The Weird

by Ann

  George looked up. ‘Is he releasing Mrs. Franklin?’ Please come and get your daughter, George thought. I have a daughter of my own. Oh how he wanted to see the last of them.

  ‘Not just yet. No. But he wanted to know about the family’s visits every year. Dr. Melrose thought there might have been something different about that first year. He feels there is some sort of trauma associated with it.’

  George Hume shrugged. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary as I recall.’

  Mrs. Hume put a hand to her cheek. ‘Oh, but it was different. Don’t you remember, George? They came earlier, with all the crowds, and they left abruptly. They had paid for two weeks, but they were gone on the third day. I remember being surprised when they returned the next year – and I thought then that it must have been the crowds they hated and that’s why they came so late from then on.’

  ‘Well…’ Her husband closed his eyes. ‘I can’t say that I actually remember the first time.’

  His wife shook her head. ‘What can I expect from a man who can’t remember his own wedding anniversary? That Melissa was just a tot back then, a little mite in a red bathing suit. Now that I think of it, she hasn’t worn a bathing suit since.’

  Before going to bed, George stopped at the door to his daughter’s room. He pushed the door open carefully and peered in. She slept as she always slept, sprawled on her back, mouth open. She had always fallen asleep abruptly, in disarray, gunned down by the sandman. Tonight she was aided by the doctor’s sedatives. The child Melissa snuggled next to her, and for one brief moment the small form seemed sinister and parasitic, as though attached to his daughter, drawing sustenance there.

  ‘Come to bed,’ his wife said, and George joined her under the covers.

  ‘It’s just that she wants to protect the girl,’ George said. ‘All she has, you know. She’s just seen her boyfriend drown, and this…I think it gives her purpose.’

  Mrs. Hume understood that this was in answer to the earlier question and she nodded her head. ‘Yes, I know dear. But is it healthy? I’ve a bad feeling about it.’

  ‘I know,’ George said.

  The shrill ringing of the phone woke him. ‘Who is it?’ his wife was asking as he fumbled in the dark for the receiver.

  The night ward clerk was calling from Romner Psychiatric. She apologized for calling at such a late hour, but there might be cause for concern. Better safe than sorry, etc. Mrs. Franklin had apparently – well, had definitely – left the hospital. Should she return to the hotel, the hospital should be notified immediately.

  George Hume thanked her, hung up the phone, and got out of bed. He pulled on his trousers, tugged a sweatshirt over his head.

  ‘Where are you going?’ his wife called after him.

  ‘I won’t be but a minute,’ he said, closing the door behind him.

  The floor was cold, the boards groaning under his bare feet. Slowly, with a certainty born of dread, expecting the empty bed, expecting the worst, he pushed open the door.

  Nancy lay sleeping soundly.

  The child was gone. Nancy lay as though still sheltering that small, mysterious form.

  George pulled his head back and closed the door. He turned and hurried down the hall. He stopped on the stairs, willed his heart to silence, slowed his breathing. ‘Melissa,’ he whispered. No answer.

  He ran down the stairs. The front doors were wide open. He ran out into the moonlight and down to the beach.

  The beach itself was empty and chill; an unrelenting wind blew in from the ocean. The moon shone overhead as though carved from milky ice.

  He saw them then, standing far out on the pier, mother and daughter, black shadows against the moon-gray clouds that bloomed on the horizon.

  Dear God, George thought. What does she intend to do?

  ‘Melissa!’ George shouted, and began to run.

  He was out of breath when he reached them. Mother and daughter regarded him coolly, having turned to watch his progress down the pier.

  ‘Melissa,’ George gasped. ‘Are you all right?’

  Melissa was wearing a pink nightgown and holding her mother’s hand. It was her mother who spoke: ‘We are beyond your concern. Mr. Hume. My husband is dead, and without him the contract cannot be renewed.’

  Mrs. Franklin’s eyes were lit with some extraordinary emotion and the wind, rougher and threatening to unbalance them all, made her hair quiver like a dark flame.

  ‘You have your own daughter, Mr. Hume. That is a fine and wonderful thing. You have never watched your daughter die, watched her fade to utter stillness, dying on her back in the sand, sand on her lips, her eyelids; children are so untidy, even dying. It is an unholy and terrible thing to witness.’

  The pier groaned and a loud crack heralded a sudden tilting of the world. George fell to his knees. A long sliver of wood entered the palm of his hand, and he tried to keep from pitching forward.

  Mrs. Franklin, still standing, shouted over the wind. ‘We came here every year to renew the bargain. Oh, it is not a good bargain. Our daughter is never with us entirely. But you would know, any parent would know, that love will take whatever it can scavenge, any small compromise. Anything less utter and awful than the grave.’

  There were tears running down Mrs. Franklin’s face now, silver tracks. ‘This year I was greedy. I wanted Melissa back, all of her. And I thought, I am her mother. I have the first claim to her. So I demanded – demanded – that my husband set it all to rights. “Tell them we have come here for the last year,” I said. And my husband allowed his love for me to override his reason. He did as I asked.’

  Melissa, who seemed oblivious to her mother’s voice, turned away and spoke into the darkness of the waters. Her words were in no language George Hume had ever heard, and they were greeted with a loud, rasping bellow that thrummed in the wood planks of the pier.

  Then came the sound of wood splintering, and the pier abruptly tilted. George’s hands gathered more spiky wooden needles as he slid forward. He heard himself scream, but the sound was torn away by the renewed force of the wind and a hideous roaring that accompanied the gale.

  Looking up, George saw Melissa kneeling at the edge of the pier. Her mother was gone.

  ‘Melissa!’ George screamed, stumbling forward. ‘Don’t move.’

  But the child was standing up, wobbling, her nightgown flapping behind her.

  George leapt forward, caught the child, felt a momentary flare of hope, and then they both were hurtling forward and the pier was gone.

  They plummeted toward the ocean, through a blackness defined by an inhuman sound, a sound that must have been the first sound God heard when He woke at the dawn of eternity.

  And even as he fell, George felt the child wiggle in his arms. His arms encircled Melissa’s waist, felt bare flesh. Had he looked skyward, he would have seen the nightgown, a pink ghost shape, sailing toward the moon.

  But George Hume’s eyes saw, instead, the waiting ocean and under it, a shape, a moving network of cold, uncanny machinery, and whether it was a living thing of immense size, or a city, or a machine, was irrelevant. He knew only that it was ancient beyond any land-born thing.

  Still clutching the child he collided with the hard, cold back of the sea.

  George Hume had been raised in close proximity to the ocean. He had learned to swim almost as soon as he had learned to walk. The cold might kill him, would almost certainly kill him if he did not reach shore quickly – but that he did. During the swim toward shore he lost Melissa and in that moment he understood not to turn back, not to seek the child.

  He could not tell anyone how he knew a change had been irretrievably wrought and that there was no returning the girl to land. It was not something you could communicate – any more than you could communicate the dreadful ancient quality of the machinery under the sea.

  Nonetheless, George knew the moment Melissa was lost to him. It was a precise and memorable moment. It was the moment the child had wriggled, with strange new, sinewy strength
, flicked her tail and slid effortlessly from his grasp.

  The Delicate

  Jeffrey Ford

  Jeffrey Ford (1955–) is an American writer whose fiction combines elements of traditional fantasy or magic realism with surrealism and horror. He studied with the novelist John Gardner at Binghamton University and he currently teaches at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey. His work has received and been nominated for many awards, including the World Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Edgar Allen Poe Award, the Hugo Award, and the Nebula Award. Although his fiction comes at the weird sideways, some of his stories, like ‘The Delicate’ (1994), enter weird territory with complete abandon. It’s a short, sharp shock of the grotesque.

  The Delicate is pale, limbs pipe-cleaner thin, with a head as shiny hard as beetle-back. Violent, in utero skull tectonics have led to a precipice of brow, a compression of matter past the point of truth. His eyes are crow eyes, and his ear holes winding tunnels to nowhere.

  He comes in the latter days of afternoon, through blowing snow, dressed in black, while Schubert’s ‘Eighth’ plays magically in the background. He comes to suck the breath out of passing fancies and to treat the infirm of mind, the particularly annoying, to a long sleep.

  ‘In order to take the waters,’ as he explains it, he comes to a resort town on the edge of reason. Beyond it, the wilderness stretches north to the frozen pole. God has never drawn breath there – the domain of bat-winged demons whose skin is the ringed wood of oak trees. These creatures fly out of the forest at night to snatch up children, their little legs kicking to the moon. To live in Absentia is to live with a soul that is liquid lead.

  Perhaps it is the manner in which he holds his cigarette or maybe his distinguished apparel that immediately ingratiates him to both the guests and staff of the Hotel Providence. At his request, they call him Harding Jarvis and marvel at his grace and facility with foreign language. Though his face is more a cow skull than a thing of flesh, no one seems to notice except the woman who cleans his rooms. She knows him by his aroma – roses over bad meat. When he knows she knows, he wheezes into his wine glass.

  No matter who Carlotta confesses her fears to, they brush her off, saying, ‘Herr Jarvis? Not possible. My dear, you are disturbed.’ She makes it a point never to enter his rooms when they are occupied. Sleep to her is death, say the toothpicks holding open her eyes. She lasts only three days before she sits down and closes them. To sleep is warm and beautiful, but the chair she sits in is at the foot of Herr Jarvis’s bed. There is so much dirt on the floor – four ounces of fly meat on every windowsill.

  He returns unexpectedly from an afternoon of playing whist with Madame Fesh of the colorful muff, Barlin the local logomancer, and Meme Haspin, taxidermist to the landed gentry, and discovers Carlotta asleep in the chair. With little pomp and less circumstance, he sucks the life out of her. The process is long and painful, and he doesn’t spare her a minute of it. After hanging her withered corpse, like a wrinkled garment bag of flesh, on a peg in the closet, he sits down to smoke his clay pipe. Before long, he moves to the writing desk, where he takes up his pen and records the essence of the maid he has just ingested. The first phrase to crawl out onto paper is, ‘Insouciance is the engine of regret,’ and from there it is a smooth plunge into lyrical facility.

  At first he thought it was the crab soufflé he had had for lunch, but then realized, too late, that something in Carlotta’s blood was causing a strange transformation in him. With a popping of bone, a stretch of incisors, a whisper growth of fur and the shrinking of skin, he stoops to become a dog. His last oath is excremental before his words give way to growling.

  The inhabitants of Absentia mention to each other the clever little hound that now wanders the streets looking for scraps. One boy tells how he heard it cry human, and the men who mine Mount Alfarabi are amused when the beast tries to have its way with a lady’s shinbone outside the beer hall. Meanwhile, everybody who is anybody is seeking out Harding Jarvis for a ride in the car, a game of tennis, a cocktail party.

  Pharsalus, the hunter, comes in from the wilderness with furs to sell and wild turkey feathers in his hat. With the money he makes, he goes directly to the beer hall and drinks many mugs. He tells those he hasn’t seen in three seasons about the demon he shot and about the beautiful paradise surrounded by hundreds of miles of ice. For proof of the demon, he displays a pair of gnarled horns which he pulled like teeth, with a pair of pliers, from the forehead of the creature. As for paradise, he offers only a shrug.

  The days of Night fall while Pharsalus is drinking. When he steps out of the beer hall, there is a brisk wind and winter chill. He stares up at the ice-bright stars and remembers tracking white apes at twilight. They moved like ghosts among the giant pines. They died with a cough of steam and a trickle of blood.

  When his memory clears, Pharsalus notices a dog sitting in the street in front of him. Because the first hours of Night each year give him a desire to speak to something other than only the earth and wind, he decides to adopt the mutt as a hunting dog. Using scraps of dried caribou, he lures his new companion out of town and into the uncharted wilderness.

  Night in the forest is either stone silence and falling snow or the sound of something dying. Demons fly out of the trees without warning, and Pharsalus is always ready with his gun. When they jump him from behind, he uses his long, curved knife and engages them in hand-to-hand combat. The dog helps in the kill. As the demons’ mauled bodies expire at his feet, he questions them about the path to the Earthly Paradise. Some of the dying offer clues, but most go quietly, their barbed tails thrashing the snow. Pharsalus writes whatever they tell him in a little notebook and then pulls their horns out with a pair of pliers.

  In spring, the hunter and dog traverse a pass that leads over the mountains. The sudden return of the days of Morning brings light that blinds. In those mountains there exist hundreds of small caves formed long ago in the Ice Age. Each year, he hunts them for snapping yellow back and artifacts left behind by the ancients who had once inhabited them.

  In one cave, the hunter discovers the frozen corpse of a man, sitting on a large stone at a table hewn from rock. Icicles hang from the man’s nose and frost glazes his eyes. From the worm-eaten journal laying open in front of the dead man, Pharsalus learns of his father’s search for him. The hunter puts his arms around the dog and cries.

  In one entry in his father’s journal, the old man describes his love affair with a woman who lives at the bottom of a lake. Her skin is blue and her hair so long it turns into sea grass and trailing vines. He descends from his mountain perch every night to meet her on the shore of her lake.

  They sit beneath a tall dune, the wind blowing around them. Above, stars smash into stars. He tells her how fifteen years earlier he left home to search for his son who had become a hunter in the wilderness. As he kisses her, he hears the immensity of paradise singing across the water to him.

  Pharsalus dreams every night of the only beast he has any desire to hunt. It is a creature he has never actually seen, with many jumbled attributes – scales, fur, talons, fangs, feathers beneath and around the hide and hair. Every night it comes vividly to him and fills him with longing to hunt it. In the dream, he always hears it flying. There is a struggle and it bites him, like a snake, in the heel. He always awakens wondering if the bird part is rooster. But since he has gotten the dog, it has become more and more difficult to envision the dream kill.

  In their wandering, the hunter and companion stumble upon a beautiful garden locked in ice. At the last second the Delicate steps out of the sloughed skin of the mutt to take the hunter by the throat. Lips meet lips and breath begins leaving, begins arriving. When the hunter is blind in one eye and his left rib cage shattered by the internal pressure, he summons those years of the kill and thrusts his hunting knife into the thorax of the Delicate. Streams of agony intermingle and separate out into fields of bright color. With a simple cracking noise the monster pushe
s a bony finger through the hunter’s chest and turns off his heart.

  But the Delicate is dying from his wound. He stumbles through the wilderness clutching his oozing side with a slim, sharp hand. He kneels and prays to heaven but nothing happens. The memories of other lifetimes swirl in his memory with an anguished forgetting of paradise. He cries for the loss of his delicate form, his exo-skeleton now a crystal meteor. If only he could change into a dog, he thinks, as life leaves him in a cascade of steam. With little conviction, he sucks it back up as it goes. In no time, he’s good as new.

  Back in the town of Absentia, in the very room of the Hotel Providence where he took Carlotta, he’s now taking them two at a time. The empty husks of life pile up like fresh-cut bales of tobacco in his closet. Men catch their wives sneaking to his door. Wives catch their husbands at some shadowy rendezvous with him, and he takes them both as quick as you please. He takes the contessa from behind as she leans over to adjust her corset. Her piles of hair almost save her, but, in the end, she is as easy to draw the life out of as is Master Cley, or the mayor, or Madam Silwort, or the Grossdig Twins.

  Someone notices the population of the town dwindling at an alarming rate and wires for the government to send troops, before the Delicate can snip the telegraph line with his incisors. When the army arrives and surrounds the town, he is huffing, as if taking snuff, the last few morsels of Mrs. Fleacox. He realizes too late that she has long since gone bad as a soft melon even though she keeps right on talking till the end. Her pointless words infect him with flexis midocarsis, and he slowly begins to disintegrate. In his final hour, he stands upon the balcony of the mayor’s house, staring out over the wilderness, playing the violin until his fingers turn to salt and the instrument falls to the floor.

  The soldiers break into Absentia, machine guns blurting out death, air cover dropping flames as if the clouds were on fire. They find the Delicate – a sorry, prodigious pile of cigarette ash. Mrs. Fleacox is lost between life and death, and they call for a specialist to administer the needle to the base of her spine. They collect the creature into a plastic bag and freeze-dry him. His remains are taken to Spire City in the Sunbelt where they are stored for the edification of future generations. The funding never comes through to study the crumbs of the Delicate, so he lies in a bag on a shelf and waits.