The Weird

by Ann

  ‘NASA and its holy grail – First Contact, the quest for intelligent life in the universe…all hogwash, all lies.’ Toshi gently took the snifter away and handed him a fresh drink in a ceramic mug. This was not brandy; it was rich and dark as honey in moonlight. ‘Private stock, my boy. Drink up!’ Partridge drank and his eyes flooded and he choked a little. Toshi nodded in satisfaction. ‘We know now what we’ve always suspected. Man is completely and utterly alone in a sea of dust and smoke. Alone and inevitably slipping into extinction.’

  ‘Not quite alone,’ Campbell said. ‘There are an estimated five to eight million species of insects as of yet unknown and unclassified. Hell of a lot of insects, hmm? But why stop at bugs? Only a damned fool would suppose that was anything but the tip of the iceberg. When the time of Man comes to an end their time will begin. And be certain this is not an invasion or a hostile occupation.

  We’ll be dead as Dodos a goodly period before they emerge to claim the surface. They won’t rule forever. The planet will eventually become cold and inhospitable to any mortal organism. But trust that their rule will make the reign of the terrible lizards seem a flicker of an eyelash.’

  ‘You’re talking about cockroaches,’ Partridge said in triumph. ‘Fucking cockroaches.’ That was too amusing and so he snorted on his pungent liquor and had a coughing fit.

  ‘No, we are not,’ Campbell said.

  ‘We aren’t talking about spiders or beetles, either,’ Toshi said. He gave Partridge’s knee an earnest squeeze. ‘To even compare them with the citizens of the Great Kingdom…I shudder. However, if I were to make that comparison, I’d say this intelligence is the Ur-progenitor of those insects scrabbling in the muck. The mother race of idiot stepchildren.’

  Campbell knelt before him so they were eye to eye. The older man’s face was radiant and distant as the moon. ‘This is a momentous discovery. We’ve established contact. Not us, actually. It’s been going on forever. We are the latest…emissaries, if you will. Trustees to the grandest secret of them all.’

  ‘Hoo boy. You guys. You fucking guys. Is Nadine in on this?’

  ‘Best that you see firsthand. Would you like that, Rich?’

  ‘Uhmm-wha?’ Partridge did not know what he wanted except that he wanted the carousel to stop.

  Campbell and Toshi stood. They took his arms and the next thing he knew they were outside in the humid country night with darkness all around. He tried to walk, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate much. They half dragged him to a dim metal door and there was a lamp bulb spinning in space and then steep, winding concrete stairs and cracked concrete walls ribbed with mold. They went down and down and a strong, earthy smell overcame Partridge’s senses. People spoke to him in rumbling nonsense phrases. Someone ruffled his hair and laughed. His vision fractured. He glimpsed hands and feet, a piece of jaw illumed by a quivering fluorescent glow. When the hands stopped supporting him, he slid to his knees. He had the impression of kneeling in a cellar. Water dripped and a pale overhead lamp hummed like a wasp in a jar. From the corner of his eye he got the sense of table legs and cables and he smelled an acrid smell like cleaning solvents. He thought it might be a laboratory.

  – Crawl forward just a bit.

  It was strange whatever lay before him. Something curved, spiral-shaped and darkly wet. A horn, a giant conch shell, it was impossible to be certain. There was an opening, as the external os of a cervix, large enough to accommodate him in all his lanky height. Inside it was moist and muffled and black.

  – There’s a lad. Curl up inside. Don’t fight. There, there. That’s my boy. Won’t be long. Not long. Don’t be afraid. This is only a window, not a doorway.

  Then nothing and nothing and nothing; only his heart, his breathing and a whispery static thrum that might’ve been the electromagnetic current tracing its circuit through his nerves.

  Nothingness grew very dense.

  Partridge tried to shriek when water, or something thicker than water flowed over his head and into his sinuses and throat. Low static built in his ears and the abject blackness was replaced by flashes of white imagery. He fell from an impossible height. He saw only high velocity jump-cuts of the world and each caromed from him and into the gulf almost instantly. Fire and blood and moving tides of unleashed water. Bones of men and women and cities. Dead, mummified cities gone so long without inhabitants they had become cold and brittle and smooth as mighty forests of stone. There loomed over everything a silence that held to its sterile bosom countless screams and the sibilant chafe of swirling dust. Nadine stood naked as ebony in the heart of a ruined square. She wore a white mask, but he knew her with the immediacy of a nightmare. She lifted her mask and looked at him. She smiled and raised her hand. Men and women emerged from the broken skyscrapers and collapsed bunkers. They were naked and pallid and smiling. In the distance the sun heaved up, slow and red. Its deathly light cascaded upon the lines and curves of cyclopean structures. These were colossal, inhuman edifices of fossil bone and obsidian and anthracite that glittered not unlike behemoth carapaces. He thrashed and fell and fell and drowned.

  Nadine said in his ear, Come down. We love you.

  The cellar floor was cool upon his cheek. He was paralyzed and choking. The men spoke to him in soothing voices. Someone pressed a damp cloth to his brow.

  – Take it easy, son. The first ride or two is a bitch and a half. Get his head.

  Partridge groaned as gravity crushed him into the moldy concrete.

  Someone murmured to him.

  – They are interested in preserving aspects of our culture. Thus Orren Towne and places, hidden places most white men will never tread. Of course, it’s a multifaceted project. Preserving artifacts, buildings, that’s hardly enough to satisfy such an advanced intellect…

  Partridge tired to speak. His jaw worked spastically. No sound emerged. The concrete went soft and everyone fell silent at once.

  Partridge stirred and sat up. He tried to piece together how he ended up on the back porch sprawled in a wooden folding chair. He was still in his suit and it was damp and clung to him the way clothes do after they have been slept in. The world teetered on the cusp of night. Parts of the sky were orange as fire and other parts were covered by purple-tinted rain clouds like a pall of cannon smoke. Partridge’s hair stood in gummy spikes. His mouth was swollen and cottony. He had drooled in his long sleep. His body was stiff as an old plank.

  Beasley came out of the house and handed him a glass of seltzer water. ‘Can’t hold your liquor anymore?’

  Partridge took the glass in both hands and drank greedily. ‘Oh, you’re back. Must’ve been a hell of a party,’ he said at last. He had slept for at least sixteen hours according to his watch. His memory was a smooth and frictionless void.

  ‘Yeah,’ Beasley said. ‘You okay?’

  Partridge was not sure. ‘Uh,’ he said. He rolled his head to survey the twilight vista. ‘Beasley.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘All this.’ Partridge swept his hand to encompass the swamped gardens and the decrepit outbuildings. ‘They’re letting it fall down. Nobody left from the old days.’

  ‘You and me. And Nadine.’

  ‘And when we’re gone?’

  ‘We’re all gonna be gone sooner or later. The docs…they just do what they can. There’s nothing else, pal.’ Beasley gave him a searching look. He shook his shaggy head and chuckled. ‘Don’t get morbid on me, Hollywood. Been a good run if you ask me. Hell, we may get a few more years before the plug gets pulled.’

  ‘Is Montague still here?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I heard someone yelling, cursing. Earlier, while I slept.’

  ‘Huh. Yeah, there was a little fight. The old fella didn’t get his golden ticket. He wasn’t wanted. Few are. He shipped out. Won’t be coming back.’

  ‘I guess not. What was he after?’

  ‘Same thing as everybody else, I suppose. People think Toshi is the Devil, that he can give them their heart’s des
ire if they sign on the dotted line. It ain’t so simple.’

  Partridge had a wry chuckle at that. ‘Damned right it’s not simple, partner. I’m still selling my soul to Tinsel Town. No such luck as to unload the whole shebang at once.’ Partridge shook with a sudden chill. His memory shucked and jittered; it spun off the reel in his brain and he could not gather it fast enough to make sense of what he had seen in the disjointed frames. ‘Lord, I hate the country. Always have. I really should get out of here, soon.’

  ‘My advice – when you get on that bus, don’t look back,’ Beasley said. ‘And keep your light on at night. You done with that?’

  ‘Um-hmm.’ He could not summon the energy to say more right then. The strength and the will had run out of him. He put his hand over his eyes and tried to concentrate.

  Beasley took the empty glass and went back into the house. Darkness came and the yard lamps sizzled to life. Moths fluttered near his face, battened at the windows and Partridge wondered why that panicked him, why his heart surged and his fingernails dug into the arm rests. In the misty fields the drone of night insects began.

  He eventually heaved to his feet and went inside and walked the dim, ugly corridors for an interminable period. He stumbled aimlessly as if he were yet drunk. His thoughts buzzed and muttered and were incoherent. He found Toshi and Campbell crouched in the den like grave robbers over a stack of shrunken, musty ledgers with hand sewn covers and other stacks of photographic plates like the kind shot from the air or a doctor’s X ray machine. The den was tomb-dark except for a single flimsy desk lamp. He swayed in the doorway, clinging to the jam as if he were in a cabin on a ship. He said, ‘Where is Nadine?’

  The old men glanced up from their documents and squinted at him. Toshi shook his head and sucked his teeth. Campbell pointed at the ceiling. ‘She’s in her room. Packing. It’s Sunday night,’ he said. ‘You should go see her.’

  ‘She has to leave,’ Toshi said.

  Partridge turned and left. He made his way up the great central staircase and tried a number of doors that let into dusty rooms with painters cloth draping the furniture. Light leaked from the jamb of one door and he went in without knocking.

  ‘I’ve been waiting,’ Nadine said. Her room was smaller and more feminine than the Garden Room. She sat lotus on a poster bed. She wore a simple yellow sun dress and her hair in a knot. Her face was dented with exhaustion. ‘I got scared you might not come to say goodbye.’

  Partridge did not see any suitcases. A mostly empty bottle of pain medication sat on the night stand beside her wedding ring and a silver locket she had inherited from her great grandmother. He picked up the locket and let it spill through his fingers, back and forth between his hands.

  ‘It’s very late,’ she said. Her voice was not tired like her face. Her voice was steady and full of conviction. ‘Take me for a walk.’

  ‘Where?’ He said.

  ‘In the fields. One more walk in the fields.’

  He was afraid as he had been afraid when the moths came over him and against the windows. He was afraid as he had been when he pulled her from the water all those years ago and then lay in his hammock bunk dreaming and dreaming of the crocodiles and the bottomless depths warm as the recesses of his own body and she had shuddered against him, entwined with him and inextricably linked with him. He did not wish to leave the house, not at night. He said, ‘Sure. If you want to.’

  She climbed from the bed and took his hand. They walked down the stairs and through the quiet house. They left the house and the spectral yard and walked through a gate into the field and then farther into heavier and heavier shadows.

  Partridge let Nadine lead. He stepped gingerly. He was mostly night blind and his head ached. Wet grass rubbed his thighs. He was soaked right away. A chipped edge of the ivory moon bit through the moving clouds. There were a few stars. They came to a shallow depression where the grass had been trampled or had sunk beneath the surface. Something in his memory twitched and a terrible cold knot formed in his stomach. He whined in his throat, uncomprehendingly, like a dog.

  She hesitated in the depression and pulled her pale dress over her head. She tossed the dress away and stood naked and half hidden in the fog and darkness. He did not need to see her, he had memorized everything. She slipped into the circle of his arms and he embraced her without thinking. She leaned up and kissed him. Her mouth was dry and hot. ‘Come on,’ she muttered against his lips. ‘Come on.’ Her hands were sinewy as talons and very strong. She grasped his hair and drew him against her and they slowly folded into the moist earth. The soft earth was disfigured with their writhing and a deep, resonant vibration traveled through it and into them where it yammered through their blood and bones. She kissed him fiercely, viciously, and locked her thighs over his hips and squeezed until he gasped and kissed her back. She did not relinquish her fistful of his hair and she did not close her eyes. He stared into them and saw a ghost of a girl he knew and his own gaunt reflection which he did not know at all. They were sinking.

  Nadine stopped sucking at him and turned her head against the black dirt and toward the high, shivering grass. There was no breeze and the night lay dead and still. The grass sighed and muffled an approaching sound that struck Partridge as the thrum of fluorescent lights or high voltage current through a wire or, as it came swiftly closer, the clatter of pebbles rolling over slate. Nadine tightened her grip and looked at him with a sublime combination of glassy terror and exultation. She said, ‘Rich–’

  The grass shook violently beneath a vast, invisible hand and a tide of chirring and burring and click-clacking blackness poured into the depression from far flung expanses of lost pasture and haunted wilderness, from the moist abyssal womb that opens beneath everything, everywhere. The cacophony was a murderous tectonic snarl out of Pandemonium, Gehenna and Hell; the slaughterhouse gnash and whicker and serrated wail of legion bloodthirsty drills and meat-hungry saw teeth. The ebony breaker crashed over them and buried them and swallowed their screams before their screams began.

  After the blackness ebbed and receded and was finally gone, it became quiet. At last the frogs tentatively groaned and the crickets warmed by degrees to their songs of loneliness and sorrow. The moon slipped into the moat around the Earth.

  He rose alone, black on black, from the muck and walked back in shambling steps to the house.

  Partridge sat rigid and upright at the scarred table in the blue-gray gloom of the kitchen. Through the one grimy window above the sink, the predawn sky glowed the hue of gun metal. His eyes glistened and caught that feeble light and held it fast like the eyes of a carp in its market bed of ice. His black face dripped onto his white shirt which was also black. His black hands lay motionless on the table. He stank of copper and urine and shit. Water leaked in fat drops from the stainless steel goose-neck tap. A grandfather clock ticked and tocked from the hall and counted down the seconds of the revolutions of the Earth. The house settled and groaned fitfully, a guilty pensioner caught fast in dreams.

  Toshi materialized in the crooked shadows near the stove. His face was masked by the shadows. He said in a low, hoarse voice that suggested a quantity of alcohol and tears, ‘Occasionally one of us, a volunteer, is permitted to cross over, to relinquish his or her flesh to the appetites of the colony and exist among them in a state of pure consciousness. That’s how it’s always been. These volunteers become the interpreters, the facilitators of communication between our species. They become undying repositories of our civilization…a civilization that shall become ancient history one day very soon.’

  Partridge said nothing.

  Toshi said in his hoarse, mournful voice, ‘She’ll never truly die. She’ll be with them until this place is a frozen graveyard orbiting a cinder. It is an honor. Yet she waited. She wanted to say goodbye in person.’

  Partridge said nothing. The sun floated to the black rim of the horizon. The sun hung crimson and boiling and a shaft of bloody light passed through the window and bathed his h
and.

  ‘Oh!’ Toshi said and his mouth was invisible, but his eyes were bright and wet in the gathering light. ‘Can you imagine gazing upon constellations a hundred million years from this dawn? Can you imagine the wonder of gazing upon those constellations from a hundred million eyes? Oh, imagine it, my boy…’

  Partridge stood and went wordlessly, ponderously, to the window and lingered there a moment, his mud-caked face afire with the bloody radiance of a dying star. He drank in the slumbering fields, the distant fog-wreathed forests, as if he might never look upon any of it again. He reached up and pulled the shade down tight against the sill and it was dark.

  The Hide

  Liz Williams

  Liz Williams (1965–) is an English writer of science fiction and fantasy whose first two novels, The Ghost Sister (2001) and Empire of Bones (2002), were nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. She is the daughter of a conjurer and a gothic novelist and has a Ph.D. in science from Cambridge. From the mid-nineties until 2000, she lived and worked in Kazakhstan. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, The Third Alternative and many others. The beautifully written weird tale ‘The Hide’ (2007) conveys a sense of place and of modern unease reminiscent of M. John Harrison or Ramsey Campbell but with Williams’ own unique perspective and style.

  The birds were white as they flew over the marsh, across the reedbeds and the frosted meres, but as they drew level with the hide their shade changed, from white to black. I saw their crimson eyes, sparks in the cloudy dark, as they disappeared into the storm. Richard and I crouched in the hide and waited.

  ‘Jude, can you see her? Can you see?’ Richard whispered.

  But all I could see was darkness, and the distant storm.

  People lived here once. A very long time ago, when this land was called the Summer Country: named not for cowslip meadows or hazy warmth, but because it only appeared in summer, when the waters had retreated towards the Severn Estuary and the marshes were dry enough to be negotiated on foot. During all other times of year, this land – gleaming wet marshes, dense beds of dull golden reeds, and groves of alder and unpollarded willow – was the haunt only of ducks and herons, and the small people who lived along the causeways and in the lake villages.