals with that subject matter. As for the story reprinted herein, a unique blend of the supernatural and science fiction, it has its inspiration in real life: ‘I had my own encounter with the numinous in…1974, when I had an epiphanic vision of a Dionsyian figure I named The Boy in the Tree’. The result is a tale both disturbing and beautiful.

  What if in your dream you dreamed, and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you woke you had the flower in your hand?

&
nbsp; – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Our heart stops.

  A moment I float beneath her, a starry shadow. Distant canyons where spectral lightning flashes: neurons firing as I tap into the heart of the poet, the dark core where desire and horror fuse and Morgan turns ever and again to stare out a bus window. The darkness clears. I taste for an instant the metal bile that signals the beginning of therapy, and then I’m gone.

  I’m sitting on the autobus, the last seat where you can catch the bumps on the crumbling highway if you’re going fast enough. Through the open windows a rush of Easter air tangles my hair. Later I will smell apple blossom in my auburn braids. Now I smell sour milk where Ronnie Abrams spilled his ration yesterday.

  ‘Move over, Yates!’ Ronnie caroms off the seat opposite, rams his leg into mine and flies back to pound his brother. From the front the driver yells ‘Shut up!’, vainly trying to silence forty-odd singing children.

  On top of Old Smoky

  All covered with blood

  I shot my poor teacher

  With a forty-four slug…

  Ronnie grins at me, eyes glinting, then pops me right on the chin with a spitball. I stick my fingers in my ears and huddle closer to the window.

  Met her at the door

  With my trusty forty-four

  Now she don’t teach no more…

  The autobus pulls into town and slows, stops behind a military truck. I press my face against the cracked window, shoving my glasses until lens kisses glass and I can see clearly to the street below. A young woman is standing on the curb holding a baby wrapped in a dirty pink blanket. At her ankles wriggles a dog, an emaciated puppy with whiptail and ears flopping as he nips at her bare feet. I tap at the window, trying to get the dog to look at me. In front of the bus two men in uniform clamber from the truck and start arguing. The woman screws up her face and says something to the men, moving her lips so that I know she’s mad. The dog lunges at her ankles again and she kicks it gently, so that it dances along the curb. The soldiers glance at her, see the autobus waiting, and climb back into the truck. I hear the whoosh of releasing brakes. The autobus lurches forward and my glasses bang into the window. The rear wheels grind up onto the curb.

  The dog barks and leaps onto the woman. Apple blossoms drift from a tree behind her as she draws her arms up alarmed, and, as I settle my glasses onto my nose and stare, drops the baby beneath the wheels of the bus.

  Retching, I strive to pull Morgan away, turn her head from the window. A fine spray etches bright petals on the glass and her plastic lenses. My neck aches as I try to turn toward the inside of the autobus and efface forever that silent rain. But I cannot move. She is too strong. She will not look away.

  I am clawing at the restraining ropes. A technician pulls the wires from my head while inches away Morgan Yates screams. I hear the hiss and soft pump of velvet thoughts into her periaqueductual gray area. The link is severed.

  I sat up as they wheeled her into the next room. Morgan’s screams abruptly stilled as the endorphins kicked in and her head flopped to one side of the gurney. For an instant the technician turned and stared at me as he slid Morgan through the door. He would not catch my eyes.

  None of them will.

  Through the glass panel I watched Emma Harrow hurry from another lab. She bent over Morgan and gently pulled the wires from between white braids still rusted with coppery streaks. Beside her the technicians looked worried. Other doctors slipped from adjoining rooms and blocked my view, all with strained faces.

  When I was sure they’d forgotten me I dug out a cigarette and lit up. I tapped the ashes into my shoe and blew smoke into a ventilation shaft. I knew Morgan wouldn’t make it. I could often tell, but even Dr. Harrow didn’t listen to me this time. Morgan Yates was too important: one of the few living writers whose readers included both rebels and Ascendants.

  ‘She will crack,’ I told Dr. Harrow after reading Morgan’s profile. Seven poetry collections published by the Ascendants. Recurrent nightmares revolving around a childhood trauma in the military creche; sadistic sexual behavior and a pathological fear of dogs. Nothing extraordinary there. But I knew she wouldn’t make it.

  ‘How do you know?’

  I shrugged. ‘She’s too strong.’

  Dr. Harrow stared at me, pinching her lower lip. She wasn’t afraid of my eyes. ‘What if it works?’ she mused. ‘She says she hasn’t written in three years, because of this.’

  I yawned. ‘Maybe it will work. But she won’t let me take it away. She won’t let anyone take it.’

  I was right. If Dr. Harrow hadn’t been so anxious about the chance to reclaim one of the damned and her own reputation, she’d have known, too. Psychotics, autists, artists of the lesser rank: these could be altered by empatherapy. I’d siphoned off their sicknesses and night terrors, inhaled phobias like giddy ethers that set me giggling for days afterward. But the big ones, those whose madnesses were as carefully cultivated as the brain chemicals that allowed myself and others like me to tap into them: they were immune. They clung to their madnesses with the fever of true addiction. Even the dangers inherent to empatherapy weren’t enough: they couldn’t let go.

  Dr. Harrow glanced up from the next room and frowned when she saw my cigarette. I stubbed it out in my shoe and slid my foot back in, wincing at the prick of heat beneath my sole.

  She slipped out of the emergency room. Sighing, she leaned against the glass and looked at me.

  ‘Was it bad, Wendy?’

  I picked a fleck of tobacco from my lip. ‘Pretty bad.’ I had a rush recalling Morgan wailing as she stood at the window. For a moment I had to shut my eyes, riding that wave until my heart slowed and I looked up grinning into Dr. Harrow’s compressed smile.

  ‘Pretty good, you mean.’ Her tight mouth never showed the disdain or revulsion of the others. Only a little dismay, some sick pride perhaps in the beautiful thing she’d soldered together from an autistic girl and several ounces of precious glittering chemicals. ‘Well,’ she sighed, and walked to her desk. ‘You can start on this.’ She tossed me a blank report and returned to the emergency lab. I settled back on my cot and stared at the sheet.

  PATIENT NAME: Wendy Wanders

  In front of me the pages blurred. Shuddering I gripped the edge of my chair. Nausea exploded inside me, a fiery pressure building inside my head until I bowed to crack my forehead against the table edge, again and again, stammering my name until with a shout a technician ran to me and slapped an ampule to my neck. I couldn’t bear the sight of my own name: Dr. Harrow usually filled in the charts for me and provided the sedatives, as she had a special lab all in gray for the empath who couldn’t bear colors and wore black goggles outside; as she had the neural bath ready for another whose amnesia after a session left her unable to talk or stand or control her bowels. The technician stood above me until the drug took effect. I breathed deeply and stared at the wall, then reported on my unsuccessful session with the poet.

  That evening I walked to the riverside. A trio of security sculls silently plied the river. At my feet water striders gracelessly mimicked them. I caught a handful of the insects and dropped them on the crumbling macadam at the water’s edge, watched them jerk and twitch with crippled stepladder legs as they fought the hard skin of gravel and sand. Then I turned and wandered along the river walk, past rotting oak benches and the ruins of glass buildings, watching the sun sink through argent thunderheads.

  A single remaining restaurant ziggurat towered above the walk. Wooden benches gave way to airy filigrees of iron, and at one of these tables I saw someone from the Human Engineering Laboratory.

  ‘Anna or Andrew?’ I called. By the time I was close enough for her to hear I knew it was Anna this time, peacock feathers and long blue macaw quills studding the soft raised nodes on her shaven temples.

  ‘Wendy.’ She gestured dreamily at a confectionery chair. ‘Sit.’

  I settled beside her, tweaking a cobalt plume, and wished I’d worn the fiery cock-of-
the-rock quills I’d bought last spring. Anna was stunning, always: eyes brilliant with octine, small breasts tight against her tuxedo shirt. She was the only one of the other empties I spoke much with, although she beat me at faro and Andrew had once broken my tooth in an amphetamine rage. A saucer scattered with broken candicaine straws sat before her. Beside it a fluted parfait glass held several unbroken pipettes. I did one and settled back grinning.

  ‘You had that woman today,’ Anna hissed into my ear. Her rasping voice made me shiver with delight. ‘The poet. I think I’m furious.’

  Smiling, I shrugged. ‘Luck of the draw.’

  ‘How was she?’ She blinked and I watched golden dust powder the air between us. ‘Was she good, Wendy?’ She stroked my thigh and I giggled.

  ‘Great. She was great.’ I lowered my eyes and squinted until the table disappeared into the steel rim of an autobus seat.

  ‘Let me see.’ Her whisper the sigh of air brakes. ‘Wendy–’

  The rush was too good to stop. I let her pull me forward until my forehead grazed hers and I felt the cold sting of electrolytic fluid where she strung the wire. I tasted brass: then bile and summer air and exhaust–

  Too fast. I jerked my head up, choking as I inadvertently yanked the connector from Anna. She stared at me with huge blank eyes.

  ‘Ch-c-c–’ she gasped, spittle flying into the parfait glass. I swore and pushed the straws away, popped the wire and held her face close to mine.

  ‘Ahhh–’ Anna nodded suddenly. Her eyes focused and she drew back. ‘Wendy. Good stuff.’ She licked her lips, tongue a little loose from the hit so that she drooled. I grimaced.

  ‘More, Wendy…’

  ‘Not now.’ I grabbed two more straws and cracked one. ‘I have a follow-up with her tomorrow morning. I have to go.’

  She nodded. I flicked the wire into her lap along with the vial of fluid and a napkin. ‘Wipe your mouth, Anna. I’ll tell Harrow I saw you so she won’t worry.’