Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three

by Simon Strantzas

  “Thank you,” he managed after the woman had already left the kitchen.

  He left the house and got onto his bicycle, but he did not moved from the spot. His mind was a blank, he couldn’t think about anything, couldn’t decide anything.

  Bates Lock floated in his head.

  Then he had an idea. He would ask one of his neighbours’ children to come over the bridge into the centre of town to find him if anything happened, if she went into labour, he forced himself to think, strangely aware of the meaning of the words. Only then was he ready to go.

  ###

  While crossing the Fort St George Bridge he went over in his mind the route to the lock that he had memorised. He did so compulsively, trying to push aside his fear of that thing, the other thing, that was about to happen. In the leaden sky a flock of geese circled, a ragged “V” with no apparent direction, stunted and lost, spiralling in its vague escape to nowhere.

  ###

  He reached the museum in less than twenty minutes, his best time yet. Thanks to his job there he had not lost his house, and had even managed to garner certain privileges: some food, warmth during the winter, access to certain books. The biannual trips to the capital. Who knew how, but it was a place where strange food managed to appear, memories of a memory, things whose taste and smell no one remembered clearly.

  The group he was working for was trying to throw a little light on the reasons why, after their appearance on the island formerly known as England, the papilio cresphontes had developed certain unusual habits, some of them violent, like the males eating the females, and occasionally even the larvae. This had been a key to the early disappearance of the insects. Some of them had developed a strange venom, and it was believed that the unusual colours in the eyespots was a warning of its presence. Shortly after their appearance they had given themselves over to hunting smaller creatures, such as field mice and even on occasion baby hares, flying away with their prey immobilised. It was believed that the venom the group he was working for was trying to track down served this purpose.

  These were no more than hypotheses. After the irreplaceable loss of most of the books, of the computer communication system, of the telephones, of almost everything that had provided information and facilitated scientific exchange, they knew almost nothing, and that was the truth. They had to start again from the beginning, to examine this new world. This was his obligation, the important job that survivors like him had to carry out.

  Their access to books was very limited, but he knew German, and most surviving treatises on butterflies were, by mere chance, in this language. But he wasn’t irreplaceable. That’s why he wanted to find the lock, to discover if a small population of Papilionidae had established itself in the county.

  The papilio cresphontes—commonly called “orange dogs”—had disappeared in the same sudden fashion that they had appeared in the records. The annals recorded their arrival as being after the first great flood. A large part of the town had been submerged. The canals where the students had punted, with their straw hats and their picnic baskets, their books of poetry or mathematics, had overflowed. The colleges bore the brunt of the furious water which finished off the destruction of all their treasures, a destruction that had been started by the months-long freeze, unexpected and murderous, which had preceded the waters. The world’s most expensive wines were drowned in the college cellars, and the large kitchens and dining rooms and studies lost their impressive beauty under the force of the silt. Whole libraries of incunabulae were lost. The whole town was flooded, Jesus Green, Mill Lane, the Backs, like a less luminous Venice in its death throes.

  But the water was not exactly hell, that was still to come. For after the flood had come the summer, the first of the hottest summers ever recorded. Fifteen fateful years of suffocating heat, damp, mosquitoes, monstrous and terrifying greenery. The flood had surpassed all expectations, but in the end the water had been sucked up in some form by the earth, risen in order to fall back down again, drop by drop, only to be spat out and multiplied in the form of a swampish miasma under the survivors’ feet. After that the ground had exploded into an impossible jungle where all kinds of unknown flora had sprung into life, bringing the strange fauna along with it. The town had transformed itself into the unexpected home of parrots and parakeets, the river the cradle for swarms of mosquitoes so dense that they sometimes covered whole houses.

  And then came the giant insects, like dark angels who had climbed up from hell by mistake. The centipedes, the caterpillars, and the moths and the butterflies, huge and ugly, brightly coloured, pot-bellied.

  That late and lengthy summer had not been a period of truce for the exhausted human race. Even after the waters went down there was less to eat. The unexpected heat led to old diseases, which had been cured generations ago, and returned now to decimate the population.

  And then came the eternal autumn, in which he had been born. The butterflies disappeared one day, the caterpillars buried themselves in the earth so as never to come out again.

  ###

  He had been bluffing with the old man. The sanitation patrols never came round now, not even to register a death. They only let themselves be seen, descending from their bumblebee helicopters in masks and white jumpsuits, when there was a suspicion of cannibalism. This was something that they were determined to stamp out root and branch, vanishing suspects. No one came when his wife went into early labour, not even the doula could cross the river to help them, because that year it had risen more than ever.

  It had been his fault as well, he knew that much.

  He had not paid attention to the signs.

  The sunflower field, the one he could see in the distance from his office at the museum, completely submerged, the heads of the flowers the only visible things above the grey water. The coots walking into the middle of Jesus Green, leaving their watery nests, making themselves easy to catch.

  He did not want to think about his guilt. But she had not abandoned the garden, had carried potatoes and parsnips, her belly sticking out, proud of the activity she could still perform. That’s how she had been until almost the sixth month, until the day she started to bleed.

  He had to help with the birth himself, had to carry out that horrendous task. The river had broken its banks as well, had flooded Jesus Green, had flooded Midsummer Common, had almost reached his house. His wife had not stopped bleeding until the doula arrived, but she had survived, a miracle. If he had helped stop her hemorrhage then he had no recollection of how he had done so. The baby had not been so lucky. He remembered it as a liquid mass of unmoving flesh and blood. The doula had told him that it would not survive, that he should bury the bundle before the mother woke up.

  ###

  Recently he had started to remember those horrid hours differently, seeing the child’s eyes in his mind; a cruel joke of his exhausted brain, for the little thing never opened them. He could still feel the little chilled body, and the doula insisting that he bury it in the garden, almost opening the back door and pushing him into the inhospitable outside. He stood there for a while, a bundle of bloody towels in his hands, and started to walk somewhere. Those memories might have been invented, tainted by the shadowy twilight that hung above them, or by the thick fog that rolled up often from the river, conquering the world.

  He decided to go home. He could not allow history repeating itself. By now he understood the signs better, and realised that the city would flood again in a few hours. He could see lightning far away, a vast electrical storm, oddly silent in the distance, and realised that this was the last warning, that soon after the storm reached them and burnt itself out, everything would once again be covered under the stain of black water.

  ###

  The birth happened that afternoon, and it was much quicker than the first time. A few hours of pain, and then everything seemed to take place in ten minutes: a few pushes, the doula shouting instructions and cheering her along, and soon he was holding in his arms a boy, purple w
ith the effort of the labour, apparently perfect, and, most importantly, alive. His wife rested under the doula’s close watch, and the baby slept alongside her.

  That night he stole a couple of hours of sleep away from his constant fear. His dreams were troubled, filled with water. The baby had little electric blue eyes. It’s too soon to tell, the dream-doula said, but he looks like he’ll have his mother’s eyes.

  In the dream his wife died, and he sat up for her wake, feeling lost and alone.

  He woke up with his heart filled with grief, into the comfort of the real world, realising that everything was fine, that they both were fine.

  His dream had been very different. He had been aware that she was dead because of the way her face had changed, becoming dry and powdery as parchment.

  There was a moment when he felt a new tremor run through his soul.

  He went to the front room and entered without making any noise, to lean over his wife. Her skin was glowing, and the child’s was as well, and both of them were slowly breathing.

  ###

  It was then that he knew. The bundle that was his son a year ago had not dried out either, his skin had not become the parchment-like texture, fragile and powdery, that all dead acquired minutes after their passing.

  This was a fact; at last he had found one.

  He sat at the foot of the bed for a few moments, and cried in silence.

  ###

  It took him all his strength of will to go out without making any noise, shutting the front door carefully. The sky was an endless black stain. He got on his bike and rode down the street.

  ###

  If it is difficult to measure distances in the dark, then in the unreal eternal twilight it is almost impossible. The canals spread out before him, apparently endless. When he reached the lock he would not have been able to say how long he had been riding for, or how long it had been since he left his wife and son in the distant town.

  The light after the storm spilled ghostly onto the canal. Maybe it was the tiredness he felt, the tiredness that weighed in his eyes and swelled his brain, but he could not say if it was day or night.

  The lock was closed, abandoned. The sign that said “No Bathing Allowed” still hung on one of the walls of the lockkeeper’s hut, its red letters bleeding rust and mould. On the horizon a late bolt of lightning shone out. A few distant groans, and the unexpected howl of some living creature broke through to reality.

  He wasn’t able to bury the bundle that afternoon, just a year ago, a brief dozen months, which he remembered as distant as if it had taken place a decade back.

  What had happened was different: night had fallen when he found that his footsteps had taken him to the Fort St George Bridge. He watched the river for a while as it nearly rubbed against the bridge, even after going down for a day. The water seemed as dark to him as the sky. He balanced the bundle against the rails, and just when he decided that he was going to go home to bury it, the bundle slipped from his trembling hands. And then he thought he heard the child make some kind of sound, no doubt another sick joke on the part of his mind; this was too cruel to be true. Whatever had happened, it was now too late, as the bundle sank with a dull noise.

  Looking down he saw nothing. The bundle had sunk deeply. He went to the other side, following the current, but didn’t see it pass under the bridge.

  Just then he saw that winged creature flying up, carrying something whitish and stained. What the creature then let drop from the sky were his towels, and in the uncertain twilight he could have sworn that it was a gigantic butterfly, one that had not been seen for years, flying ochre and leaden into the dusk, carrying his dead unshrouded son like the spoil of a monstrous bird of prey. This, and no other, was the memory that had followed him all that year.

  ###

  He considered the lock—a rectangle filled up almost halfway with stagnant water, with all kinds of natural and artificial rubbish floating on top.

  He thought it must be deceptively easy to drown in a lock.

  There was no doubt that he was in the right place. He could hear clearly a papilio’s wings moving. But he couldn’t see where the creature was. He cranked his lantern’s handle, which would maintain the light for the time being. That’s when he saw it, a square hole, artificially made to repair some of the lock’s mechanism, in the side. He threw himself into the water.

  It was only then that he understood how dirty the water was. His arms and his head got instantly covered in a dark oily liquid, whatever it was that the water had transformed itself into over the decades, stock still like a dead sea. He did not waste much time in thinking. As well as he could he pushed his way through the tins and the beams and the branches, and reached the spot where the square hole was; he held on with both hands and lifted himself up. He managed to get half his body in, only his legs still hanging out.

  He heard the murmur—birds, bats? Butterflies. Papilios. Orange dogs. All of them with the same unusual electric blue stains in the wings, so similar to his wife’s wide open eyes as she pushed and pushed to let their child into the world.

  Nothing there of course. He thought he could hear a child whimpering at the end of a large tunnel, and tried to crawl towards the sound. But he could not move. Then the butterfly came out in his direction.

  The largest one he had ever seen.

  Obviously not a child. Nothing human could moan like that. This made him relax a little. What exactly was he looking for there? What had he hoped to find? His overwrought mind could only hint at the reply to that question.

  Another noise broke upon him—the unmistakeable and deafening racket of furious water. The lock would soon flood, killing off those creatures. Killing him as well, if he did not get moving. He chose life.

  Once again he came out to the stagnant water. He looked for the steps cut into the stone, intended to help anyone climb up the canal’s artificial bank, but he slipped and sank. Water filled his lungs. He tasted it avidly as the water soaked into him.

  This was the end.

  With a superhuman effort, he moved his arms and found himself beating against the wall. This time he climbed the steps on fingertips, clawing the life out of the stone itself. Without knowing how, he managed to give himself a push and got a foot onto the bottom step. Climbing up was easier than he had thought. He found himself next to the canal, sprawled on the ground, covered in dark mud and spitting out that black water which he had found so sweet a minute ago. He tried to sit up then, but something pushed him back, making him bite the earth. He turned over.

  Then he saw them. Spat out of the hole. A swarm of papilios that went following their queen, escaping from whatever it was that had made them grow in such a supernatural way, escaping from the rising waters that would soon have drowned them.

  He got on his bicycle and pedalled away as quickly as he could, more quickly than he had ever pedalled before in his life, in the opposite direction, against the current, back to his wife, back to his newborn son, back home.

  Brian Evenson

  SEASIDE TOWN

  1.

  In past years, Hovell had simply not bothered to vacation away, but the arrival of Miss Pickaver had changed that. Her arrival had, in fact, changed a lot of things. In the past, Hovell’s idea of vacationing had been sitting around in his ratty sweater and khakis in his bedroom, reading the newspaper very slowly, savoring it even, letting his cigarette ash fall where it would, each day like the next until he had to return to work. But then Miss Pickaver had swept into his life and into his bed, and taken him to hand, and slowly taken him to task, and now, yes, he’d been made to understand that, as a vacation, this simply wouldn’t do.

  “But where would I go?” he pleaded.

  “We, you mean,” said Miss Pickaver, “where would we go? Because it isn’t just you anymore.”

  But Hovell didn’t care to go anywhere. A man of regular habits, he was an incurious person. He did not care to learn about new things. Even the old things he already knew about h
e often thought it was better to forget. He still lived in the house he’d been born in, the house he’d inherited when his mother died. And he had some difficulty understanding how it was that Miss Pickaver had suddenly jimmied her way into his life, coming in a matter of weeks to have so much of a say in everything.

  “To Europe,” Miss Pickaver said decisively.

  “Europe?” he repeated, as if confused.

  “You have the money. You’ve never been to Europe. It has to be Europe, James.”

  It made Hovell wince when she called him by his first name—nobody called him by his first name and even to himself he was simply Hovell, but he had given up correcting her. Miss Pickaver had a first name she used, but he suspected he would always think of her as Miss Pickaver.

  And so, Europe. He did not, he was surprised to find, immediately give in. He had the presence of mind to at least let her know that if he had to go to Europe he wanted to stay put, to stay in one place. And once he told her that if she wanted she was welcome to do one of those tours—6 countries in 4 days or some such—as long as he could go somewhere and stay put, she agreed. She’d stay with him for a few days on either end of the trip, she told him, get him established at the beginning and help him pack at the end, but in the middle he’d be on his own. She couldn’t help it if he didn’t want to make the most of the trip. But no worries, she said: she would be sure to tell him all about everything he missed.

  ###

  The plane flight from the U.S. alone all but killed him. Though Miss Pickaver had managed to sleep for most of the flight, Hovell had hardly even blinked. When they landed in Paris, Miss Pickaver had delicately stretched and given a little yawn, exposing what had always looked to Hovell like too many teeth, as if she had an extra row of teeth, and then proceeded to lead Hovell implacably through the nightmare that was French customs. Did monsieur have anything to declare? No, monsieur did not. Was monsieur sure? Would monsieur please open his bags? The sight of the officers fingering their way through his carefully folded underthings while Miss Pickaver tittered was too much for him, and when he lost his temper it was only Miss Pickaver’s quick action and heartfelt apologies on his behalf that kept him from ending up detained in a back room for hours. When he tried to sleep later, on the train to the seaside town whose name even the French themselves were apparently unsure how to pronounce, she told him no, considering what time it was, he would be better off staying awake until night came. Thus, every time he began to nod off she would nudge him awake.