Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three

by Simon Strantzas

  Perhaps, however, as the Guy Fawkes man said in his address to the Club, there is a geographical circumference beyond which such as the Z― family have no power to range. The man said that there “appeared” to be such a boundary. Very little indeed is fully known about anything, as I suppose the man tried in his own way to make clear; not even, in many cases, whether an individual is fully alive or properly dead. There are misconceptions on all hands. At the Vittoriale, I learned from M. Jullian, Paul Valéry conversed to Gabriele D’Annunzio about the “Third Place”, the state between life and death. So there it is.

  I come to London frequently, though I seldom stay for very long. I go to the Club almost every time―among other things, of course. But I doubt whether I, or anyone, will learn much more. Being neither sage nor prophet, that is. Not yet awhile.

  Brian Conn

  THE GUEST

  In all cases the guest will be announced in writing. If by letter, the postmark will be smudged beyond legibility and the somber gentleman on the stamp will be missing an ear. Inside, a single sheet of onionskin notepaper will bear a few typewritten sentences and a saffron-yellow stain. Alternatively, you may return home from an afternoon spent watching the foliage to discover a cream-white envelope slipped under your door and the kitchen smelling of leather. A woman in Denmark opened her flue to light the first fire of the year and down fluttered a scrap of newsprint, much blotted. A second woman in Denmark reached up to close her storm window and in blew a tight roll of parchment sealed with a blob of blue wax. In no case will the guest’s announcement be discovered in any place but your home.

  You will have been waiting for a change. You will feel that you have been eating the same food every day, not just the same type of food but actually the same instance of food, the same eternal loaf of day-old bread. You will think: when the guest arrives, I will change my life.

  When the guest arrives, the two of you will visit museums. How long it has been since you have seen dinosaurs! You will buy hot chocolate, then sit poring over the map and remarking on the rain until it is time for the planetarium show. On the way home you will try to describe to the guest your reasons for enjoying this outing. It has been so long, you will say, since I have done something like this. You will realize that you are failing to express yourself, but this feeling will only delight you: how long it has been since you have had anything worth failing to express!

  Your guest will accept clean sheets and a clean towel, and you will lie awake in bed, conscious of the new presence on the couch downstairs, wondering what tomorrow will bring.

  During this, the first stage of your encounter with the guest, you will enjoy dreams of power. In Alaska a woman dreamed that she had climbed Denali. In Spain a man dreamed that he fought two bulls simultaneously and caused them to gore each other. In Gujarat a woman dreamed that she feasted on lion.

  You will wake to the smell of coffee and the crackle of bacon. On the first mornings you will come downstairs to discover that the guest has prepared actual coffee and bacon, but on a certain morning, though the smell and sound will recur, the coffee and bacon themselves will fail. The scent of coffee is merely the guest’s bodily morning-odor, and the sound of frying bacon is the sound of the guest’s waking. In any case there will be no time for breakfast before you depart for a distant museum that closes at 3:30. On your way home from this museum you will strike but not kill a small animal with your car. The next morning you will come downstairs to find the guest downloading photos onto your laptop. You will not remember any photography on any of your museum excursions, but there you are gazing at a desert panorama through plexiglass. In this photograph your neck looks unnaturally thick and there is a red welt under your ear. If you look closer, the panorama is not a desert but an empty space, a plexiglass-enclosed space in which the panorama is missing. If you mention the thickness of your neck in the photo, the following conversation will occur:

  GUEST: That’s my wrist.

  YOU: Are you in this picture?

  GUEST: I’m behind you. What looks like a welt under your ear is actually the styloid process of my ulna.

  After this incident you will go to your room to get something but forget what it was and then realize it was nothing. When you come out you will no longer find the guest.

  You now begin the second stage of your encounter, during which the guest will appear only when you are thinking of something else, most often on staircases. Awakening early on the morning of the year’s first frost, you will find that the guest has rearranged your shoes. It will soon become apparent that certain shoes are missing. Should you later meet the guest tapping thoughtfully at a banister and think to ask about the missing shoes, you will be distracted by the discovery that the guest’s own feet are bare despite the cold. An impulse to offer shoes of your own will become entangled with other impulses, and your thoughts will end in confusion. You may recover by pointing out a falcon visible through the window, over distant mountains.

  On a different day, turning away from a different window, through which you were watching the year’s first snow, you will discover that the guest has painted the molding in the living room asparagus green. It is recommended that you leave the basement door open when you go downstairs to fetch the original can of daffodil yellow; hosts who encounter guests on the basement stairs with closed doors at their backs find the experience disturbing. A grandfather in Taiwan reached for his hatchet but in his anxiety upended a can of kerosene. A seamstress in London lost her thumb. If you do not startle, the guest will point out the visible structural defects of your basement and continue up the stairs. You will find the yellow paint can empty and clean.

  On a certain day you will come downstairs to find the guest performing an act of carpentry. This act will vary according to the particular home and the particular guest, but its nature will be to render the home more attractive, if less functional. The guest of a cottage in New Hampshire constructed a reading loft with morning light and a view of the Connecticut River, but placed the ceiling of this space several inches too low for the host to sit comfortably. The guest of a large estate in Zimbabwe inlaid the interior doors with masks of gold and ivory that obstructed the movement of the door handles and rendered the doors inoperable. The guest of a government housing unit in Queensland filled the refrigerator with mirrors that reflected nonexistent Turkish delight. If you express a desire to read in the nook, to close the doors, or to taste the Turkish delight, the following conversation will occur:

  GUEST: I understand that this is the custom aboard ship.

  YOU: Have you been a sailor?

  GUEST: No. You mentioned it recently while talking in your sleep.

  Things can’t go on this way much longer, you will think, and with that thought become aware of a delicate gray shadow in the air of your home. By moving about in pure white garments you may collect a sample of this shadow, which is not a quality of the light but a dust so perfectly ephemeral that it disdains air currents, hanging motionless until touched and then turning to grease. The purpose of this dust is not understood—whether it is for sustenance, or reproduction, or for ritual purposes—but it is called “glamor,” it comes from your clothing, hair, and breath as a result of the guest’s presence, and it will continue to do so in ever increasing quantities until the afternoon when you look behind you and observe distinctly the trail you have just left by walking between the toaster and the sink: a dull gray line into the past.

  This moment marks the beginning of the third phase of your encounter. You will return to your bedroom to find that the bedclothes have turned to paper. It is recommended that you place a pair of scissors close at hand and pass a cold night wrapped in coats. You may taste blood, but there is no sense in disturbing the arrangement of your coats by getting up to look in the mirror; it is only your gums and there is nothing you can do. In the morning you will find your hair stuck fast to the paper of your sheets. It is recommended that you employ the scissors. It does not matter whether you cut th
e paper or the hair.

  Downstairs, all of your belongings will have been replaced by false belongings made of pale honeycomb wrapped in colored and textured foils that dimly suggest the colors and textures of the original objects. We call this complex of honeycomb and foil “ice.” When you pick up your coffee cup, the handle will fall off; it is only ice. Take the lesson of the coffee cup and treat your ice gently. The furniture, too, will have been replaced by ice, as will the house itself. The gray glamor will hang thick and the room will smell of lead. As you stand looking out the window you will sink slightly into the ice floor. Outside, a storm at sea.

  During this phase you will no longer see the guest. It is not known whether the guest remains in a home that has gone to ice or whether matters proceed automatically from this point.

  You may remain in the house for several days if you like. The ice is edible, if unappetizing. Structurally, however, it deteriorates quickly; you will soon have to abandon the stairs, which will not bear your weight, and even when traversing the ground floor you may find it necessary to wade.

  It will not be possible to contact your friends or family, as all your devices will be ice. A banker in Pakistan, one of a pair of twins, attempted to contact her twin telepathically but received the impression that the twin had also turned to ice. She refused to leave her home, which happened also to be the place of her birth, and observed the very room in which she had been born to develop a greasy sheen, like that of warm cheese, and ultimately to become home to a colony of insects.

  In the end you will be driven out into the snow. It is suggested that you proceed to the home of your neighbor, whom you have never liked but who at least is not ice, and borrow some simple tools: a hammer and saw, nails, a wheelbarrow. The neighbor will not offer you a bed, which is just as well. At this stage your project is to build a guesthouse. The word “guesthouse” is not analogous to the word “doghouse,” a house for dogs, but rather to the word “winter house,” a house to which one retreats at the onset of winter. Build a home for yourself free from the guest. Build with wood and stone. Build a hearth to warm it and a window through which to watch your former home, which is in the process of liquefying, and which, wrapped as it is in torn and twisted foils, resembles a Gothic phantasy. In the forest, search for mushrooms. Brew a tea. Invite friends over and call this your home: the other has disappeared. Give your friends what you have, but take care that they do not become your guests.

  L.S. Johnson

  JULIE

  I.

  1749

  Her name was Julie, and she was kept by Reverend Klüpfel.

  She had known what it meant to be kept. Halfway between whore and wife, her aunt had explained. Less work than the former, with prettier jewels than the latter. And to Klüpfel, of course she will need someone to dress her, watch over her. She’s a simple little thing, hardly the sense she was born with.

  Later that night, bundling their clothes into the satchel he had hastily provided: Madame Klüpfel? Not likely, my girl, not this one. Wearing his collar to seduce a village girl. You just make sure you keep him interested.

  Julie hadn’t argued, because her aunt knew better about such things. But all the way to Paris she had mouthed the name to herself, had stolen glances at his profile, tried to imagine what their children would look like.

  Madame Klüpfel.

  For the whole of the week-long journey her aunt prattled on about the city: the shops, the fine clothes that even the poorest people wore, the fairs and the balls, all that they would see and do. Klüpfel ignored them, keeping his nose in a book that looked proper on the outside, but Julie knew that it was filled with pictures of buxom women with their skirts hiked up. She had blushed when he showed it to her. Was that what she looked like at night, when he beckoned her to his room? Her aunt modestly averting her eyes while giving her a little push.

  As it turned out, Klüpfel was not only a debauched minister, but a poor one as well. He installed Julie and her aunt in a draughty garret in a neighborhood reeking from the nearby tanneries. They walked past rows of skinned animals swarming with flies just to get their bread. Coarse men leering at Julie and her aunt alike. Every day the landlady made comments, the water-seller complained about his unpaid bill. And what happens when you lose your looks? her aunt had asked fretfully, though before Julie could answer she continued, we’ll be out on the street with nothing.

  He did bring us to Paris, Julie said, because it made her uncomfortable to hear her aunt speak about Klüpfel in such a way.

  But her aunt only shrugged. And he’s received plenty in return.

  So late one night, while Julie pretended to sleep, her aunt and Klüpfel negotiated, and the next evening Klüpfel brought a friend back with him. He introduced his friend to her aunt, and when the money had changed hands he showed his friend to the bedroom, where Julie was waiting.

  1761

  The book is called Julie and it is on the lips of every man and woman in Paris. Julie knows of it: she hears her name at the marketplace and the fair, she hears Julie, Julie, amidst the noise of the cafés, she sees the rapture on others’ faces as they speak her name. Soon the brothel’s customers come with its volumes tucked under their arms, they ask to call her Julie, they tell her their name is St Preux. That all of Paris is in love with her name seems at first a poor joke, nothing more.

  It takes several nights for her to piece together the story: how the book-Julie falls in love with her tutor, St Preux, but is forced to marry another, so she and St Preux can only love each other in letters. It takes several nights, because her customers can barely get through a few pages at a time. The very words seem to stoke their ardor to a feverish pitch, and there are always extra coins on the table afterwards.

  It takes Julie longer still to learn that the book-Julie dies without ever marrying her St Preux. It is almost as an afterthought that she thinks to inquire who wrote such a tale, which makes grown men weep even as they pant Julie in her ear.

  “Sweet girl,” her customer said, stroking her face, “you will not know of him, though he is one of the great men of our age. His name is Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

  She tries to dismiss it as coincidence, how many Julies are there in the world? She tells herself this, she tries to ignore it, but it gnaws at her. She hides the extra coins from the grasping hands of the brothel-keeper, Madame Travers, and she manages to save enough to buy the first volume of Julie, ou la Nouvelle Hëloíse, by J-J Rousseau, and what little she is able to read makes her feel faint.

  Was she not also blonde? Was there not something of her aunt in the mother? Wasn’t this phrase, and this one, sayings of Klüpfel’s? She scrutinizes the pages as if they are some kind of holy epistle, muttering the words to herself night after night after night, until finally she collapses from sheer exhaustion.

  The other girls tell Travers, who at once confiscates the book and brings in a surgeon, who in turn prescribes bed rest and an end to so-called philosophes burdening Julie’s uneducated mind.

  Thereafter the only customers permitted to see Julie are servants, often still in their livery, or young clerks who leave smears upon her body, chalk-dust and ink, the marks of their trades. Any scrap of paper, even a list or a chit, has to be left at the door.

  But it is too late for her.

  1749

  There were three sets of footsteps on the stairs that night, and Klüpfel introduced two friends: Messieurs Friedrich Grimm and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Julie didn’t think anything of it, because her aunt was away visiting their village, and it had been agreed upon that no one would bed her save Klüpfel until her aunt returned.

  The friends brought wine, and Klüpfel brought Julie a sweet cake with pretty icing, and they invited her to join their party. They talked about the theater and the opera, and they took the time to explain the names and words to her until she felt giddy to be among them. When she closed her eyes she saw not the spinning garret but a grand room, an
d herself in silk and jewels and broad panniers, so that she swept proudly through the halls. And they music they sang! The sweetest melodies imaginable, the kind of music she had only heard in her dreams.

  Klüpfel’s hand on the small of her back, steering her into the bedroom, and she had looked into his eyes as he kissed her and thought she might become Madame Klüpfel after all.

  He was up her before she even had time to unlace her stays, taking her quickly atop the bed rug, her skirts bunching around her waist and his arm keeping her close. She giggled through it all, still thinking about going to the opera as Madame Klüpfel, and everyone bowing to her revered husband while only she knew just what a randy old goat he was. . . .

  She was still giggling when he disappeared for a moment, and it had been some time before she realized that the man now caressing her was not Klüpfel but Friedrich, sniggering as if he was sharing the joke.

  1761

  Her name is Isabella but at Madame Travers’ they have assigned names, so she is Tulipe and Julie is Lilas. Welcome to my garden, Travers declares to their customers, look at all my beautiful flowers. Tulipe has been ordered to watch Lilas between customers, to make sure there are no more episodes. Throw a fit before one of their gentlemen and he would think the whole garden riddled with illness, and what would become of the rest of them?

  To which Isabella rolled her eyes. “As if we gave up love when we gave up our virtue,” she says after Travers has stormed off, for all the girls have decided Lilas has been jilted, why else would she carry on so? “You must learn to be less trusting, Lilas. A fellow will say anything for a little extra, but nothing they say can change what you are, now can it?” She taps her pelvis, then makes a flicking gesture. “Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”