The Weird

by Ann

  ‘One hundred and eleven, actually,’ she says. ‘They’re like birthday candles. One for every year since the house was built. We’ve been carving them for a week.’

  ‘Oh,’ Tara says, because she doesn’t know what else to say. ‘I see.’

  ‘You should go on inside,’ the woman tells her. ‘They’ll be waiting. It’s getting late,’ and Tara says nice to meet you, we’ll talk some more later, something polite and obligatory like that. She steps past the smoking woman, towards the front door, past and between the grinning and grimacing and frowning pumpkin faces.

  ‘Yes, she’s the one that I was telling you about last week,’ Darren is saying to them all, ‘the marine biologist.’ He laughs, and Tara shakes someone else’s hand. It’s getting hard to keep them straight, all these pale people in their impeccable black clothing. She feels like a pigeon dropped into a flock of crows. Sure, it’s not a masquerade, not a costume party, but she could have at least had the good sense to wear black. A tall, painfully thin woman with a thick French accent touches the back of Tara’s hand. The woman’s nails are lacquered the red-brown color of kelp, and her smile is as gentle as was the woman’s out on the porch.

  ‘It’s always so nice to see a new face,’ the French woman says. ‘Especially when it’s such a fine and splendid face.’ The woman kisses the back of Tara’s hand, and then Darren’s introducing her to a short, fat man wearing an ascot the color of a stormy summer sky.

  ‘Ah,’ he says, and shakes Tara’s hand so forcefully it hurts. ‘A scientist. That’s grand. We’ve had so few scientists, you know.’ She isn’t sure if his accent is Scots or Irish, but it’s heavy, like his wide, jowly face.

  ‘We’ve had medical doctors, yes,’ the fat man continues. ‘Lots and lots of medical doctors. Once we had a neurologist, even. But I’ve never thought doctors were quite the same thing. As scientists, I mean. Doctors aren’t really much more than glorified mechanics, are they?’

  ‘I never really thought of it that way,’ Tara says, which isn’t exactly true. She manages to slip free of the fat man’s endless, crushing handshake without seeming rude, then glances towards Darren, hoping that he can read the discomfort, the unease, in her eyes.

  ‘If you’ll all please excuse us for a moment,’ he says, so she knows that he’s seen, that he understands, and he puts one of his long arms around her shoulders. ‘I need to steal her away for just a few minutes.’ There’s a splash of soft, knowing laughter from the little crowd of people.

  He leads her from the front parlor into what might once have been a dining room, and Tara’s beginning to realize how very empty the house is. The way it looked from the outside, she expected the place to be full of antiques, perhaps neglected antiques gone just a bit shabby, a threadbare and discrepant mix of Edwardian and Victorian. But still, she thought that it would be furnished. These rooms are almost empty, not even carpets on the floors or drapes on the tall windows; the velvet wallpaper is faded and torn in places, hanging down in strips here and there, like a reptile shedding its skin. And there’s no electricity, as far as she can tell, just candles and old-fashioned gaslight fixtures on the walls, warm and flickering light held inside frosted crystal flowers.

  ‘They can be somewhat intimidating at first, I know that,’ Darren says. ‘It’s a pretty close-knit group. I should have warned you.’ But she shakes her head, smiles and tells him no, it’s fine, it’s not a problem.

  ‘They’re probably as anxious about your being here,’ he says, ‘as you are about meeting them.’ He rubs his hands together in a nervous sort of way, and glances back towards the crows milling about in the parlor, whispering among themselves. Are they talking about me? Tara wonders. Are they asking each other questions about me?

  ‘I trust you didn’t have any trouble finding the house?’ Darren asks. ‘It’s pretty far off the beaten track. We had someone get lost once.’

  ‘No,’ she replies. ‘Finding the house was easy. With all those jack-o-lanterns, it’s almost like a lighthouse.’ And she thinks that’s probably exactly what it would look like to a ship passing in the night, to fishermen or a tanker passing on their way north or south, an unblinking lighthouse perched high on the craggy shore.

  ‘The pumpkins. That’s one of the traditions,’ Darren says, brushing his long black bangs away from his face. It’s not exactly a handsome face, something more honest than handsome. She thinks maybe that’s one of the reasons she finds him attractive.

  ‘One of the traditions? Are there many others?’ ‘A few. I hope all this isn’t freaking you out.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ she replies, and turns her head towards a window, towards the moonlight shining in clean through the glass, shining white off the sea. ‘Not at all. It’s all very dignified, I think. Not like Halloween in the city. All the noisy drunks and drag queens, those gaudy parades. I like this much better than that. I wish you’d told me to wear black, though,’ and he laughs at her then.

  ‘I don’t think it’s funny,’ she says, frowning slightly, still watching the moon riding on the waves, and he puts a hand on her arm. ‘I must stick out like a sore thumb.’

  ‘A bit of contrast isn’t a bad thing,’ Darren says, and she turns away from the window, turning back to him, his high cheekbones and high forehead, his long aquiline nose and eyes that are neither blue nor green.

  ‘I think you need a drink,’ he says, and Tara nods and smiles for him.

  ‘I think maybe I need two or three.’

  ‘That can be arranged,’ he tells her, then leads Tara back towards the crows. A few of them turn their heads to see, dark eyes watching her, and she half expects them to spread wide black wings and fly away.

  ‘They’ll ask you questions,’ and now Darren’s almost whispering, hushed words meant for her and no one else. ‘But don’t ever feel like you have to tell them anything you don’t want to tell them. They don’t mean to be pushy, Tara. They’re just impatient, that’s all.’ She starts to ask what he means by that exactly, impatient, but then she and Darren are already in the parlor again. The small and murmuring crowd opens momentarily, parting long enough to take them in, and then it closes eagerly around them.

  The evening proceeds, and an hour or so later, she’s looking on as members of a string quartet carefully return their sleek instruments to black violin and viola and cello cases, cases lined in aubergine and lavender velvet. They played Bach and Chopin, and there was only one piece she didn’t recognize.

  ‘It really isn’t very fair of you, Mr. Quince,’ someone says. Tara turns around and sees that it’s the dapper fat man with the blue-gray ascot, the man who’s either Irish or Scottish. ‘The way you’re keeping her all to yourself like this,’ he says, and he glances coyly past her to Darren. The fat man smiles and rubs at his short salt-and-pepper beard.

  ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t aware,’ Darren says, and he looks at Tara, then, checking to be sure she’s okay before leaving her in the man’s company.

  ‘Oh, I think we’ll be fine,’ she says, and Darren nods once before disappearing into the crowd.

  ‘I am Peterson,’ the man says, ‘Ahmed Peterson.’ He kisses the back of her hand the same way that the tall French woman did earlier. There’s the same peculiar formality about him, about all of them, manners that ought to come across as affected, but don’t somehow. He has a walking stick topped with a silver dolphin.

  ‘Quince tells us that you’re a marine biologist,’ he says, releasing her hand and standing very straight, but he’s still a few inches shorter than Tara.

  ‘An ichthyologist, actually. I do some work at the aquarium in Monterey and teach at Cal State. That’s where I met Darren.’

  ‘How very marvelous,’ Peterson beams. ‘You know, my dear, I once came across an oarfish, a great, long, spiny thing, stranded on the shingle at Lyme Regis. The fellow I was with thought sure we’d found ourselves a sea serpent.’

  ‘I actually saw an oarfish alive,’ Tara says, ‘off the coast of Oregon abou
t ten years ago, when I was still a grad student.’ She’s finally starting to relax, beginning to feel less like an outsider. This is familiar ground, swapping fish stories with the fat man. ‘We estimated it at almost twenty feet.’

  ‘Ah, well, mine was smaller,’ he says, sounding a little disappointed. Then, suddenly, there’s a jolting, reverberating crash, and Tara turns to see that one of the women is holding up a small brass gong.

  ‘Oh my,’ the fat man says. ‘Is it really that late already? I lost track,’ and then Darren’s standing next to her again.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asks.

  ‘You’ll see,’ he replies, taking her hand and slipping something cold and metallic into her palm, a coin or a token.

  ‘What’s this?’ ‘Just hang onto it,’ he replies. ‘Don’t lose it. You’ll need it later.’

  So, it’s a game, she thinks. Yes, it must be some sort of party game.

  And now everyone is starting to leave the parlor. She lets Darren lead her, and they follow the others, filing along a narrow hallway to a locked door near the very back of the house. Behind the door are stairs winding down and down and down, steps that seem to have been cut directly into the native rock, and damp stone walls rise up around them. Some of the guests have candles or oil lanterns. Tara slips once, and Darren catches her. He leans close and whispers in her ear, and his breath is very faintly sour.

  ‘Watch your step,’ he says. ‘It’s not much farther, but you wouldn’t want to fall.’ There are cool gusts of salty air rising up from below, not the sort of air she’d expect from a cellar at all; cool air against her skin, but air tainted by an oily, fishy odor, a low tide sort of a smell, bladderwrack and dying starfish trapped in stagnant tidal pools.

  ‘Where the hell are we going?’ she asks him, not bothering to whisper, and a woman with a conch shell tattooed on her forehead turns around and looks at her with a guarded hint of disapproval, and then she turns away again.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Darren whispers. ‘In a moment you’ll see.’ And Tara realizes that there’s something besides the salty darkness and the light from the candles and lanterns, a softer chartreuse glow coming from somewhere below, yellow-green light that gets a little brighter with every step she takes towards the bottom of the stairway.

  And now, if Darren were to ask again whether or not she was getting freaked out, now she might say yes. Now, she might even tell him she really should be going, that it’s late, and she needs to get back to the city. She could say that she has papers to grade or a test to write for her oceanography class, anything that sounds plausible enough to get her out of the house and onto the pumpkin-littered porch, back down the trail to her rented car. She imagines her relief at being free of the house. There would be stars overhead, instead of stone. But he doesn’t ask again, so she keeps quiet. The chartreuse light grows brighter and brighter, and in a few more minutes they’ve come to the bottom.

  ‘No one ever understands at first,’ Darren says. He has one hand gripped just a little too tightly around her left wrist, and Tara’s about to tell him that it hurts, about to ask him to let go, when she sees the pool and forgets about everything else.

  There’s a sort of a boardwalk at the bottom of the stairs, a short path of warped planks and rails and pilings gone driftwood soft from the perpetually damp air, from the spray and seawater lapping restlessly at the wood. The strange light is coming from the water, from the wide pool that entirely fills the cavern at the foot of the stairs, coruscating light that rises in dancing fairy shafts to play across the uneven ceiling of the chamber. Tara’s stopped moving, and people are having to step around her, all the impatient crows grown quiet and beginning to take their places on the boardwalk, no sound now but the hollow clock, clock, clock of their shoes on the planks and the waves splashing against the pier and the limestone walls of the sea cave.

  It’s like they’ve all done this thing a hundred, hundred times before, and she looks to Darren for an explanation, for a wink or a smile to tell her this really is just some odd Halloween game. However, his blue-green eyes are fixed on the far end of the boardwalk, and he doesn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Take me back now,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to see this,’ but if he’s heard her it doesn’t show on his face, his long, angular face reflecting the light from the pool. He has the awed and joyous expression of someone witnessing a miracle. The sort of expression that Hollywood always gives a Joan of Arc or a Bernadette, the eyes of someone who’s seen God, she thinks, and then Tara looks towards the end of the boardwalk again. The crowd parts on cue, stepping aside so that she can see the rocks jutting up from the middle of the pool, from whatever depths there are beneath her feet, those stones stacked one upon the other as precarious as jackstraws. The rocks and the thing that’s chained there, and in a moment she knows that it’s seen her, as well.

  ‘When I was five,’ she says, ‘when I was five, I found a sea turtle dead on the beach near Santa Cruz.’ She opens her hand again to stare at the coin that Darren gave her upstairs.

  ‘No, dear,’ Ahmed Peterson says. ‘It was an oarfish. Don’t you remember?’ and she shakes her head, because it wasn’t an oarfish that time. That time it was a turtle, and the maggots and the gulls had eaten away its eyes.

  ‘You must be mistaken,’ the fat man says again, and her coin glints and glimmers in the yellow-green light, glinting purest moonlight silver in her palm. She doesn’t want to give it away, as all the others have already done. It may be the only thing still tethering her to the world, and she doesn’t want to drop it into the water and watch as it spirals down to nowhere, that see-saw spiral descent towards the blazing deep, and she quickly closes her hand again. She makes a tight fist. The fat man huffs and grumbles, and she looks up at the moon instead of the pool.

  ‘You may not have lived much under the sea,’ he says.

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ Tara confesses. ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘Perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster,’ he says.

  She thinks about that for a moment, about brown claws boiled orange and jointed crustacean legs on china plates.

  ‘I once tasted –’ but then she stops herself, because she’s almost certain having eaten lobster is something she shouldn’t admit. ‘No, never,’ Tara whispers, instead.

  And the sea slams itself against the cliffs below the house, the angry sea, the cheated sea that wants to drown all the land again. Darren is lying in the tall grass, and Tara can hear a train far away in the night, its steam-throat whistle and steel-razor wheels, rolling from there to there, and she traces a line in the dark with the tip of one index finger, horizon to horizon, sea to sky, stitching with her finger.

  ‘She keeps the balance,’ Darren says, and Tara knows he’s talking about the woman on the rocks in the cave below the house. The thing that was a woman once. ‘She stands between the worlds,’ he says. ‘She watches all the gates.’

  ‘Did she have a choice?’ Tara asks him, and now he’s pulling her down into the grass, the sea of grass washed beneath a harvest moon. He smells like fresh hay and pumpkin flesh, nutmeg and candy corn.

  ‘Do saints ever have choices?’

  And Tara’s trying to remember, if they ever do, when Ahmed and the woman with the conch-shell tattoo lean in close and whisper the names of deep-sea things in her ears, a rushed and bathypelagic litany of fish and jellies, squid and the translucent larvae of shrimp and crabs.

  Saccopharynx, Stylephorus, Pelagothuria, Asteronyx.

  ‘Not so fast,’ she says. ‘Not so fast, please.’

  Caulophyrne, Lasiognathus, Sqaulogadus, Abyssobrotula.

  ‘You can really have no notion, how delightful it will be,’ sings Ahmed Peterson, and then the tattooed woman finishes for him. ‘When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea.’

  It’s easier to shut her eyes and lie in Darren’s arms, hidden by the merciful, undulating grass, easier than listening, easier than hearing. ‘The jack-o�
�-lanterns,’ he says again, because she asked him why the need for all the jack-o’-lanterns. ‘You said it yourself, Tara. Remember? A lighthouse. One night a year, they rise, and we want them to know we’re watching.’

  ‘Beneath the waters of the sea, Are lobsters thick as thick can be – They love to dance with you and me. My own and gentle Salmon.’

  ‘It hurts her,’ Tara says, watching the woman on the rocks, the lady of spines and scales and the squirming podia sprouting from her distended belly.

  ‘Drop the coin, Tara,’ Darren murmurs, and, somehow, his voice manages to be urgent, but not impatient. ‘Drop the coin into the pool. It helps her hold the line.’

  Drop the coin, the coin, the candy in a plastic pumpkin grinning basket.

  ‘The reason is,’ says the Gryphon, who was a moment before the woman with the conch on her forehead, ‘that they would go with the lobsters to the dance. So they got thrown out to sea. So they had to fall a long, long way.’

  And the Mock Turtle – who was previously Ahmed Peterson – glares at the Gryphon. ‘I never went to him,’ he huffs. ‘He taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say.’

  ‘Someone got lost,’ Darren whispers. ‘We had to have another. The number is fixed,’ and the black-salt breeze blows unseen through the concealing grass. She can’t hear the train any longer. And the moon stares down at them with its single swollen jaundiced eye, searching and dragging the ocean against the rocks.

  It will find me soon, and what then?

  ‘Drop the coin, Tara. There’s not much time left. It’s almost midnight,’ and the woman on the rocks strains against her shackles, the rusted chains that hold her there, and cold corroded iron bites into her pulpy cheese-white skin. The crimson tentacles between her alabaster thighs, the barnacles that have encrusted her legs, and her lips move without making a sound.

  ‘They’re rising, Tara,’ Darren says, and he sounds scared and stares down into the glowing water, the abyss below the boardwalk, the pool that’s so much deeper than any ocean has ever been. And there is movement down there, she can see that, the coils and lashing fins. The woman on the rock makes a sound like a dying whale.