The Weird

by Ann

  Here I put down the book, my hands trembling from fatigue, and took up the other one, printed in an unknown tongue. ‘The Unfathomable Ruse’? I hardly thought so; I was inclined to give as little credit as I reasonably could to Herr von Junzt’s account. More than likely the small black volume was some inspirational text in the mother tongue of the dead man, a translation of the Gospels, perhaps. And yet I must confess that there were a few tangential points in von Junzt’s account that caused me some misgiving.

  There was a scrape then just outside my window, as if a finger with a very long nail were being drawn almost lovingly along the glass. But the finger turned out to be one of the branches of a fine old horse-chestnut tree that stood outside the tower, scratching at the window in the wind. I was relieved and humiliated. Time to go to bed, I said to myself. Before I turned in, I went to the shelf and moved to one side the bust of Galen that I had inherited from my father, a country doctor. I took a quick snort of good Tennessee whiskey, a taste for which I had also inherited from the old man. Thus emboldened, I went over to the desk and picked up the books. To be frank, I would have preferred to leave them there – I would have preferred to burn them, to be really frank – but I felt that it was my duty to keep them about me while they were under my watch. So I slept with the books beneath my pillow, in their wax envelopes, and I had the worst dream of my life.

  It was one of those dreams where you are a fly on the wall, a phantom bystander, disembodied, unable to speak or intervene. In it, I was treated to the spectacle of a man whose young son was going to die. The man lived in a corner of the world where, from time to time, evil seemed to bubble up from the rusty red earth like a black combustible compound of ancient things long dead. And yet, year after year, this man met each new outburst of horror, true to his code, with nothing but law books, statutes, and county ordinances, as if sheltering with only a sheet of newspaper those he had sworn to protect, insisting that the steaming black geyser pouring down on them was nothing but a light spring rain. That vision started me laughing, but the cream of the jest came when, seized by a spasm of forgiveness toward his late, mad mother, the man decided not to prosecute one of her old paramours, a rummy by the name of Craven, for driving under the influence. Shortly thereafter, Craven steered his old Hudson Terraplane the wrong way down a one-way street, where it encountered, with appropriate cartoon sound effects, an oncoming bicycle ridden by the man’s heedless, darling, wildly pedalling son. That was the funniest thing of all, funnier than the amusing ironies of the man’s profession, than his furtive drinking and his wordless, solitary suppers, funnier even than his having been widowed by suicide: the joke of a father’s outliving his boy. It was so funny that, watching this ridiculous man in my dream, I could not catch my breath for laughing. I laughed so hard that my eyes popped from their sockets, and my smile stretched until it broke my aching jaw. I laughed until the husk of my head burst like a pod and fell away, and my skull and brains went floating off into the sky, white dandelion fluff, a cloud of fairy parasols.

  Around four o’clock in the morning, I woke and was conscious of someone in the room with me. There was an unmistakable tang of the sea in the air. My eyesight is poor and it took me a while to make him out in the darkness, though he was standing just beside my bed, with his long thin arm snaked under my pillow, creeping around. I lay perfectly still, aware of the tips of this slender shadow’s fingernails and the scrape of his scaly knuckles, as he rifled the contents of my head and absconded with them through the bedroom window, which was somehow also the mouth of the Neighborsburg Caverns, with tiny old Colonel Earnshaw taking tickets in the booth.

  I awakened now in truth, and reached immediately under the pillow. The books were still there. I returned them to the evidence room at eight o’clock this morning. At nine, there was a call from Dolores and Victor Abbott, at their motor lodge out on the Plunkettsburg Pike. A guest had made an abrupt departure, leaving a mess. I got into a car with Ganz and we drove out to get a look. The Ashtown police were already there, going over the buildings and grounds of the Vista Dolores Lodge. The bathroom wastebasket of Room 201 was overflowing with blood-soaked bandages. There was evidence that the guest had been keeping some kind of live bird in the room; one of the neighboring guests reported that it had sounded like a crow. And over the whole room there hung a salt smell that I recognized immediately, a smell that some compared to the smell of the ocean, and others to that of blood. When the pillow, wringing wet, was sent up to Pittsburgh for analysis by Mr. Espy, it was found to have been saturated with human tears.

  When I returned from court, late this afternoon, there was a message from Dr. Sauer. He had completed his postmortem and wondered if I would drop by. I took the bottle from behind Daniel Webster and headed on down to the county morgue.

  ‘He was already dead, the poor son of a biscuit eater,’ Dr. Sauer said, looking less morose than he had the last time we spoke. Sauer was a gaunt old Methodist who avoided strong language but never, so long as I had known him, strong drink. I poured us each a tumbler, and then a second. ‘It took me a while to establish it because there was something about the fellow that I was missing.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Well, I’m reasonably sure that he was a hemophiliac. So my reckoning time of death by coagulation of the blood was all thrown off.’

  ‘Hemophilia,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ Dr. Sauer said. ‘It is associated sometimes with inbreeding, as in the case of royal families of Europe.’

  Inbreeding. We stood there for a while, looking at the sad bulk of the dead man under the sheet.

  ‘I also found a tattoo,’ Dr. Sauer added. ‘The head of a grinning baboon. On his left forearm. Oh, and one other thing. He suffered from some kind of vitiligo. There are white patches on his nape and throat.’

  Let the record show that the contents of the victim’s makeup kit, when it was inventoried, included cold cream, rouge, red greasepaint, a powder puff, some brushes, cotton swabs, and five cans of foundation in a tint the label described as ‘Olive Male.’ There was no trace, however, of the white greasepaint with which clowns daub their grinning faces.

  Here I conclude my report, and with it my tenure as district attorney for this blighted and unfortunate county. I have staked my career – my life itself – on the things I could see, on the stories I could credit, and on the eventual vindication, when the book was closed, of the reasonable and skeptical approach. In the face of twenty-five years of bloodshed, mayhem, criminality, and the universal human pastime of ruination, I have clung fiercely to Occam’s razor, seeking always to keep my solutions unadorned and free of conjecture, and never to resort to conspiracy or any kind of prosecutorial woolgathering. My mother, whenever she was confronted by calamity or personal sorrow, invoked cosmic emanations, invisible empires, ancient prophecies, and intrigues; it has been the business of my life to reject such folderol and seek the simpler explanation. But we were fools, she and I, arrant blockheads, each of us blind to or heedless of the readiest explanation: that the world is an ungettable joke, and our human need to explain its wonders and horrors, our appalling genius for devising such explanations, is nothing more than the rim shot that accompanies the punch line.

  I do not know if that nameless clown was the last, but in any case, with such pursuers, there can be few of his kind left. And if there is any truth in the grim doctrine of those hunters, then the return of our father Yrrh, with his inscrutable intentions, cannot be far off. But I fear that, in spite of their efforts over the last ten thousand years, the followers of Ai are going to be gravely disappointed when, at the end of all we know and everything we have ever lost or imagined, the rafters of the world are shaken by a single, a terrible guffaw.

  Details

  China Miéville

  China Miéville (1972–) is an influential English writer known for revitalizing weird fiction, and remains the leading figure in the New Weird movement. He has won the World Fantasy Award and multiple Arthur
C. Clarke awards, among others. Miéville’s early novels – including Perdido Street Station (2001) and The Scar (2002) – fused the weird with body transformation, Marxist politics, secondary world settings, and a bold, often pulpy style. Later novels like The City and the City (2009) and Embassytown (2011) feature a more stripped-down style without sacrificing the visionary quality of the weird. Stories like ‘Details’ (2002) show that he had delicacy of touch early in his career, as well as an encyclopedic knowledge of weird fiction.

  When the boy upstairs got hold of a pellet gun and fired snips of potato at passing cars, I took a turn. I was part of everything. I wasn’t an outsider. But I wouldn’t join in when my friends went to the yellow house to scribble on the bricks and listen at the windows. One girl teased me about it, but everyone else told her to shut up. They defended me, even though they didn’t understand why I wouldn’t come.

  I don’t remember a time before I visited the yellow house for my mother.

  On Wednesday mornings at about nine o’clock I would open the front door of the decrepit building with a key from the bunch my mother had given me. Inside was a hall and two doors, one broken and leading to splintering stairs. I would unlock the other and enter the dark flat. The corridor was unlit and smelled of old, wet air. I never walked even two steps down that hallway. Rot and shadows merged, and it looked as if the passage disappeared a few yards from me. The door to Mrs. Miller’s room was right in front of me. I would lean forward and knock.

  Quite often there were signs that someone else had been there recently. Scuffed dust and bits of litter. Sometimes I was not alone. There were two other children I sometimes saw slipping in or out of the house. There were a handful of adults who visited Mrs. Miller.

  I might find one or another of them in the hallway outside the door to her flat, or even in the flat itself, slouching in the crumbling dark hallway. They would be slumped over or reading some cheap-looking book or swearing loudly as they waited.

  There was a young Asian woman who wore a lot of makeup and smoked obsessively. She ignored me totally. There were two drunks who came sometimes. One would greet me boisterously and incomprehensibly, raising his arms as if he wanted to hug me into his stinking, stinking jumper. I would grin and wave nervously, walk past him. The other seemed alternately melancholic and angry. Occasionally I’d meet him by the door to Mrs. Miller’s room, swearing in a strong cockney accent. I remember the first time I saw him, he was standing there, his red face contorted, slurring and moaning loudly.

  ‘Come on, you old slag,’ he wailed, ‘you sodding old slag. Come on, please, you cow.’

  His words scared me but his tone was wheedling, and I realized I could hear her voice, Mrs. Miller’s voice, from inside the room, answering him back. She did not sound frightened or angry.

  I hung back, not sure what to do, and she kept speaking, and eventually the drunken man shambled miserably away. And then I could continue as usual.

  I asked my mother once if I could have any of Mrs. Miller’s food. She laughed very hard and shook her head. In all the Wednesdays of bringing the food over, I never even dipped my finger in to suck it.

  My mum spent an hour every Tuesday night making the stuff up. She dissolved a bit of gelatin or cornflour with some milk, threw in a load of sugar or flavorings, and crushed a clutch of vitamin pills into the mess. She stirred it until it thickened and let it set in a plain white plastic bowl. In the morning it would be a kind of strong-smelling custard that my mother put a dishcloth over and gave me, along with a list of any questions or requests for Mrs. Miller and sometimes a plastic bucket full of white paint.

  So I would stand in front of Mrs. Miller’s door, knocking, with a bowl at my feet. I’d hear a shifting and then her voice from close by the door.

  ‘Hello,’ she would call, and then say my name a couple of times. ‘Have you my breakfast? Are you ready?’

  I would creep up close to the door and hold the food ready. I would tell her I was.

  Mrs. Miller would slowly count to three. On three, the door suddenly swung open a snatch, just a foot or two, and I thrust my bowl into the gap. She grabbed it and slammed the door quickly in my face.

  I couldn’t see very much inside the room. The door was open for less than a second. My strongest impression was of the whiteness of the walls. Mrs. Miller’s sleeves were white, too, and made of plastic. I never got much of a glimpse at her face, but what I saw was unmemorable. A middle-aged woman’s eager face.

  If I had a bucket full of paint, we would run through the routine again. Then I would sit cross-legged in front of her door and listen to her eat.

  ‘How’s your mother’ she would shout. At that I’d unfold my mother’s careful queries. She’s okay, I’d say, she’s fine. She says she has some questions for you.

  I’d read my mother’s strange questions in my careful childish monotone, and Mrs. Miller would pause and make interested sounds, and clear her throat and think out loud. Sometimes she took ages to come to an answer, and sometimes it would be almost immediate.

  ‘Tell your mother she can’t tell if a man’s good or bad from that,’ she’d say; ‘Tell her to remember the problems she had with your father.’ Or: ‘Yes, she can take the heart of it out. Only she has to paint it with the special oil I told her about.’ ‘Tell your mother seven. But only four of them concern her and three of them used to be dead.’

  ‘I can’t help her with that,’ she told me once, quietly. ‘Tell her to go to a doctor, quickly.’ And my mother did, and she got well again.

  ‘What do you not want to be when you grow up?’ Mrs. Miller asked me one day.

  That morning when I had come to the house the sad cockney vagrant had been banging on the door of her room again, the keys to the flat flailing in his hand.

  ‘He’s begging you, you old tart, please, you owe him, he’s so bloody angry,’ he was shouting, ‘only it ain’t you gets the sharp end, is it? Please, you cow, you sodding cow, I’m on me knees…’

  ‘My door knows you, man,’ Mrs. Miller declared from within. ‘It knows you and so do I, you know it won’t open to you. I didn’t take out my eyes and I’m not giving in now. Go home.’

  I waited nervously as the man gathered himself and staggered away, and then, looking behind me, I knocked on the door and announced myself. It was after I’d given her the food that she asked her question.

  ‘What do you not want to be when you grow up?’

  If I had been a few years older her inversion of the cliché would have annoyed me. It would have seemed mannered and contrived. But I was only a young child, and I was quite delighted.

  I don’t want to be a lawyer, I told her carefully. I spoke out of loyalty to my mother, who periodically received crisp letters that made her cry or smoke fiercely, and swear at lawyers, bloody smartarse lawyers.

  Mrs. Miller was delighted.

  ‘Good boy!’ she snorted. ‘We know all about lawyers. Bastards, right? With the small print. Never be tricked by the small print! It’s right there in front of you, right there in front of you, and you can’t even see it and then suddenly it makes you notice it! And I tell you, once you’ve seen it it’s got you!’ She laughed excitedly. ‘Don’t let the small print get you. I’ll tell you a secret.’ I waited quietly, and my head slipped nearer the door.

  ‘The devil’s in the details!’ She laughed again. ‘You ask your mother if that’s not true. The devil is in the details!’

  I’d wait the twenty minutes or so until Mrs. Miller had finished eating, and then we’d reverse our previous procedure and she’d quickly hand me out an empty bowl. I would return home with the empty container and tell my mother the various answers to her various questions. Usually she would nod and make notes. Occasionally she would cry.

  After I told Mrs. Miller that I did not want to be a lawyer she started asking me to read to her. She made me tell my mother, and told me to bring a newspaper or one of a number of books. My mother nodded at the message and packed me a s
andwich the next Wednesday, along with the Mirror. She told me to be polite and do what Mrs. Miller asked, and that she’d see me in the afternoon.

  I wasn’t afraid. Mrs. Miller had never treated me badly from behind her door. I was resigned and only a little bit nervous.

  Mrs. Miller made me read stories to her from specific pages that she shouted out. She made me recite them again and again, very carefully. Afterward she would talk to me. Usually she started with a joke about lawyers, and about small print.

  ‘There’s three ways not to see what you don’t want to,’ she told me. ‘One is the coward’s way and too damned painful. The other is to close your eyes forever which is the same as the first, when it comes to it. The third is the hardest and the best: You have to make sure only the things you can afford to see come before you.’

  One morning when I arrived the stylish Asian woman was whispering fiercely through the wood of the door, and I could hear Mrs. Miller responding with shouts of amused disapproval. Eventually the young woman swept past me, leaving me cowed by her perfume.

  Mrs. Miller was laughing, and she was talkative when she had eaten.

  ‘She’s heading for trouble, messing with the wrong family! You have to be careful with all of them,’ she told me. ‘Every single one of them on that other side of things is a tricksy bastard who’ll kill you as soon as look at you, given half a chance.

  ‘There’s the gnarly throat-tripped one…and there’s old hasty, who I think had best remain nameless,’ she said wryly. ‘All old bastards, all of them. You can’t trust them at all, that’s what I say. I should know, eh? Shouldn’t I?’ She laughed. ‘Trust me, trust me on this: It’s too easy to get on the wrong side of them.