by Ann
‘She shakes her head. I’m not ill, she says. I’m hungry. That’s all.
‘Are you sure, I say, because I can call someone, it’s not a bother. They’ll come out for old people.
‘She says, Edward? I don’t want to be a burden on anyone, but I’m so hungry.
‘Right. I’ll get you something to eat, I said. Something easy on your tummy, I says. That’s when she surprises me. She looks embarrassed. Then she says, very quietly, Meat. It’s got to be fresh meat, and raw. I won’t let anyone else cook for me. Meat. Please, Edward.
‘Not a problem I says, and I go downstairs. I thought for a moment about nicking it from the cat’s bowl, but of course I didn’t. It was like, I knew she wanted it, so I had to do it. I had no choice. I went down to Safeways, and I bought her a packet of best ground sirloin.
‘The cat smelled it. Followed me up the stairs. I said, you get down, puss. It’s not for you, I said. It’s for Miss Corvier and she’s not feeling well, and she’s going to need it for her supper, and the thing mewed at me as if it hadn’t been fed in a week, which I knew wasn’t true because its bowl was still half full. Stupid, that cat was.
‘I knock on her door, she says Come in. She’s still in the bed, and I give her the pack of meat, and she says, Thank you, Edward, you’ve got a good heart. And she starts to tear off the plastic wrap, there in the bed. There’s a puddle of brown blood under the plastic tray, and it drips onto her sheet, but she doesn’t notice. Makes me shiver.
‘I’m going out the door, and I can already hear her starting to eat with her fingers, cramming the raw mince into her mouth. And she hadn’t got out of bed.
‘But the next day she’s up and about, and from there on she’s in and out at all hours, in spite of her age, and I think there you are. They say red meat’s bad for you, but it did her the world of good. And raw, well, it’s just steak tartare, isn’t it? You ever eaten raw meat?’
The question came as a surprise. I said, ‘Me?’
Eddie looked at me with his dead eyes, and he said, ‘Nobody else at this table.’
‘Yes. A little. When I was a small boy – four, five years old – my grandmother would take me to the butcher’s with her, and he’d give me slices of raw liver, and I’d just eat them, there in the shop, like that. And everyone would laugh.’
I hadn’t thought of that in twenty years. But it was true.
I still like my liver rare, and sometimes, if I’m cooking and if nobody else is around, I’ll cut a thin slice of raw liver before I season it, and I’ll eat it, relishing the texture and the naked, iron taste.
‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I liked my meat properly cooked. So the next thing that happened was Thompson went missing.’
‘Thompson?’
‘The cat. Somebody said there used to be two of them, and they called them Thompson and Thompson. I don’t know why. Stupid, giving them both the same name. The first one was squashed by a lorry.’ He pushed at a small mound of sugar on the Formica top with a fingertip. His left hand, still. I was beginning to wonder whether he had a right arm. Maybe the sleeve was empty. Not that it was any of my business. Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way.
I was trying to think of some way of telling him I didn’t have any money, just in case he was going to ask me for something when he got to the end of his story. I didn’t have any money: just a train ticket and enough pennies for the bus ticket home.
‘I was never much of a one for cats,’ he said suddenly. ‘Not really. I liked dogs. Big, faithful things. You knew where you were with a dog. Not cats. Go off for days on end, you don’t see them. When I was a lad, we had a cat, it was called Ginger. There was a family down the street, they had a cat they called Marmalade. Turned out it was the same cat, getting fed by all of us. Well, I mean. Sneaky little buggers. You can’t trust them.
‘That was why I didn’t think anything when Thompson went away. The family was worried. Not me. I knew it’d come back. They always do.
‘Anyway, a few nights later, I heard it. I was trying to sleep, and I couldn’t. It was the middle of the night, and I heard this mewing. Going on, and on, and on. It wasn’t loud, but when you can’t sleep these things just get on your nerves. I thought maybe it was stuck up in the rafters, or out on the roof outside. Wherever it was, there wasn’t any point in trying to sleep through it. I knew that. So I got up, and I got dressed, even put my boots on in case I was going to be climbing out onto the roof, and I went looking for the cat.
‘I went out in the corridor. It was coming from Miss Corvier’s room on the other side of the attic. I knocked on her door, but no one answered. Tried the door. It wasn’t locked. So I went in. I thought maybe that the cat was stuck somewhere. Or hurt. I don’t know. I just wanted to help, really.
‘Miss Corvier wasn’t there. I mean, you know sometimes if there’s anyone in a room, and that room was empty. Except there’s something on the floor in the corner going Mrie, Mrie…And I turned on the light to see what it was.’
He stopped then for almost a minute, the fingers of his left hand picking at the black goo that had crusted around the neck of the ketchup bottle. It was shaped like a large tomato. Then he said, ‘What I didn’t understand was how it could still be alive. I mean, it was. And from the chest up, it was alive, and breathing, and fur and everything. But its back legs, its rib cage. Like a chicken carcass. Just bones. And what are they called, sinews? And, it lifted its head, and it looked at me.
‘It may have been a cat, but I knew what it wanted. It was in its eyes. I mean.’ He stopped. ‘Well, I just knew. I’d never seen eyes like that. You would have known what it wanted, all it wanted, if you’d seen those eyes. I did what it wanted. You’d have to be a monster not to.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I used my boots.’ Pause. ‘There wasn’t much blood. Not really. I just stamped, and stamped on its head, until there wasn’t really anything much left that looked like anything. If you’d seen it looking at you like that, you would have done what I did.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘And then I heard someone coming up the stairs to the attic, and I thought I ought to do something, I mean, it didn’t look good, I don’t know what it must have looked like really, but I just stood there, feeling stupid, with a stinking mess on my boots, and when the door opens, it’s Miss Corvier.
‘And she sees it all. She looks at me. And she says, You killed him. I can hear something funny in her voice, and for a moment I don’t know what it is, and then she comes closer, and I realize that she’s crying.
‘That’s something about old people, when they cry like children, you don’t know where to look, do you? And she says, He was all I had to keep me going, and you killed him. After all I’ve done, she says, making it so the meat stays fresh, so the life stays on. After all I’ve done.
‘I’m an old woman, she says. I need my meat.
‘I didn’t know what to say.
‘She’s wiping her eyes with her hand. I don’t want to be a burden on anybody, she says. She’s crying now. And she’s looking at me. She says, I never wanted to be a burden. She says, that was my meat. Now, she says, who’s going to feed me now?’
He stopped, rested his gray face in his left hand, as if he was tired. Tired of talking to me, tired of the story, tired of life. Then he shook his head and looked at me and said, ‘If you’d seen that cat, you would have done what I did. Anyone would have done.’
He raised his head then, for the first time in his story, looked me in the eyes. I thought I saw an appeal for help in his eyes, something he was too proud to say aloud.
Here it comes, I thought. This is where he asks me for money.
Somebody outside tapped on the window of the café. It wasn’t a loud tapping, but Eddie jumped. He said, ‘I have to go now. That means I have to go.’
I just nodded. He got up from the table. He was still a tall man, which almost surprised me: he’d collapsed in on himself in so m
any other ways. He pushed the table away as he got up, and as he got up he took his right hand out of his coat pocket. For balance, I suppose. I don’t know.
Maybe he wanted me to see it. But if he wanted me to see it, why did he keep it in his pocket the whole time? No, I don’t think he wanted me to see it. I think it was an accident.
He wasn’t wearing a shirt or a jumper under his coat, so I could see his arm, and his wrist. Nothing wrong with either of them. He had a normal wrist. It was only when you looked below the wrist that you saw most of the flesh had been picked from the bones, chewed like chicken wings, leaving only dried morsels of meat, scraps and crumbs, and little else. He only had three fingers left, and most of a thumb. I suppose the other finger bones must have just fallen right off, with no skin or flesh to hold them on.
That was what I saw. Only for a moment, then he put his hand back in his pocket and pushed out of the door into the chilly night.
I watched him then, through the dirty plate-glass of the café window.
It was funny. From everything he’d said, I’d imagined Miss Corvier to be an old woman. But the woman waiting for him, outside, on the pavement, couldn’t have been much over thirty. She had long, long hair, though. The kind of hair you can sit on, as they say, although that always sounds faintly like a line from a dirty joke. She looked a bit like a hippy, I suppose. Sort of pretty, in a hungry kind of way.
She took his arm and looked up into his eyes, and they walked away out of the café’s light for all the world like a couple of teenagers who were just beginning to realize that they were in love.
I went back up to the counter and bought another cup of tea and a couple of packets of crisps to see me through until the morning, and I sat and thought about the expression on his face when he’d looked at me that last time.
On the milk train back to the big city I sat opposite a woman carrying a baby. It was floating in formaldehyde, in a heavy glass container. She needed to sell it, rather urgently, and although I was extremely tired we talked about her reasons for selling it, and about other things, for the rest of the journey.
The Cage
Jeff VanderMeer
Jeff VanderMeer (1968–) is an American writer and editor sometimes associated with the New Weird because of his surreal, grotesque fictions set in fantasy city of Ambergris. A World Fantasy Award-winner, VanderMeer has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and Philip K. Dick awards. Spanning a period of five hundred years, the Ambergris Cycle consists of City of Saints & Madmen (2001), Shriek: An Afterword (2006), and Finch (2009). Short story collections include Secret Life (2004) and The Third Bear (2010). His major influences include Vladimir Nabokov and Angela Carter. The creepy and luminous ‘The Cage’, reprinted from City of Saints, chronicles the dangerous impulse to deliberately seek out the weird.
The hall contained the following items, some of which were later catalogued on faded yellow sheets constrained by blue lines and anointed with mildew:
– 24 moving boxes, stacked three high. Atop the boxes stood
– 1 stuffed black swan with banded blood-red legs, its marble eyes plucked, the empty sockets a shock of outrushing cotton (or was it fungus?), the bird merely a scout for the
– 5,325 specimens from far-off lands placed on shelves that ran along the four walls and into the adjoining corridors, lit with what he could later only describe as a dark light: it illuminated but did not lift the gloom. Iridescent thrush corpses, the exhausted remains of tattered jellyfish floating in amber bottles, tiny mammals with bright eyes that hinted at the memory of catastrophe, their bodies frozen in brittle poses. The stink of chemicals, a whiff of blood, and
– 1 phonograph, in perfect condition, wedged beside the jagged black teeth of 11 broken records and
– 8 framed daguerreotypes of the family that had lived in the mansion. On vacation in the Southern Isles. Posed in front of a hedge. Blissful on the front porch. His favorite picture showed a boy of seven or eight sticking his tongue out, face animated by indecipherable delight. The frame was cracked, a smudge of blood in the lower left corner. Phonograph, records, and daguerreotypes stood atop
– 1 long oak table covered by a dark green cloth that could not conceal the upward thrust that had splintered the surface of the wood. Around the table stood
– 8 oak chairs, silver lion paws sheathing their legs. The chairs dated to back before the reign of Trillian the Great Banker, the first true ruler of Ambergris. He could not help but wince noting the abuse to which the chairs had been subjected, or fail to notice
– 1 grandfather clock, its blood-spattered glass face cracked, the hands frozen at a point just before midnight, a faint repressed ticking coming from somewhere within its gears, as if the hands sought to move once again, and beneath the clock
– 1 embroidered rug, clearly woven in the north, near the city of Morrow, perhaps even by one of his own ancestors. It depicted the arrival of Morrow cavalry in Ambergris at the time of the mass disappearances known as the Silence, the horses and riders bathed in a halo of blood that might, in another light, be seen as part of the tapestry. Although no light could conceal
– 1 bookcase, lacquered, stacks with books wounded, ravaged, as if something had torn through the spines. Beside the bookcase
– 1 solicitor, dressed all in black. The solicitor wore a cloth mask over his nose and mouth. It was a popular fashion, for those who believed in the dangers of the ‘Invisible World’ newly mapped by the Kalif’s scientists. Nervous and fatigued, the solicitor, eyes blinking rapidly over the top of the mask, stood next to
– 1 pale, slender woman in a white dress. Her hooded eyes never blinked, the ethereal quality of her gaze weaving cobwebs into the distance. Her hands had recently been hacked off, the end of the bloody bandage that hid her left nub held by
– 1 pale gaunt boy with wide, twitchy eyes. At the end of his other arm dangled a small blue-green suitcase, his grasp as fragile as his mother’s gaze. His legs trembled in his ashgrey trousers. He stared at
– 1 metal cage, three feet tall and in shape similar to the squat mortar shells that the Kalif’s troops had only the year before rained down upon Ambergris during the ill-fated Occupation. An emerald green cover hid its bars from view. The boy’s gaze, which required him to twist neck and shoulder to the right while also raising his head to look up and behind, drew the attention of
– 1 exporter-importer, Robert Hoegbotton, 35 years old: neither thin nor fat, neither handsome nor ugly. He wore a drab grey suit he hoped displayed neither imagination nor lack of it. He too wore a cloth mask over his (small) nose and (wide, sardonic) mouth, although not for the same reasons as the solicitor. Hoegbotton considered the mask a weakness, an inconvenience, a superstition. His gaze followed that of the boy up to the high perch, an alcove set halfway up the wall where the cage sat on a window ledge. Rivulets of rain seethed against the window’s thick green glass. It was the season of downpours in Ambergris. The rain would not let up for days on end, the skies blue-green-grey with moisture. Fruiting bodies would rise in all the hidden corners of the city. Nothing in the bruised sky would reveal whether it was morning, noon, or dusk. It was an atmosphere well suited to the city’s subterranean inhabitants, the gray caps, who in recent years came and went like the ebb and flow of a tide – now underground, now above ground, as if in a perpetual migration between light and dark – appearing suddenly and unwanted, only to disappear just as quickly. As they had here.
Nothing could make one safe. Witnessing the great spasm among the rich of buying houses without basements, or with stone floors, Hoegbotton had been tempted to branch out into real estate, but who knew how long the frenzy would last? No one had yet proven that such a measure, or any measure, helped. The random nature of the events had instilled a certain fatalism. Most of the city’s inhabitants had no choice but to go about their business, hoping they would not be next.
The solicitor was talking and had been for what seemed to Hoegbotton
like a rather long time.
‘That black swan, for example, is in bad condition,’ Hoegbotton said, just to slow the solicitor’s relentless chatter.
The solicitor wiped his beaded forehead with a handkerchief tinged a pale green.
‘The bird? The bird,’ the solicitor said, ‘is in superb condition. Missing eyes, yes. Yes, this is true. But,’ he gestured at the walls, ‘surely you see the richness of Daffed’s collection.’
Thomas Daffed. The last in a long line of driven zoologists. Daffed’s wife and son stood beside the solicitor, the remnants of a family of six.
Hoegbotton frowned. ‘It’s a fine collection, very fine’ – and he meant it; he admired a man who could so single-mindedly, perhaps obsessively, acquire such a diverse yet unified assortment of things – ‘but my average customer needs a pot or an umbrella or a stove. I stock the odd curio from time to time, but a collection of this size?’ Hoegbotton shrugged the famous shrug of indifference, perfected over years of haggling, that disguised a more predatory sentiment.
The solicitor stared at Hoegbotton as if he did not believe him. ‘What’s your offer? What will you take?’
‘I’m still calculating that figure.’
The solicitor stood uncomfortably close to Hoegbotton, his breath sour and thick, a great smudge of a man. He was sweating profusely. A greenish pallor had begun to infiltrate his skin. ‘You might consider a little haste. Should I call Slattery or Ungdom instead?’ As if in the grip of a new, perhaps deadly emotion, his voice seemed more distorted than the mask, which puffed in and out from the violence of his speech.
Hoegbotton took a step back from the ferocity of the solicitor’s distress. The names of his chief rivals had made a little vein in his left eyelid pulse in and out. Especially Ungdom – towering John Ungdom, he of the wide belly, steeped in alcohol and pork lard.
‘Call for them, then,’ he said, staring the solicitor down.
Neither Slattery nor Ungdom would come. Despite being ruthless, their devotion to their job was incomplete, insufficient, inadequate. Hoegbotton imagined them both taken up into the rain and torn to pieces by the wind. As they deserved, for the simple damning fact of their fear.