The Weird

by Ann

  He sat down behind the desk, staring at the cage. The inside of his mouth felt dry and thick. Nothing happened without a reason. The mushroom had not appeared by coincidence. This he could not believe. How could he?

  Against his instincts, he reached over to the cage and pulled the cover aside, the green giving way to the finely etched metal bars, the shadows of the bars letting the light slide around them so that he saw the perch, gently swinging, and, below it, a pale white hand. Slender and delicate. The end a mass of dried blood. He became utterly still. A vision overtook him: that he was Samuel Hoegbotton, staring across the dining room table at the cage, which was the last thing he would ever see. The hand, he had no doubt, was from Daffed’s wife. What would it take to make it go away?

  But then his mind registered a much more important detail, one that made him bite down hard on his lower lip to stop from screaming. The cage door was open, slid to the side as neatly as the cover. He sat there, motionless, staring, for several seconds. Throughout the store, he could hear the myriad clocks ticking forward. No mask could help him now. The hand. The open cage. The fey brightness of the bars. A rippling at the edges of his vision.

  Somewhere, Hoegbotton found the nerve. He reached out and slid the door back into position with both hands, worked the latch shut – just as he felt a sudden weight on the other side, rushing up to meet him. It brushed against his fingers and chilled them. He drew back with a gasp. The door rattled once, twice, fell still. The perch began to swing violently back and forth as if something had pushed up against it. Then it too fell still. Suddenly.

  He could not breathe. He could not call out for help. His heart was beating so fast, he thought it might burst. This was not how he had imagined it. This was not how he had imagined it.

  Something invisible picked up the hand and forced it through the bars. The hand fell onto his blotter, rocked once, twice, and was still.

  It took five or six tries, his fingers nimble as blocks of wood, but he managed to find the cord to the cover and slide it back into position.

  Then he sat there for a long time, staring at the green cover of the cage. Nothing happened. Nothing bad. The sense of weight on the other side of the bars had vanished with the drawing of the veil. The hand that lay on his blotter did not seem real. It looked like alabaster. It looked like wax. It was a candle without a wick. It was a piece of a statue.

  An hour could have passed, or a minute, before he found a paper bag, nudged the hand into it using the letter opener, and folded the bag shut.

  Bristlewing appeared in his field of vision some time later.

  ‘Bristlewing,’ Hoegbotton said. ‘I’m glad. You’re here.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You see this cage?’ Tight, tight control, imprisoning his own thoughts.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I need you to take it to Ungdom.’

  ‘Ungdom?’ Bristlewing’s face brightened. He clearly thought this was a joke.

  ‘Yes. To Ungdom. Tell him that I send it with my compliments. That I offer it as a token of renewed friendship.’ Somewhere inside, he was laughing at Ungdom’s future discomfort. Somewhere inside, he was screaming for help.

  Bristlewing snorted. ‘Is it wise?’

  Hoegbotton stared up at him, as if through a haze of smoke. ‘Wise? No. It isn’t wise. But I would like you to do it anyway.’

  Bristlewing waited for a moment, as if there might be something more, but there was nothing more. He walked forward, picked up the cage. As Bristlewing bent over the cage, Hoegbotton thought he saw a patch of green at the base of his assistant’s neck, under his left ear. Was Bristlewing already infected? Was Bristlewing the threat?

  ‘Another thing. Take the rest of the week off. Once you’ve delivered the cage to Ungdom.’ If his assistant was going to dissolve into spores, let him do it elsewhere. Hoegbotton suppressed a giggle of hysteria, felt a sudden kinship with the dead solicitor.

  Suspicious, Bristlewing frowned. ‘And if I want to work?’

  ‘It’s a vacation. A vacation. I’ve never given you one. I’ll pay you for the time.’

  ‘All right,’ Bristlewing said. Now the look he gave Hoegbotton was, to Hoegbotton’s eye, very close to pity. ‘I’ll give the cage to Ungdom and take the week off.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘Right. Bye then.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  As Bristlewing negotiated the tiny flotsam-lined pathway, Hoegbotton could not help but notice that his assistant seemed to list to one side, as if the cage had grown unaccountably heavy.

  Five minutes after Bristlewing had left, Hoegbotton closed up the shop for the day. It only took seven tries for him to lock the door behind him.

  5

  When he arrived at the apartment, Hoegbotton told Rebecca he was home early because he had learned of his grandmother’s death. She seemed to interpret his shakes and shudders, the trembling of his voice, the way he needed to touch her, as consistent with his grief. They ate dinner in silence, her hand in his hand.

  ‘You should talk to me,’ she said afterwards and he catalogued all the symptoms of fear as if they were the symptoms of loss, of grief. Everywhere he turned, the woman from the mansion confronted him, her gaze now angry, now mournful. Her wounds bled copiously down her dress but she did nothing to staunch the flow.

  They went to bed early and Rebecca held him until he found a path toward sleep. But sleep held images to torment him. In his dreams, he walked through Samuel Hoegbotton’s apartment until he reached a long, white hallway he had never seen before. At the opposite end of the hallway, he could see the woman and the boy from the mansion, surrounded by great wealth, antiques fit for a god winking at him in their burnished multitudes. He was walking across a carpet of small, severed hands to reach them. This fact revolted him, but he could not stop walking: the promise of what lay ahead was too great. Even when he began to see his head, his arms, his own legs, crudely soldered to the walls using his own blood, he could not stop his progress toward the end of the hallway. The hands were cold and soft and pleading.

  But despite the dreams, Hoegbotton woke the next morning feeling energetic and calm. The cage was gone. He had another chance. He did not feel the need to follow in Samuel Hoegbotton’s footsteps. Even the imprint on his hand throbbed less painfully. The rain clattering down made him happy for obscure, childhood reasons – memories of sneaking out into thunderstorms to play under the dark clouds, of taking to the water on a rare fishing trip with his father while drops sprinkled the dark, languid surface of the River Moth.

  At breakfast, he even told Rebecca that perhaps he had been wrong and they should have a child. Rebecca hugged him, and told him they should wait to talk about it until after he had recovered from his grandmother’s death. When she did not ask him about the funeral arrangements, he wondered if she knew he had lied to her. On his way out the door, he held her close and kissed her. Her lips tasted of honey from the toast. Her eyes were, as ever, a mystery.

  Once at work, Bristlewing blissfully absent, Hoegbotton searched the store for any sign of mushrooms. Donning long gloves and a mask, he spent most of his time in the old dining room, scuffing his knees to examine the underside of the table, cleaning every surface. The fungus embedded in the mirror had lost its appearance of renewed vigor. Nevertheless, he took an old toothbrush and knife and spent half an hour gleefully scraping it away.

  Then, divesting himself of mask and gloves, he went through the same routines with his ledgers as in the past, this time reading the entries aloud since Bristlewing was not there to frown at him for doing so. Fragments of disturbing images fluttered in his mind like caged birds, but he ignored them, bending himself to his routine that he might allow himself no other thoughts.

  By noon, the rain had turned to light hail, discouraging many erstwhile customers. Those who did enter the store alighted like crows fleeing bad weather, shaking their raincoat-and-umbrella wings and unlikely to buy anything.

  By one
o’clock, he had made very little. It didn’t matter. It was almost liberating. He was beginning to think he had escaped great danger. Nor did he believe that Sporlender had told anyone.

  But at two o’clock, his spirits still high, Hoegbotton received a shock when a grim-faced member of the city’s security forces entered the store. The man was in full protective gear from head to foot, a grey mask covering his entire face except for his eyes. What could they know? It wasn’t time for an inspection. Had Sporlender talked after all? Hoegbotton scratched at his wounded palm.

  ‘How can I help you?’ he asked.

  The man stared at him for a moment, then said, ‘I’m looking for a purse for my mother’s birthday.’

  Hoegbotton burst out laughing and had to convince the man it was not directed at him.

  No one entered the store for half an hour after the man left. Hoegbotton had worked himself into a fever pitch of calm by the time a messenger arrived around three o’clock: a boy on a bicycle, pinched and drawn, wearing dirty clothes, who knocked at the door and waited for Hoegbotton to arrive before letting an envelope flutter to the welcome mat outside the door. The boy pulled his bicycle back to the sidewalk and pedaled away, ringing his bell.

  Hoegbotton, softly singing to himself, leaned down to pick up the envelope. He opened it. The letter inside read, in a spidery scrawl:

  Thank you, Robert, for your very fine gift, but your bird has flown away home. I couldn’t keep such a treasure. My regards to your wife. – John Ungdom.

  Hoegbotton stared at the note, chuckling at the sarcasm. Read it again, a frown closing his lips. Flown away home. Read it a third time, his stomach filling with stones. My regards to your wife.

  He dropped the note, flung on his raincoat, and, not bothering to lock the store behind him, ran out onto the street, into the blinding rain. He headed up Albumuth Boulevard, through the Bureaucratic Quarter, toward home. He felt as if he were running in place. Every pedestrian hindered him. Every horse and cart blocked his path. As the rain came down harder, it beat a rhythmic message into Hoegbotton’s shoulders. The raindrops sounded like the tapping claws of something demonic. Through the haze, the dull shapes of buildings became landmarks to anchor his staggering progress. Passersby stared at him as if he were crazy.

  By the time he reached the apartment building lobby, his sides ached and he was drenched in sweat. He had fallen repeatedly on the slick pavement and bloodied his hands. He took the stairs three at a time, ran down the hallway to the apartment shouting ‘Rebecca!’

  The apartment door was ajar. He tried to catch his breath, bending over as he slowly pushed the door open. A line of white mushrooms ran through the hallway, low to the ground, their gills stained red. Where his hand held the door, fungus touched his fingers. He recoiled, straightened up.

  ‘Rebecca?’ he said, staring into the kitchen. No one. The inside of the kitchen window was covered in purple fungus. A cane lay next to the coat rack, a gift from his father. He took it and walked into the apartment, picking his way between the white mushrooms as he pulled the edge of his raincoat up over his mouth. The doorway to the living room was directly to his left. He could hear nothing, as if his head were stuffed with cloth. Slowly, he peered around the doorway.

  The living room was aglow with fungi, white and purple, green and yellow. Shelves of fungi jutted from the walls. Bottle-shaped mushrooms, a deep burgundy, wavering like balloons, were anchored to the floor. Hoegbotton’s palm burned fiercely. Now he was in the dream, not before.

  The cage stood on the coffee table, the cover drawn aside, the door open. Next to the cage lay another alabaster hand. This did not surprise him. It hardly registered. For, beyond the table, the doors to the balcony had been thrown wide open. Rebecca stood on the balcony, in the rain, her hair slick and bright, her eyes dim. Strewn around her, as if in tribute, the strange growths that had long ago claimed the balcony: orange strands whipping in the winds, transparent bulbs that stood rigid, mosaic patterns of gold-green mold imprinted on the balcony’s corroded railing. Beyond: the dark grey shadows of the city, dotted with smudges of light.

  Rebecca was looking down at…nothing…her hands held out before her as if trying to touch something.

  ‘Rebecca!’ he shouted. Or thought he shouted. His mouth was tight and dry. He began to walk across the living room, the mushrooms pulling against his shoes, his pants, the air alive with spores. He blinked, sneezed, stopped just short of the balcony. Rebecca had still not looked up. Rain splattered against his boots.

  ‘Rebecca,’ he said, afraid that she would not hear him, that the distance between them was somehow too great. ‘Come away from there. It isn’t safe.’ She was shivering. He could see her shivering.

  Rebecca turned toward him and smiled. ‘Isn’t safe? You did this yourself, didn’t you? Opened the balcony for me before you left this morning?’ She frowned. ‘But then I was puzzled. You had the cage sent back even though Mrs. Willis said we couldn’t keep pets.’

  ‘I didn’t open the balcony. I didn’t send back the cage.’ His boots were tinged green. His shoulders ached.

  ‘Well, someone brought it here – and I opened it. I was bored. The flower vendor was supposed to come and take me to the market, but he didn’t.’

  ‘Rebecca, come away from the balcony.’ His words were dull, unconvincing, even to himself. A lethargy had begun to envelop his body.

  ‘I wish I knew what it was,’ she said. ‘You said it was a lizard. But it isn’t. Can you see it? It’s right here – in front of me.’

  He started to say no, he couldn’t see it, but then he realized he could see it. He was gasping from the sight of it. He was choking from the sight of it. Blood trickled down his chin where he had bitten into his lip. All the courage he had built up for Rebecca’s sake melted away.

  ‘Come here, Rebecca,’ he managed to say.

  ‘Yes. Okay,’ she said in a small voice, as if his tone had finally gotten to her.

  Tripping over fungi, she walked into the apartment. He met her at the coffee table, drew her against him, whispered into her ear, ‘You need to get out of here, Rebecca. I need you to go downstairs. Find Mrs. Willis. Have her send for enforcers.’ Her hair was wet against his face. He stroked it gently.

  ‘You’re scaring me,’ she whispered back, arms thrown around him. ‘Come with me.’

  ‘I will, Rebecca. Rebecca, I will. In just a minute. But now, I need you to leave.’ He was trembling from the horror of the thought that he might never say her name again and relief, because now he knew why he loved her.

  Then her weight was gone as she moved past him to the door and, perversely, his burden returned to him.

  The thing had not moved from the balcony. It was not truly invisible but camouflaged itself by perfectly matching its background. The bars of a cage. The spaces between the bars. A perch. He could only glimpse it now because it could not adjust quickly enough to the raindrops that fell upon it.

  Hoegbotton walked out onto the balcony. The rain felt good on his face. His legs were numb so he lowered himself into an old rotting chair that they had never bothered to take off the balcony. While the thing watched, he sat there, staring between the bars of the railing out into the city. The rain trickled through his hair. He tried not to look at his hands, which were tinged green. He tried to laugh, but it came out as a rasping gurgle. The thought came to him that he must still be back in the mansion with the woman and the boy, that he had never really left, because, honestly, how could you escape such horror? How could anyone escape something like that?

  The thing padded up to him on its quiet feet and sang to him. Because it no longer mattered, Hoegbotton turned to look at it. He choked back a sob. He had not expected this. It was beautiful. Its single eye, so like Rebecca’s eyes, shone with an unearthly light, phosphorescent flashes darting across it. Its mirror skin shimmered with the rain. Its mouth, full of knives, smiled in a way that did not mean the same thing as a human smile. This was as close as he could
get, he knew now, staring into that beautiful eye. This was as close. Maybe there was something else, something beyond. Maybe there was a knowledge still more secret than this knowledge, but he would never experience it.

  The thing held out a clawed hand and, after a time, Hoegbotton took it in his own.

  The Beautiful Gelreesh

  Jeffrey Ford

  Jeffrey Ford (1955–) is a highly respected US writer from New Jersey whose story ‘The Delicate’ appeared earlier in this volume. In his best work, Ford makes the familiar unfamiliar, leading the reader into new territory. Ford is known for highly personal, beautifully told stories that reflect both genre and literary influences. But ‘The Beautiful Gelreesh’ (2003), which first appeared in Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology Album Zutique #1, primarily reflects the strange as filtered through a Decadent sensibility. It’s a cruel and pointed tale that is matter-of-fact in that cruelty, and would have fit well within the certain Belgian traditions of the weird.

  His facial fur was a swirling wonder of blond and blue with highlights the deep orange of a November sun. It covered every inch of his brow and cheeks, the blunt ridge of his nose, even his eyelids. When beset by a bout of overwhelming sympathy, he would twirl the thicket of longer strands that sprouted from the center of his forehead. His bright silver eyes emitted invisible beams that penetrated the most guarded demeanors of his patients and shed light upon the condition of their souls. Discovering the essence of an individual, the Gelreesh would sit quietly, staring, tapping the black enamel nails of his hirsute hands together in an incantatory rhythm that would regulate the heartbeat of his visitor to that of his own blood muscle.