The Weird

by Ann

  ‘I should be going,’ she said, getting up. ‘I have to be in at eight tomorrow.’

  ‘Okay.’ I followed her to the door, and we both felt stiff and self-conscious. I knew then that Chris was still between us, and that he would be for some time.

  She found her keys and we stepped out onto the front porch. She looked at her car, and then down at her keys, and then back up at me. I kissed her, but the kiss didn’t kill the awkwardness, and she stepped off the porch.

  ‘I’ll see you again soon?’ she asked.

  ‘I hope so,’ I said.

  She got into her car, and then leaned back out. ‘I’ll be extra careful to watch for animals crossing the road.’

  ‘Please,’ I said.

  The car retreated down my driveway, and she gave me a little wave. After she was on the road and out of sight I stood on the porch and listened to the receding sounds of her car. Finally there were only the sounds of the breeze and the night. I stepped back into my house.

  A garden of dead animals blooms in my back yard. Some nights when I’m walking around the lake, they just show up. I never know when it’s going to happen. At first I thought maybe it happened the same time of the month. Moon phases or something. But that wasn’t it. Then I thought maybe it had something to do with the weather, but that couldn’t be, because sometimes they materialize after dry days and cloudless sunsets, and sometimes after rain and low skies. I only know it’s happening again once I’m walking in the back yard and find myself surrounded by them. They pad all around me on soft feet, and each retains its personality. The squirrels maintain their small, nervous movements, the dogs their manic sociability, the raccoon its oddly masked guilelessness, the armadillo its impervious dignity. The cats stalk and pounce, and deep in their throats they softly hum their rightness with, and in, the world.

  On such nights I walk among them and do not willingly go back indoors, St Francis in the final stages of mourning. I think Sarah’s coming back, but I will still walk around the lake on nights when I can’t sleep.

  One night, I hope, when I am walking with them, we’ll be joined by another.

  Will he look in my eyes, in that quiet, crowded yard, and wonder at his presence there, and know me?

  The Ocean and All Its Devices

  William Browning Spencer

  William Browning Spencer (1946–) is an award-winning American writer living in Austin, Texas. His weird tales often contain an undercurrent of dark humor while novels like 1995’s quirky Résumé With Monsters and Zod Wallop seem both sui generis and steeped in the history of strange fiction. In 2005, his short story ‘Pep Talk’ was turned into a short film for Project Greenlight and premiered at the Santa Fe Film Festival in December 2006. ‘The Ocean and All of Its Devices’ (1994), about a strange family secret at an off-season hotel, is typical of Spencer’s work: effortless, understated, at times terrifying, and nicely updating the weird tales tradition.

  Left to its own enormouas devices the sea in timeless reverie conceives of life being itself the world in pantomime.

  Lloyd Frankenberg, The Sea

  The hotel’s owner and manager, George Hume, sat on the edge of his bed and smoked a cigarette. ‘The Franklins arrived today,’ he said.

  ‘Regular as clockwork,’ his wife said.

  George nodded. ‘Eight years now. And why? Why ever do they come?’

  George Hume’s wife, an ample woman with soft, motherly features, sighed. ‘They seem to get no pleasure from it, that’s for certain. Might as well be a funeral they come for.’

  The Franklins always arrived in late fall, when the beaches were cold and empty and the ocean, under dark skies, reclaimed its terrible majesty. The hotel was almost deserted at this time of year, and George had suggested closing early for the winter. Mrs. Hume had said, ‘The Franklins will be coming, dear.’

  So what? George might have said. Let them find other accommodations this year. But he didn’t say that. They were sort of a tradition, the Franklins, and in a world so fraught with change, one just naturally protected the rare, enduring pattern.

  They were a reserved family who came to this quiet hotel in North Carolina like refugees seeking safe harbor. George couldn’t close early and send the Franklins off to some inferior establishment. Lord, they might wind up at The Cove with its garish lagoon pool and gaudy tropical lounge. That wouldn’t suit them at all.

  The Franklins (husband, younger wife, and pale, delicate-featured daughter) would dress rather formally and sit in the small opened section of the dining room – the rest of the room shrouded in dust covers while Jack, the hotel’s aging waiter and handyman, would stand off to one side with a bleak, stoic expression.

  Over the years George had come to know many of his regular guests well. But the Franklins had always remained aloof and enigmatic. Mr. Greg Franklin was a man in his mid or late forties, a handsome man, tall – over six feet – with precise, slow gestures and an oddly uninflected voice, as though he were reading from some internal script that failed to interest him. His much younger wife was stunning, her hair massed in brown ringlets, her eyes large and luminous and containing something like fear in their depths. She spoke rarely, and then in a whisper, preferring to let her husband talk.

  Their child, Melissa, was a dark-haired girl – twelve or thirteen now, George guessed – a girl as pale as the moon’s reflection in a rain barrel. Always dressed impeccably, she was as quiet as her mother, and George had the distinct impression, although he could not remember being told this by anyone, that she was sickly, that some traumatic infant’s illness had almost killed her and so accounted for her methodical, wounded economy of motion.

  George ushered the Franklins from his mind. It was late. He extinguished his cigarette and walked over to the window. Rain blew against the glass, and lightning would occasionally illuminate the white-capped waves.

  ‘Is Nancy still coming?’ Nancy, their daughter and only child, was a senior at Duke University. She had called the week before saying she might come and hang out for a week or two.

  ‘As far as I know,’ Mrs. Hume said. ‘You know how she is. Everything on a whim. That’s your side of the family, George.’

  George turned away from the window and grinned. ‘Well, I can’t accuse your family of ever acting impulsively – although it would do them a world of good. Your family packs a suitcase to go to the grocery store.’

  ‘And your side steals a car and goes to California without a toothbrush or a prayer.’

  This was an old, well-worked routine, and they indulged it as they readied for bed. Then George turned off the light and the darkness brought silence.

  It was still raining in the morning when George Hume woke. The violence of last night’s thunderstorm had been replaced by a slow, business-like drizzle. Looking out the window, George saw the Franklins walking on the beach under black umbrellas. They were a cheerless sight. All three of them wore dark raincoats, and they might have been fugitives from some old Bergman film, inevitably tragic, moving slowly across a stark landscape.

  When most families went to the beach, it was a more lively affair.

  George turned away from the window and went into the bathroom to shave. As he lathered his face, he heard the boom of a radio, rock music blaring from the adjoining room, and he assumed, correctly, that his twenty-one-year-old daughter Nancy had arrived as planned.

  Nancy had not come alone. ‘This is Steve,’ she said when her father sat down at the breakfast table.

  Steve was a very young man – the young were getting younger – with a wide-eyed, waxy expression and a blond mustache that looked like it could be wiped off with a damp cloth.

  Steve stood up and said how glad he was to meet Nancy’s father. He shook George’s hand enthusiastically, as though they had just struck a lucrative deal.

  ‘Steve’s in law school,’ Mrs. Hume said, with a proprietary delight that her husband found grating.

  Nancy was complaining. She had, her father thought, al
ways been a querulous girl, at odds with the way the world was.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ she was saying. ‘The whole mall is closed. The only – and I mean only – thing around here that is open is that cheesy little drugstore, and nobody actually buys anything in there. I know that, because I recognize stuff from when I was six. Is this some holiday I don’t know about or what?’

  ‘Honey, it’s the off season. You know everything closes when the tourists leave.’

  ‘Not the for-Christ-sakes mall!’ Nancy said. ‘I can’t believe it.’ Nancy frowned. ‘This must be what Russia is like,’ she said, closing one eye as smoke from her cigarette slid up her cheek.

  George Hume watched his daughter gulp coffee. She was not a person who needed stimulants. She wore an ancient gray sweater and sweatpants. Her blonde hair was chopped short and ragged and kept in a state of disarray by the constant furrowing of nervous fingers. She was, her father thought, a pretty girl in disguise.

  That night, George discovered that he could remember nothing of the spy novel he was reading, had forgotten, in fact, the hero’s name. It was as though he had stumbled into a cocktail party in the wrong neighborhood, all strangers to him, the gossip meaningless.

  He put the book on the nightstand, leaned back on the pillow, and said. ‘This is her senior year. Doesn’t she have classes to attend?’

  His wife said nothing.

  He sighed. ‘I suppose they are staying in the same room.’

  ‘Dear, I don’t know,’ Mrs. Hume said. ‘I expect it is none of our business.’

  ‘If it is not our business who stays in our hotel, then who in the name of hell’s business is it?’

  Mrs. Hume rubbed her husband’s neck. ‘Don’t excite yourself, dear. You know what I mean. Nancy is a grown-up, you know.’

  George did not respond to this and Mrs. Hume, changing the subject, said, ‘I saw Mrs. Franklin and her daughter out walking on the beach again today. I don’t know where Mr. Franklin was. It was pouring, and there they were, mother and daughter. You know…’ Mrs. Hume paused. ‘It’s like they were waiting for something to come out of the sea. Like a vigil they were keeping. I’ve thought it before, but the notion was particularly strong today. I looked out past them, and there seemed no separation between the sea and the sky, just a black wall of water.’ Mrs. Hume looked at herself in the dresser’s mirror, as though her reflection might clarify matters. ‘I’ve lived by the ocean all my life, and I’ve just taken it for granted, George. Suddenly it gave me the shivers. Just for a moment. I thought, Lord, how big it is, lying there cold and black, like some creature that has slept at your feet so long you never expect it to wake, have forgotten that it might be brutal, even vicious.’

  ‘It’s all this rain,’ her husband said, hugging her and drawing her to him. ‘It can make a person think some black thoughts.’

  George left off worrying about his daughter and her young man’s living arrangements, and in the morning, when Nancy and Steve appeared for breakfast, George didn’t broach the subject – not even to himself.

  Later that morning, he watched them drive off in Steve’s shiny sports car – rich parents, lawyers themselves? – bound for Wilmington and shopping malls that were open.

  The rain had stopped, but dark, massed clouds over the ocean suggested that this was a momentary respite. As George studied the beach, the Franklins came into view. They marched directly toward him, up and over the dunes, moving in a soldierly, clipped fashion. Mrs. Franklin was holding her daughter’s hand and moving at a brisk pace, almost a run, while her husband faltered behind, his gait hesitant, as though uncertain of the wisdom of catching up.

  Mrs. Franklin reached the steps and marched up them, her child tottering in tow, her boot heels sounding hollowly on the wood planks. George nodded, and she passed without speaking, seemed not to see him. In any event, George Hume would have been unable to speak. He was accustomed to the passive, demure countenance of this self-possessed woman, and the expression on her face, a wild distorting emotion, shocked and confounded him. It was an unreadable emotion, but its intensity was extraordinary and unsettling.

  George had not recovered from the almost physical assault of Mrs. Franklin’s emotional state, when her husband came up the stairs, nodded curtly, muttered something, and hastened after his wife.

  George Hume looked after the retreating figures. Mr. Greg Franklin’s face had been a mask of cold civility, none of his wife’s passion written there, but the man’s appearance was disturbing in its own way. Mr. Franklin had been soaking wet, his hair plastered to his skull, his overcoat dripping, the reek of salt water enfolding him like a shroud.

  George walked on down the steps and out to the beach. The ocean was always some consolation, a quieting influence, but today it seemed hostile.

  The sand was still wet from the recent rains and the footprints of the Franklins were all that marred the smooth expanse. George saw that the Franklins had walked down the beach along the edge of the tide and returned at a greater distance from the water. He set out in the wake of their footprints, soon lost to his own thoughts. He thought about his daughter, his wild Nancy, who had always been boy-crazy. At least this one didn’t have a safety-pin through his ear or play in a rock band. So lighten up, George advised himself.

  He stopped. The tracks had stopped. Here is where the Franklins turned and headed back to the hotel, walking higher up the beach, closer to the weedy debris-laden dunes.

  But it was not the ending of the trail that stopped George’s own progress down the beach. In fact, he had forgotten that he was absently following the Franklin’s spore.

  It was the litter of dead fish that stopped him. They were scattered at his feet in the tide. Small ghost crabs had already found the corpses and were laying their claims.

  There might have been a hundred bodies. It was difficult to say, for not one of the bodies was whole. They had been hacked into many pieces, diced by some impossibly sharp blade that severed a head cleanly, flicked off a tail or dorsal fin. Here a scaled torso still danced in the sand, there a pale eye regarded the sky.

  Crouching in the sand, George examined the bodies. He stood up, finally, as the first large drops of rain plunged from the sky. No doubt some fishermen had called it a day, tossed their scissored bait and gone home.

  That this explanation did not satisfy George Hume was the result of a general sense of unease. Too much rain.

  It rained sullenly and steadily for two days during which time George saw little of his daughter and her boyfriend. Nancy apparently had the young man on a strict regime of shopping, tourist attractions, and movies, and she was undaunted by the weather.

  The Franklins kept inside, appearing briefly in the dining room for bodily sustenance and then retreating again to their rooms. And whatever did they do there? Did they play solitaire? Did they watch old reruns on TV?

  On the third day, the sun came out, brazen, acting as though it had never been gone, but the air was colder. The Franklins, silhouetted like black crows on a barren field, resumed their shoreline treks.

  Nancy and Steve rose early and were gone from the house before George arrived at the breakfast table. George spent the day endeavoring to satisfy the IRS’s notion of a small businessman’s obligations, and he was in a foul mood by dinner time.

  After dinner, he tried to read, this time choosing a much-touted novel that proved to be about troubled youth. He was asleep within fifteen minutes of opening the book and awoke in an overstuffed armchair. The room was chilly, and his wife had tucked a quilt around his legs before abandoning him for bed. In the morning she would, he was certain, assure him that she had tried to rouse him before retiring, but he had no recollection of such an attempt.

  ‘Half a bottle of wine might have something to do with that,’ she would say.

  He would deny the charge.

  The advantage of being married a long time was that one could argue without the necessity of the other’s actual, physical presence.<
br />
  He smiled at this thought and pushed himself out of the chair, feeling groggy, head full of prickly flannel. He looked out the window. It was raining again – to the accompaniment of thunder and explosive, strobe-like lightning. The sports car was gone. The kids weren’t home yet. Fine. Fine. None of my business.

  Climbing the stairs, George paused. Something dark lay on the carpeted step, and as he bent over it, leaning forward, his mind sorted and discarded the possibilities: cat, wig, bird’s nest, giant dust bunny. Touch and a strong olfactory cue identified the stuff: seaweed. Raising his head, he saw that two more clumps of the wet, rubbery plant lay on ascending steps, and gathering them – with no sense of revulsion for he was used to the ocean’s disordered presence – he carried the weed up to his room and dumped it in the bathroom’s wastebasket.

  He scrubbed his hands in the sink, washing away the salty, stagnant reek, left the bathroom and crawled into bed beside his sleeping wife. He fell asleep immediately and was awakened later in the night with a suffocating sense of dread, a sure knowledge that an intruder had entered the room.

  The intruder proved to be an odor, a powerful stench of decomposing fish, rotting vegetation and salt water. He climbed out of bed, coughing.

  The source of this odor was instantly apparent and he swept up the wastebasket, preparing to gather the seaweed and flush it down the toilet.

  The seaweed had melted into a black liquid, bubbles forming on its surface, a dark, gelatinous muck, simmering like heated tar. As George stared at the mess, a bubble burst, and the noxious gas it unleashed dazed him, sent him reeling backward with an inexplicable vision of some monstrous, shadowy form, silhouetted against green, mottled water.

  George pitched himself forward, gathered the wastebasket in his arms, and fled the room. In the hall he wrenched open a window and hurled the wastebasket and its contents into the rain.