The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  ‘This is Mrs. Allison, Mr. Babcock. I thought I’d give you my order a day early because I wanted to be sure and get some–’

  ‘What say, Mrs. Allison?’

  Mrs. Allison raised her voice a little; she saw Mr. Allison, out on the lawn, turn in his chair and regard her sympathetically. ‘I said, Mr. Babcock, I thought I’d call in my order early so you could send me–’

  ‘Mrs. Allison?’ Mr. Babcock said. ‘You’ll come and pick it up?’

  ‘Pick it up?’ In her surprise Mrs. Allison let her voice drop back to its normal tone and Mr. Babcock said loudly, ‘What’s that, Mrs. Allison?’

  ‘I thought I’d have you send it out as usual,’ Mrs. Allison said.

  ‘Well, Mrs. Allison,’ Mr. Babcock said, and there was a pause while Mrs. Allison waited, staring past the phone over her husband’s head out into the sky. ‘Mrs. Allison,’ Mr. Babcock went on finally, ‘I’ll tell you, my boy’s been working for me went back to school yesterday, and now I got no one to deliver. I only got a boy delivering summers, you see.’

  ‘I thought you always delivered,’ Mrs. Allison said.

  ‘Not after Labor Day, Mrs. Allison,’ Mr. Babcock said firmly. ‘You never been here after Labor Day before, so’s you wouldn’t know, of course.’

  ‘Well,’ Mrs. Allison said helplessly. Far inside her mind she was saying, over and over, can’t use city manners on country folk, no use getting mad.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asked finally. ‘Couldn’t you just send out an order today, Mr. Babcock?’

  ‘Matter of fact,’ Mr. Babcock said, ‘I guess I couldn’t, Mrs. Allison. It wouldn’t hardly pay, delivering, with no one else out at the lake.’

  ‘What about Mr. Hall?’ Mrs. Allison asked suddenly, ‘the people who live about three miles away from us out here? Mr. Hall could bring it out when he comes.’

  ‘Hall?’ Mr. Babcock said. ‘John Hall? They’ve gone to visit her folks upstate, Mrs. Allison.’

  ‘But they bring all our butter and eggs,’ Mrs. Allison said, appalled.

  ‘Left yesterday,’ Mr. Babcock said. ‘Probably didn’t think you folks would stay on up there.’

  ‘But I told Mr. Hall…’ Mrs. Allison started to say, and then stopped. ‘I’ll send Mr. Allison in after some groceries tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘You got all you need till then,’ Mr. Babcock said, satisfied; it was not a question, but a confirmation.

  After she hung up, Mrs. Allison went slowly out to sit again in her chair next to her husband. ‘He won’t deliver,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to go in tomorrow. We’ve got just enough kerosene to last till you get back.’

  ‘He should have told us sooner,’ Mr. Allison said.

  It was not possible to remain troubled long in the face of the day; the country had never seemed more inviting, and the lake moved quietly below them, among the trees, with the almost incredible softness of a summer picture. Mrs. Allison sighed deeply, in the pleasure of possessing for themselves that sight of the lake, with the distant green hills beyond, the gentleness of the small wind through the trees.

  The weather continued fair; the next morning Mr. Allison, duly armed with a list of groceries, with ‘kerosene’ in large letters at the top, went down the path to the garage, and Mrs. Allison began another pie in her new baking dishes. She had mixed the crust and was starting to pare the apples when Mr. Allison came rapidly up the path and flung open the screen door into the kitchen.

  ‘Damn car won’t start,’ he announced, with the end-of-the-tether voice of a man who depends on a car as he depends on his right arm.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ Mrs. Allison demanded, stopping with the paring knife in one hand and an apple in the other. ‘It was all right on Tuesday.’

  ‘Well,’ Mr. Allison said between his teeth, ‘it’s not all right on Friday.’

  ‘Can you fix it?’ Mrs. Allison asked.

  ‘No,’ Mr. Allison said. ‘I can not. Got to call someone, I guess.’

  ‘Who?’ Mrs. Allison asked.

  ‘Man runs the filling station, I guess.’ Mr. Allison moved purposefully toward the phone. ‘He fixed it last summer one time.’

  A little apprehensive, Mrs. Allison went on paring apples absentmindedly, while she listened to Mr. Allison with the phone, ringing, waiting, ringing, waiting, finally giving the number to the operator, then waiting again and giving the number again, giving the number a third time, and then slamming down the receiver.

  ‘No one there,’ he announced as he came into the kitchen.

  ‘He’s probably gone out for a minute,’ Mrs. Allison said nervously; she was not quite sure what made her so nervous, unless it was the probability of her husband’s losing his temper completely. ‘He’s there alone, I imagine, so if he goes out there’s no one to answer the phone.’

  ‘That must be it,’ Mr. Allison said with heavy irony. He slumped into one of the kitchen chairs and watched Mrs. Allison paring apples. After a minute, Mrs. Allison said soothingly, ‘Why don’t you go down and get the mail and then call him again?’

  Mr. Allison debated and then said, ‘Guess I might as well.’ He rose heavily and when he got to the kitchen door he turned and said, ‘But if there’s no mail–’ and leaving an awful silence behind him, he went off down the path.

  Mrs. Allison hurried with her pie. Twice she went to the window to glance at the sky to see if there were clouds coming up. The room seemed unexpectedly dark, and she herself felt in the state of tension that precedes a thunderstorm, but both times when she looked the sky was clear and serene, smiling indifferently down on the Allisons’ summer cottage as well as on the rest of the world. When Mrs. Allison, her pie ready for the oven, went a third time to look outside, she saw her husband coming up the path; he seemed more cheerful, and when he saw her, he waved eagerly and held a letter in the air.

  ‘From Jerry,’ he called as soon as he was close enough for her to hear him, ‘at last – a letter!’ Mrs. Allison noticed with concern that he was no longer able to get up the gentle slope of the path without breathing heavily; but then he was in the doorway, holding out the letter. ‘I saved it till I got here,’ he said.

  Mrs. Allison looked with an eagerness that surprised her on the familiar handwriting of her son; she could not imagine why the letter excited her so, except that it was the first they had received in so long; it would be a pleasant, dutiful letter, full of the doings of Alice and the children, reporting progress with his job, commenting on the recent weather in Chicago, closing with love from all; both Mr. and Mrs. Allison could, if they wished, recite a pattern letter from either of their children.

  Mrs. Allison slit the letter open with great deliberation, and then she spread it out on the kitchen table and they leaned down and read it together.

  ‘Dear Mother and Dad,’ it began, in Jerry’s familiar, rather childish, handwriting, ‘Am glad this goes to the lake as usual, we always thought you came back too soon and ought to stay up there as long as you could. Alice says that now that you’re not as young as you used to be and have no demands on your time, fewer friends, etc., in the city, you ought to get what fun you can while you can. Since you two are both happy up there, it’s a good idea for you to stay.’

  Uneasily Mrs. Allison glanced sideways at her husband; he was reading intently, and she reached out and picked up the empty envelope, not knowing exactly what she wanted from it. It was addressed quite as usual, in Jerry’s handwriting, and was postmarked Chicago. Of course it’s postmarked Chicago, she thought quickly, why would they want to postmark it anywhere else? When she looked back down at the letter, her husband had turned the page, and she read on with him: ‘– and of course if they get measles, etc., now, they will be better off later. Alice is well, of course, me too. Been playing a lot of bridge lately with some people you don’t know, named Carruthers. Nice young couple, about our age. Well, will close now as I guess it bores you to hear about things so far away. Tell Dad old Dickson, in our Chicago office, died. He us
ed to ask about Dad a lot. Have a good time up at the lake, and don’t bother about hurrying back. Love from all of us, Jerry.’

  ‘Funny,’ Mr. Allison commented.

  ‘It doesn’t sound like Jerry,’ Mrs. Allison said in a small voice. ‘He never wrote anything like…’ She stopped.

  ‘Like what?’ Mr. Allison demanded. ‘Never wrote anything like what?’

  Mrs. Allison turned the letter over, frowning. It was impossible to find any sentence, any word, even, that did not sound like Jerry’s regular letters. Perhaps it was only that the letter was so late, or the unusual number of dirty fingerprints on the envelope.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said impatiently.

  ‘Going to try that phone call again,’ Mr. Allison said.

  Mrs. Allison read the letter twice more, trying to find a phrase that sounded wrong. Then Mr.

  Allison came back and said, very quietly, ‘Phone’s dead.’

  ‘What?’ Mrs. Allison said, dropping the letter.

  ‘Phone’s dead,’ Mr. Allison said.

  The rest of the day went quickly; after a lunch of crackers and milk, the Allisons went to sit outside on the lawn, but their afternoon was cut short by the gradually increasing storm clouds that came up over the lake to the cottage, so that it was as dark as evening by four o’clock. The storm delayed, however, as though in loving anticipation of the moment it would break over the summer cottage, and there was an occasional flash of lightning, but no rain. In the evening, Mr. and Mrs. Allison, sitting close together inside their cottage, turned on the battery radio they had brought with them from New York. There were no lamps lighted in the cottage, and the only light came from the lightning outside and the small square glow from the dial of the radio.

  The slight framework of the cottage was not strong enough to withstand the city noises, the music and the voices, from the radio, and the Allisons could hear them far off echoing across the lake, the saxophones in the New York dance band wailing over the water, the flat voice of the girl vocalist going inexorably out into the clean country air. Even the announcer, speaking glowingly of the virtues of razor blades, was no more than an inhuman voice sounding out from the Allisons’ cottage and echoing back, as though the lake and the hills and the trees were returning it unwanted.

  During one pause between commercials, Mrs. Allison turned and smiled weakly at her husband. ‘I wonder if we’re supposed to…do anything,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ Mr. Allison said consideringly. ‘I don’t think so. Just wait.’

  Mrs. Allison caught her breath quickly, and Mr. Allison said, under the trivial melody of the dance band beginning again, ‘The car had been tampered with, you know. Even I could see that.’

  Mrs. Allison hesitated a minute and then said very softly, ‘I suppose the phone wires were cut.’

  ‘I imagine so.’

  After a while, the dance music stopped and they listened attentively to a news broadcast, the announcer’s rich voice telling them breathlessly of a marriage in Hollywood, the latest baseball scores, the estimated rise in food prices during the coming week. He spoke to them, in the summer cottage, quite as though they still deserved to hear news of a world that no longer reached them except through the fallible batteries on the radio, which were already beginning to fade, almost as though they still belonged, however tenuously, to the rest of the world.

  Mrs. Allison glanced out the window at the smooth surface of the lake, the black masses of the trees, and the waiting storm, and said conversationally, ‘I feel better about that letter of Jerry’s.’

  ‘I knew when I saw the light down at the Hall place last night,’ Mrs. Allison said.

  The wind, coming up suddenly over the lake, swept around the summer cottage and slapped hard at the windows. Mr. and Mrs. Allison involuntarily moved closer together, and with the first crash of thunder, Mr. Allison reached out and took his wife’s hand. And then, while the lightning flashed outside, and the radio faded and sputtered, the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and waited.

  The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles

  Margaret St. Clair

  Margaret St. Clair (1911–1995) was an American science fiction writer whose most creative period was during the 1950s, when she wrote such acclaimed stories as ‘Brightness Falls from the Air’ (1951), ‘An Egg a Month from All Over’ (1952), and ‘Horrer Howce’ (1956). In 1951 she also published the classic ‘The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles’. Satirical, weird, and with a nod to the Lord Dunsany story collected earlier in this volume, ‘The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles’ has bite…and teeth. St. Clair largely stopped writing short stories after 1960. The Best of Margaret St. Clair (1985) provides a good overview of her short fiction.

  The gnoles had a bad reputation, and Mortensen was quite aware of this. But he reasoned, correctly enough, that cordage must be something for which the gnoles had a long unsatisfied want, and he saw no reason why he should not be the one to sell it to them. What a triumph such a sale would be! The district sales manager might single out Mortensen for special mention at the annual sales-force dinner. It would help his sales quota enormously. And, after all, it was none of his business what the gnoles used cordage for.

  Mortensen decided to call on the gnoles on Thursday morning. On Wednesday night he went through his Manual of Modern Salesmanship, underscoring things.

  ‘The mental states through which the mind passes in making a purchase,’ he read, ‘have been catalogued as 1) arousal of interest 2) increase of knowledge 3) adjustments to needs…’ There were seven mental states listed, and Mortensen underscored all of them. Then he went back and double-scored No. 1, arousal of interest, No. 4, appreciation of suitability, and No. 7, decision to purchase. He turned the page. ‘Two qualities are of exceptional importance to a salesman,’ he read. ‘They are adaptability and knowledge of merchandise.’ Mortensen underlined the qualities. ‘Other highly desirable attributes are physical fitness, and high ethical standard, charm of manner, a dogged persistence, and unfailing courtesy.’ Mortensen underlined these too. But he read on to the end of the paragraph without underscoring anything more, and it may be that his failure to put ‘tact and keen power of observation’ on a footing with the other attributes of a salesman was responsible for what happened to him.

  The gnoles live on the very edge of Terra Cognita, on the far side of a wood which all authorities unite in describing as dubious. Their house is narrow and high, in architecture a blend of Victorian Gothic and Swiss chalet. Though the house needs paint, it is kept in good repair. Thither on Thursday morning, sample case in hand, Mortensen took his way.

  No path leads to the house of the gnoles, and it is always dark in that dubious wood. But Mortensen, remembering what he had learned at his mother’s knee concerning the odor of gnoles, found the house quite easily. For a moment he stood hesitating before it. His lips moved as he repeated, ‘Good morning, I have come to supply your cordage requirements,’ to himself. The words were the beginning of his sales talk. Then he went up and rapped on the door.

  The gnoles were watching him through holes they had bored in the trunks of trees; it is an artful custom of theirs to which the prime authority on gnoles attests. Mortensen’s knock almost threw them into confusion, it was so long since anyone had knocked on their door. Then the senior gnole, the one who never leaves the house, went flitting up from the cellars and opened it.

  The senior gnole is a little like a Jerusalem artichoke made of India rubber, and he has small red eyes which are faceted in the same way that gemstones are. Mortensen had been expecting something unusual, and when the gnole opened the door he bowed politely, took off his hat, and smiled. He had got past the sentence about cordage requirements and into an enumeration of the different types of cordage his firm manufactured when the gnole, by turning his head to the side, showed him that he had no ears. Nor was there anything on his head which could take their place in the conduction of sound. Then the gnole opened his little fanged mouth
and let Mortensen look at his narrow ribbony tongue. As a tongue it was no more fit for human speech than was a serpent’s. Judging from his appearance, the gnole could not safely be assigned to any of the four physio-characterological types mentioned in the Manual; and for the first time Mortensen felt a definite qualm.

  Nonetheless, he followed the gnole unhesitatingly when the creature motioned him within. Adaptability, he told himself, adaptability must be his watchword. Enough adaptability, and his knees might even lose their tendency to shakiness.

  It was the parlor the gnole led him to. Mortensen’s eyes widened as he looked around it. There were whatnots in the corners, and cabinets of curiosities, and on the fretwork table an album with gilded hasps; who knows whose pictures were in it? All around the walls in brackets, where in lesser houses the people display ornamental plates, were emeralds as big as your head. The gnoles set great store by their emeralds. All the light in the dim room came from them.

  Mortensen went through the phrases of his sales talk mentally. It distressed him that that was the only way he could go through them. Still, adaptability! The gnole’s interest was already aroused, or he would never have asked Mortensen into the parlor; and as soon as the gnole saw the various cordages the sample case contained he would no doubt proceed of his own accord through ‘appreciation of suitability’ to ‘desire to possess.’

  Mortensen sat down in the chair the gnole indicated and opened his sample case. He got out henequen cable-laid rope, an assortment of ply and yarn goods, and some superlative slender abaca fiber rope. He even showed the gnole a few soft yarns and twines made of cotton and jute.