The Weird

by Ann

  I must have tried seven, eight times. I no longer thought the tunnel was cold. I thought the V.C. had closed the door on my original route so that I wouldn’t find it again. I thought they were watching every move I made, pretty easy with me waving my flashlight about. I switched it off. I could hear them in the dark, their eyelids closing and opening, their hands tightening on their knives. I was sweating, head to toe, like I was ill, like I had the mysterious English sweating sickness or the Suette des Picards.

  And I knew that to get back to the entrance, I had to go into the water. I sat and thought that through, and when I finished, I wasn’t the same man I’d been when I began the thought.

  It would have been bad to have to crawl back through the tunnels with no light. To go into the water with no light, not knowing how much water there was, not knowing if one lungful of air would be enough or if there were underwater turns so you might get lost before you found air again, was something you’d have to be crazy to do. I had to do it, so I had to be crazy first. It wasn’t as hard as you might think. It took me only a minute.

  I filled my lungs as full as I could. Emptied them once. Filled them again and dove in. Someone grabbed me by the ankle and hauled me back out. It frightened me so much I swallowed water, so I came up coughing and kicking. The hand released me at once, and I lay there for a bit, dripping water and still sweating, too, feeling the part of the tunnel that was directly below my body turn to mud, while I tried to convince myself that no one was touching me.

  Then I was crazy enough to turn my light on. Far down the tunnel, just within range of the light, knelt a little kid dressed in the uniform of the rats. I tried to get closer to him. He moved away, just the same amount I had moved, always just in the light. I followed him down one tunnel, around a turn, down another. Outside, the sun rose and set. We crawled for days. My right knee began to bleed.

  ‘Talk to me,’ I asked him. He didn’t.

  Finally he stood up ahead of me. I could see the rat cages, and I knew where the entrance was behind him. And then he was gone. I tried to follow with my flashlight, but he’d jumped or something. He was just gone.

  ‘Victor,’ Rat Six told me when I finally came out. ‘Goddamn Victor.’

  Maybe so. If Victor was the same little boy I put a net over in the high country in Yosemite.

  When I came out, they told me less than three hours had passed. I didn’t believe them. I told them about Victor. Most of them didn’t believe me. Nobody outside the tunnels believed in Victor. ‘We just sent home one of the rats,’ a doctor told me. ‘He emptied his whole gun into a tunnel. Claimed there were V.C. all around him, but that he got them. He shot every one. Only, when we went down to clean it up, there were no bodies. All his bullets were found in the walls.

  ‘Tunnel vision. Everyone sees things. It’s the dark. Your eyes no longer impose any limit on the things you can see.’

  I didn’t listen. I made demands right up the chain of command for records: recruitment, AWOLs, special projects. I wanted to talk to everyone who’d ever seen Victor. I wrote Clint to see what he remembered of the drive back from Yosemite. I wrote a thousand letters to Mercy Hospital, telling them I’d uncovered their little game. I demanded to speak with the red-haired doctor with glasses whose name I never knew. I wrote the Curry Company and suggested they conduct a private investigation into the supposed suicide of Sergeant Redburn. I asked the CIA what they had done with Paul’s parents. That part was paranoid. I was so unstrung I thought they’d killed his parents and given him to the coyote to raise him up for the tunnel wars. When I calmed down, I knew the CIA would never be so farsighted. I knew they’d just gotten lucky. I didn’t know what happened to the parents; still don’t.

  There were so many crazy people in Vietnam, it could take them a long time to notice a new one, but I made a lot of noise. A team of three doctors talked to me for a total of seven hours. Then they said I was suffering from delayed guilt over the death of my little dog-boy, and that it surfaced, along with every other weak link in my personality, in the stress and the darkness of the tunnels. They sent me home. I missed the moon landing, because I was having a nice little time in a hospital of my own.

  When I was finally and truly released, I went looking for Caroline Crosby. The Crosbys still lived in Palo Alto, but Caroline did not. She’d started college at Berkeley, but then she’d dropped out. Her parents hadn’t seen her for several months.

  Her mother took me through their beautiful house and showed me Caroline’s old room. She had a canopy bed and her own bathroom. There was a mirror with old pictures of some boy on it.

  A throw rug with roses. There was a lot of pink. ‘We drive through the Haight every weekend,’ Caroline’s mother said. ‘Just looking.’ She was pale and controlled. ‘If you should see her, would you tell her to call?’

  I would not. I made one attempt to return one little boy to his family, and look what happened. Either Sergeant Redburn jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of his investigation or he didn’t. Either Paul Becker died in Mercy Hospital or he was picked up by the military to be their special weapon in a special war.

  I’ve thought about it now for a couple of decades, and I’ve decided that, at least for Paul, once he’d escaped from the military, things didn’t work out so badly. He must have felt more at home in the tunnels under Cu Chi than he had under the bed in Mercy Hospital.

  There is a darkness inside us all that is animal. Against some things – untreated or untreatable disease, for example, or old age – the darkness is all we are. Either we are strong enough animals or we are not. Such things pare everything that is not animal away from us. As animals we have a physical value, but in moral terms we are neither good nor bad. Morality begins on the way back from the darkness.

  The first two plagues were largely believed to be a punishment for man’s sinfulness. ‘So many died,’ wrote Agnolo di Tura the Fat, who buried all five of his own children himself, ‘that all believed that it was the end of the world.’ This being the case, you’d imagine the cessation of the plague must have been accompanied by outbreaks of charity and godliness. The truth was just the opposite. In 1349, in Erfurt, Germany, of the three thousand Jewish residents there, not one survived. This is a single instance of a barbarism so marked and so pervasive, it can be understood only as a form of mass insanity.

  Here is what Procopius said: And after the plague had ceased, there was so much depravity and general licentiousness, that it seemed as though the disease had left only the most wicked.

  When men are turned into animals, it’s hard for them to find their way back to themselves. When children are turned into animals, there’s no self to find. There’s never been a feral child who found his way out of the dark. Maybe there’s never been a feral child who wanted to.

  You don’t believe I saw Paul in the tunnels at all. You think I’m crazy or, charitably, that I was crazy then, just for a little while. Maybe you think the CIA would never have killed a policeman or tried to use a little child in a black war, even though the CIA has done everything else you’ve ever been told and refused to believe.

  That’s okay. I like your version just fine. Because if I made him up, and all the tunnel rats who ever saw him made him up, then he belongs to us, he marks us. Our vision, our Procopian phantom in the tunnels. Victor to take care of us in the dark.

  Caroline came home without me. I read her wedding announcement in the paper more than twenty years ago. She married a Stanford chemist. There was a picture of her in her parents’ backyard with gardenias in her hair. She was twenty-five years old. She looked happy. I never did go talk to her.

  So here’s a story for you, Caroline:

  A small German town was much plagued by rats who ate the crops and the chickens, the ducks, the cloth and the seeds. Finally the citizens called in an exterminator. He was the best; he trapped and poisoned the rats. Within a month he had deprived the fleas of most of their hosts.

  The fleas then bit
the children of the town instead. Hundreds of children were taken with a strange dancing and raving disease. Their parents tried to control them, tried to keep them safe in their beds, but the moment their mothers’ backs were turned, the children ran into the streets and danced. The town was Erfurt. The year was 1237.

  Most of the children danced themselves to death. But not all. A few of them recovered and lived to be grown-ups. They married and worked and had their own children. They lived reasonable and productive lives.

  The only thing is that they still twitch sometimes. Just now and then. They can’t help it.

  Stop me, Caroline, if you’ve heard this story before.

  Angels in Love

  Kathe Koja

  Kathe Koja (1960–) is an American writer who first emerged as a novelist during the US horror boom of the early 1990s. Kafkaesque, transgressive novels such as The Cipher (1991), Bad Brains (1992), Skin (1993), and Strange Angels (1994) established her as one of weird fiction’s most innovative practitioners. Story collaborations with science fiction writer Barry Malzberg broadened her oeuvre, and as Koja moved into the realm of young adult novels her work continued to evade easy categorization. In 2010 her first historical novel, Under the Poppy, was published, with the sequel to follow in 2012. As ‘Angels in Love’ (1991) demonstrates, Koja’s version of the weird is both claustrophobic and luminous, continually questioning the nature of reality.

  LIKE WINGS. Rapturous as the muted screams, lush the beating of air through chipboard walls, luscious like sex and oh, my, far more forbidden: whatever it was, Lurleen knew it was wrong.

  Knew it from the shrieks, gagged and that was no pillow, no sir no way, she herself was familiar with the gasp of muffled sex and this was definitely not it. And not – really – kinky, or not in any way she knew of, and with a half-shy swagger Lurleen could admit she had acquaintance of a few. Kiss me here. Let’s see some teeth. Harder.

  The sounds, arpeggio of groans, that basso almost-unheard thump, thump, rhythmic as a headboard or a set of baritone springs but that wasn’t it either. Subsonic; felt by the bones. Lying there listening her own bones tingled, skin rippled light with goosebumps, speculation: who made those strange strange sounds? Someone with a taste for the rough stuff, maybe, someone who liked the doughy strop of flesh. Someone strong. An old boyfriend had used to say she fucked like an angel, she never understood the phrase till now. Her hands, deliberate stroll southward, shimmy of familiar fingers on as-familiar flesh; her own groans in counterpoint to the ones through the walls.

  Waking heavy in the morning, green toothpaste spit and trying to brush her hair at the same time, late again. ‘You’re late,’ Roger would say when she walked in, and she would flip fast through her catalog of excuses, which hadn’t he heard lately? and try to give him something to get her by, thinking all the while of last night’s tingle, puzzling again its ultimate source. It was kind of a sexy game to Lurleen, that puzzling; it gave her something to do at work.

  Music store. No kind of music she liked but sometimes it wasn’t too bad, and the store itself had a kind of smell that she enjoyed, like a library smell, like something educational was going on. Sheet music, music stands, Roger fussy with customers, turning the stereo on loud and saying stuff like, ‘But have you heard Spivakov’s Bach? Really quite good,’ like he had probably heard Bach’s Bach and could have suggested a few improvements. Right.

  Today she felt, was, dopey and sluggish, simple transactions done twice and twice wrong; Roger was pissed, glowered as she slumped through the day. At quitting time he made a point of pointedly disappearing, not saying goodnight; sighing, she had to find him, hide and seek through the racks, he was a stickler for what he called the pleasantries: Goodnight, Lurleen. Goodnight, Roger. Every day.

  Finally: hunched behind the order counter, flipping through the day’s mail like he hadn’t read it nine times already. Lurleen leaned tippy-toe over, flathanded on the cracking gray laminate: ‘Goodnight, Roger.’

  Chilly nod, like he’d just caught her trying to palm something: ‘Goodnight, Lurleen.’ Waited till she was almost out the door to say, ‘Lurleen?’

  Stopped, impatient keys in hand. ‘What?’

  ‘We open at ten o’clock. Every day.’

  Asshole. ‘See you tomorrow,’ not banging the door, giving herself points for it. Outside her skin warmed, like butter, spread velvet all over, he always kept the fucking store too cold. Like the music’d melt or something if he turned it up past freezing. Rolling all her windows down, singing to the Top 40 station. Stopped at the party store for cigarettes and to flirt with the clerk, old guy just about as ugly as Roger but round where Roger was slack, furry where Roger was not.

  ‘You headin’ out tonight?’ sliding the cigarettes across the counter, grinning at her tits. ‘Have some fun?’

  ‘Oh, I always manage to have fun,’ over the shoulder smile as she headed for the door, Roger liked to stare at her tits too, she was positive, she just hadn’t caught him at it yet. Asshole probably went home and jerked off, dreaming about her bouncing around to Bach. And she laughed, a little: who’d been flying solo last night, huh? But that was different.

  In the dark, blind witness to the nightly ravishment, Lurleen, closed eyes, busy hands filling in the blanks, timing herself to the thump and stutter of the rapture beyond the walls. Longer tonight, ecstatic harmony of gulping cries, and after the crescendo wail, soundtrack to her own orgasm, she slept: to dream of flesh like iron, of rising whole, and drenched, and shiny-bright; shock-heavy with a pleasure poisonously rare. Woke just in time to see that she’d slept through the clock. Again.

  In the hallway, pausing – already late, so what if she was later – before the door next door. Identical in nondescription to every other down the grimy hall, there was no way to tell by looking just what kind of fun went on there every night. Lurleen, tapping ignition key to lips, thoughtful sideways stare. Imagining, all the reluctant way to work, what sort of exotica, what moist brutalities were practiced there, what kinds of kinks indulged. Wriggling a little, skirt riding up and the cracked vinyl edges of the too-hot seat pressing voluptuously sharp into the damp flesh of her thighs.

  It came to her that she had never really seen that next-door neighbor of hers. Maybe they’d bumped into each other, exchanged laundry-room hellos, but for the life of her Lurleen could not recall. She wasn’t even sure if it was just one person or a couple. They sure were a couple at night, though, weren’t they just.

  The day spent avoiding Roger’s gaze, colder than the store and just as constant, more than one smart remark about time clocks. Stopping for cigarettes, she picked up a six-pack too, clandestine sips at red lights, rehearsing queenly answers she would never give. It was so hot outside it felt good, brought a warm slow trickle of sweat down the plane of her temple, the hotter spot between her breasts.

  She was going out tonight, that was for sure, she owed herself something for the just-past bitch of a day. Walking up the two flights a thought nudged her, firm and brisk to get past the beer. She leaned to sight up the stairwell, heart a trifle nervous, quick and jangly in her chest. Well. No time like the present, was there, to scratch a little itch? I’ll just say hi, she thought, walking quicker now. I’ll say, Hi, I’m your next-door neighbor, I just stopped by to say hello.

  Fourth can in hand, smart tattoo on the door before she could change her mind. Wondering who would open, what they would look like. What they would smell like – Lurleen was a great believer in smells. If they would ask her in, and what she might say, knowing she would say yes and a smile past the thick spot in her throat, and she smiled at that, too, it wasn’t that big a deal, was it?

  Maybe it was.

  Nothing. Silence inside so she knocked again, louder, humming to herself and oh boy here we go: winded swing of the door and ‘Hi,’ before it was all the way open. ‘Hi, I’m Lurleen, your neighbor?’

  Tall, her first thought. And skinny. Not model-skinny, just chicken bones, short blonde hai
r, Giants T-shirt over a flat chest. Anne, the girl said her name was, and past her curved shoulders Lurleen could see a flat as cramped and dingy as her own, a little emptier, maybe, a little less ripe, but nothing special. Purely ordinary. Like Anne herself: no exotic bruising, no secret sheen. Just stood there in the doorway playing with the end of her baggy T-shirt, flipping it as she talked and that thin-lipped smile that said Are you ready to leave yet? Just one big disappointment, but Lurleen didn’t show it, kept up her own smile through the strain of the stillborn chatter until she was back inside her own place, sucking up the last of her beer.

  ‘Well,’ through a closed-mouth ladylike burp. ‘Well.’

  How could someone so dull have such a wild sex life? Be better off meeting the boyfriend, he had to be the real show. Fucking angel. Lurleen’s giggles lasted through the rest of the beer, her long cool shower and half-hour’s worth of mousse and primp. When she left for the bar Anne’s flat was silent still, not even the requisite TV drone. From the parking lot the lifeless drift of her curtains, beige to Lurleen’s red, was all there was to see.

  At the bar she met a couple of guys, nice ones, she couldn’t quite remember which was Jeff and which was Tony, but they kept her dancing, and drinking, and that was nice, too. After last call she swiveled off her seat, sweet and smiled and said she was sorry but she had an hour to make the airport to pick up her husband, and even as she said it she had to wonder why; it was one of them she’d planned on picking up, and never mind that she couldn’t remember who was who, names didn’t exactly matter at that time of night, words didn’t matter past Who’s got the rubber. But still she left alone.