The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  He will have to think of something with Welch’s favorite drive variables. What are they? And lots of statistics, he thinks, realizing he is grinning at a really pretty girl walking with that cow Polinsky. Yes, why not use students? Something complicated with students – that doesn’t cost much. And maybe sex differentials, say, in perception – or is that too far out?

  A wailing sound alerts him to the fact that he has arrived at the areaway. A truck is offloading crates of cats, strays from the pound.

  ‘Give a hand, Tilly! Hurry up!’

  It’s Sheila, holding the door for Jones and Smith. They want to get these out of sight quickly, he knows, before some student sees them. Those innocent in the rites of pain. He hauls a crate from the tailboard.

  ‘There’s a female in here giving birth,’ he tells Sheila. ‘Look.’ The female is at the bottom of a mess of twenty emaciated struggling brutes. One of them has a red collar.

  ‘Hurry up, for Christ’s sake.’ Sheila waves him on.

  ‘But…’

  When the crates have disappeared inside he does not follow the others in but leans on the railing, lighting a cigarette. The kittens have been eaten, there’s nothing he can do. Funny, he always thought that females would be sympathetic to other females. Shows how much he knows about Life. Or is it that only certain types of people empathize? Or does it have to be trained in, or was it trained out of her? Mysteries, mysteries. Maybe she is really compassionate somewhere inside, toward something. He hopes so, resolutely putting away a fantasy of injecting Sheila with reserpine and applying experimental stimuli.

  He becomes aware that the door has been locked from the inside; they have all left through the front. It’s getting late. He moves away too, remembering that this is the long holiday weekend. Armistice Day. Would it were – he scoffs at himself for the bathos. But he frowns, too; long weekends usually mean nobody near the lab. Nothing gets fed or watered. Well, three days – not as bad as Christmas week.

  Last Christmas week he had roused up from much-needed sleep beside a sky-high mound of term papers and hitchhiked into town to check the labs. It had been so bad, so needless. The poor brutes dying in their thirst and hunger, eating metal, each other. Great way to celebrate Christmas.

  But he will have to stop that kind of thing, he knows. Stop it. Preferably starting now. He throws down the cigarette stub, quickens his stride to purposefulness. He will collect his briefcase of exam papers from the library where he keeps it to avoid the lab smell and get on home and get at it. The bus is bound to be jammed.

  Home is an efficiency in a suburban high-rise. He roots in his moldy fridge, carries a sandwich and ale to the dinette that is his desk. He has eighty-one exams to grade; junior department members get the monster classes. It’s a standard multiple-choice thing, and he has a help – a theatrically guarded manila template he can lay over the sheets with slots giving the correct response. By just running down them he sums an arithmetical grade. Good. Munching, he lays out the first mimeoed wad.

  But as he starts to lay it on the top page he sees – oh, no! – somebody has scrawled instead of answering Number 6. It’s that fat girl, that bright bum Polinsky. And she hasn’t marked answers by 7 or 8 either. Damn her fat female glands; he squints at the infantile uncials: ‘I won’t mark this because its smucky! Read it, Dr. Lipshitz.’ She even has his name wrong.

  Cursing himself, he scrutinizes the question. ‘Fixed versus variable reinforcement is called a–’ Oh yes, he remembers that one. Bad grammar on top of bad psychology. Why can’t they dump these damn obsolete things? Because the office wants grade intercomparability for their records, that’s why. Is Polinsky criticizing the language or the thought? Who knows. He leafs through the others, sees more scribbles. Oh, shit, they know I read them. They all know I don’t mark them like I should. Sucker.

  Grimly masticating the dry sandwich, he starts to read. At this rate he is working, he has figured out, for seventy-five cents an hour.

  By midnight he isn’t half through, but he knows he ought to break off and start serious thought about Welch’s ultimatum. Next week all his classes start Statistical Methods; he won’t have time to blow his nose, let alone think creatively.

  He gets up for another ale, thinking, Statistical Methods, brrr. He respects them, he guesses. But he is incurably sloppy-minded, congenitally averse to ignoring any data that don’t fit the curve. Factor analysis, multivariate techniques – all beautiful; why is he troubled by this primitive visceral suspicion that somehow it ends up proving what the experimenter wanted to show? No, not that, really. Something about qualities as opposed to quantities, maybe? That some statistically insignificant results are significant, and some significant ones…aren’t? Or just basically that we don’t know enough yet to use such ultraprecise weapons. That we should watch more, maybe. Watch and learn more and figure less. All right, call me St. Lipsitz.

  Heating up a frozen egg roll, he jeers at himself for superstition. Face facts, Lipsitz. Deep down you don’t really believe dice throws are independent. Psychology is not a field for people with personality problems.

  Ignoring the TV yattering through the wall from next door, he sits down by the window to think. Do it, brain. Come up with the big one. Take some good testable hypothesis from somebody in the department, preferably something that involves electronic counting of food pellets, bar presses, latencies, defecations. And crank it all into printed score sheets with a good Fortran program. But what the hell are they all working on? Reinforcement schedules, cerebral deficits, split brain, God knows only that it seems to produce a lot of dead animals. ‘The subjects were sacrificed.’ They insist on saying that. He had been given a lecture when he called it ‘killing.’ Sacrificed, like to a god. Lord of the Flies, maybe.

  He stares out at the midnight streets, thinking of his small black-and-white friends, his cozy community in the alcove. Nursing their offspring, sniffing the monkeys, munching apples, dreaming ratly dreams. He likes rats, which surprises him. Even the feral form, Rattus rattus itself; he would like to work with wild ones. Rats are vicious, they say. But people know only starving rats. Anything starving is ‘vicious.’ Beloved beagle eats owner on fourth day.

  And his rats are, he blushingly muses, affectionate. They nestle in his hands, teeteringly ride his shoulder, display humor. If only they had fluffy tails, he thinks. The tail is the problem. People think squirrels are cute. They’re only overdressed rats. Maybe I could do things with the perceptual elements of ‘cuteness,’ carry on old Tinbergen’s work?

  Stop it.

  He pulls himself up; this isn’t getting anywhere. A terrible panorama unrolls before his inner eye. On the one hand the clean bright professional work he should be doing, he with those thousands of government dollars invested in his doctorate, his grant – and on the other, what he is really doing. His cluttered alcove full of irregular rodents, his tiny, doomed effort to…what? To live amicably and observantly with another species? To understand trivial behaviors? Crazy. Spending all his own money, saving everybody’s cripples – God, half his cages aren’t even experimentally justifiable!

  His folly. Suddenly it sickens him. He stands up, thinking, It’s a stage you go through. I’m a delayed adolescent. Wake up, grow up. They’re only animals, get with it.

  Resolve starts to form in him. Opening another ale can, he lets it grow. This whole thing is no good, he knows that. So what if he does prove that animals learn better if they’re treated differently – what earthly use is that? Don’t we all know it anyway? Insane. Time I braced up. All right. Ale in hand, he lets the resolve bloom.

  He will go down there and clean out the whole mess, right now.

  Kill all his rats, wipe the whole thing off. Clear the decks. That done, he’ll be able to think; he won’t be locked into the past.

  The department will be delighted, Doctor Welch will be delighted. Nobody believed his thing was anything but a waste of time. All right, Lipsitz. Do it. Now, tonight.

 
Yes.

  But first he will have something analgesic, strengthening. Not ale, not a toke. That bottle of – what is it, absinthe? – that crazy girl gave him last year. Yes, here it is back of the roach-killer he never used either. God knows what it’s supposed to do, it’s wormwood, something weird.

  ‘Fix me,’ he tells it, sucking down a long licorice-flavored draft. And goes out, bottle in pocket.

  It has, he thinks, helped. He is striding across the campus now; all the long bus ride his resolve hasn’t wavered. A quiet rain is falling. It must be two in the morning, but he’s used to the spooky empty squares. He has often sneaked down here at odd hours to water and feed the brutes. The rain is moving strange sheens of shadow on the old tenement block, hissing echoes of the lives that swirled here once. At the cellar entrance he stops for another drink, finds the bottle clabbered with carrot chunks. Wormwood and Vitamin C, very good.

  He dodges down and unlocks, bracing for the stench. The waste cans are full – cats that didn’t make it, no doubt. Inside is a warm rustling reek.

  When he finds the light, a monkey lets out one eerie whoop and all sounds stop. Sunrise at midnight; most of these experimental subjects are nocturnal.

  He goes in past the crowded racks, his eye automatically checking levels in the hundreds of water bottles. Okay, okay, all okay…What’s this? He stops by Sheila’s hamster tier. A bottle is full to the top. But there’s a corpse by the wire, and the live ones look bedraggled. Why? He jerks up the bottle. Nothing comes out of the tube. It’s blocked. Nobody has checked it for who knows how long. Perishing of thirst in there, with the bottle full.

  He unblocks it, fishes out the dead, watches the little beasts crowd around. How does Sheila report this? Part of an experimental group was, uh, curtailed. On impulse he inserts some carrots too, inserts more absinthe into himself. He knows he is putting off what he has come here to do.

  All right, get at it.

  He stomps past a cage of baby rabbits with their eyes epoxyed shut, somebody’s undergraduate demonstration of perceptual learning, and turns on the light over the sinks. All dirty with hanks of skin and dog offal. Why the hell can’t they clean up after themselves? We are scientists. Too lofty. He whooshes with the power hose, which leaks. Nobody cares enough even to bring a washer. He will bring one. No, he won’t! He’s going to be doing something different from here on in.

  But first of all he has to get rid of all this. Sacrifice his subjects. His ex-subjects. Where’s my ether?

  He finds it back of the mops, has another snort of the cloudy liquor to fortify himself while he sets up his killing jars. He has evolved what he thinks is the decentest way: an ether pad under a grill to keep their feet from being burned by the stuff.

  The eight jars are in a row on the sink. He lifts down a cage of elderly females, the grandmothers of his present group. They cluster at the front, trustfully expectant. Oh God; he postpones murder long enough to give them some carrot, deals out more to every cage in the rack so they’ll have time to eat. Tumult of rustling, hoping, munching.

  All right. He goes back to the sink and pours in the ether, keeping the lids tight. Then he reaches in the holding cage and scoops up a soft female in each hand. Quick: He pops them both in one jar, rescrews the lid. He has this fatuous belief that the companionship helps a little. They convulse frantically, are going limp before he has the next pair in theirs. Next. Next. Next…It takes five minutes to be sure of death.

  This will be, he realizes, a long night.

  He lifts down another cage, lifts up his bottle, leaning with his back to the jars to look at his rack, his little city of rats. My troops. My pathetic troops. An absinthe trip flashes through his head of himself leading his beasts against his colleagues, against the laughing pain-givers. Jones having his brain reamed by a Dachshund pup. A kitten in a surgical smock shaving Sheila, wow. Stop it!

  His eye has been wandering over the bottom cages. The mothers have taken the goodies in to their young; interesting to see what goes on in there, maybe if he used infra-red – stop that, too. A lab is not a zoo. Down in one dark back cage he can see the carrot is still there. Where’s Snedecor, the old brain-damaged male? Why hasn’t he come for it? Is the light bothering him?

  Lipsitz turns off the top lights, goes around to the side to check. Stooping, he peers into the gloom. Something funny down there – good grief, the damn cage is busted, it’s rotted through the bottom. Where’s old Sneddles?

  The ancient cage rack has wheels. Lipsitz drags one end forward, revealing Stygian darkness behind. In prehistoric times there was a coal chute there. And there’s something back here now, on the heap of bags by the old intake.

  Lipsitz frowns, squints; the lab lights behind him seem to be growing dim and gaseous. The thing – the thing has black and white patches. Is it moving?

  He retreats to the drainboard, finds his hand on the bottle. Yes. Another short one. What’s wrong with the lights? The fluorescents have developed filmy ectoplasm, must be chow dust. This place is a powder keg. The monkeys are still as death too. That’s unusual. In fact everything is dead quiet except for an odd kind of faint clicking, which he realizes is coming from the dark behind the rack. An animal. Some animal has got out and been living back there, that’s all it is.

  All right, Lipsitz: Go see.

  But he delays, aware that the absinthe has replaced his limbs with vaguer, dreamlike extensions. The old females on the drainboard watch him alertly. The dead ones in the jar watch nothing. All his little city of rats has stopped moving, is watching him. Their priest of pain. This is a temple of pain, he thinks. A small shabby dirty one. Maybe its dirt and squalor are better so, more honest. A charnel house shouldn’t look pretty, like a clean kitchen. All over the country, the world, the spotless knives are slicing, the trained minds devising casual torments in labs so bright and fair you could eat off their floors. Auschwitz, Belsen were neat. With flowers. Only the reek of pain going up to the sky, the empty sky. But people don’t think animals’ pain matters. They didn’t think my people’s pain mattered either, in the death camps a generation back. It’s all the same, endless agonies going up unheard from helpless things. And all for what?

  Maybe somewhere there is a reservoir of pain, he muses. Waiting to be filled. When it is full, will something rise from it? Something created and summoned by torment? Inhuman, an alien superthing…He knows he is indulging drunkenness. The clicking has grown louder.

  Go and look at the animal, Lipsitz.

  He goes, advances on the dark alcove, peering down, hearing the click-click-click. Suddenly he recognizes it: the tooth-click a rat makes in certain states of mind. Not threatening at all, it must be old Sneddles in there. Heartened, he pulls a dim light bulb forward on its string – and sees the thing plain, while the lab goes unreal around him.

  What’s lying back there among the Purina bags is an incredible whorl – a tangle of rat legs, rat heads, rat bodies, rat tails intertwined in a great wheellike formation, joined somehow abnormally rat to rat – a huge rat pie, heaving, pulsing, eyes reflecting stress and pain. Quite horrible, really; the shock of it is making him fight for breath. And it is not all laboratory animals; he can see the agouti coats of feral rats mixed in among it. Have wild rats come in here to help form this gruesome thing?

  And at that moment, hanging to the light bulb, he knows what he is seeing. He has read in the old lore, the ancient grotesque legends of rat and man.

  He is looking at a Rat King.

  Medieval records were full of them, he recalls dimly. Was it Württemberg? ‘They are monstrously Joynt, yet Living…It can by no way be Separated, and screamed much in the Fyre.’ Apparitions that occurred at times of great attack on the rats. Some believed that the rat armies had each their king of this sort, who directed them. And they were sometimes connected to or confused with King Rats of still another kind: gigantic animals with eyes of fire and gold chains on their necks. Lipsitz stares, swaying on the light cord. The tangled mass
of the Rat King remains there clicking faintly, pulsing, ambiguously agonized among the sacks. His other hand seems to be holding the bottle; good. He takes a deep pull, his eyes rolling to fix the ghastliness, wondering what on earth he will do. ‘I can’t,’ he mumbles aloud, meaning the whole thing, the whole bloody thing. ‘I can’t…’

  He can do his own little business, kill his animals, wind up his foolishness, get out. But he cannot – cannot – be expected to cope with this, to abolish this revenant from time, this perhaps supernatural horror. For which he feels obscurely, hideously, to blame. It’s my fault, I…

  He realizes he is weeping thinly, his eyes are running. Whether it’s for the animals or himself he doesn’t know, he knows only that he can’t stand it, can’t take any of it any more. And now this.

  ‘No!’ Meaning, really, the whole human world. Dizzily he blinks around at the jumbled darkness, trying to regain his wits, feeling himself a random mote of protesting life in an insignificant foolkiller. Slowly his eyes come back to the monstrous, pitiable rat pie. It seems to be weakening; the click has lost direction. His gaze drifts upward, into the dark shadows.

  – And he is quite unsurprised, really, to meet eyes looking back. Two large round animal eyes deep in the darkness, at about the level of his waist, the tapetums reflecting pale vermilion fire.

  He stares; the eyes shift right, left, calmly in silence, and then the head advances. He sees the long wise muzzle, the vibrissae, the tuned shells of the ears. Is there a gold collar? He can’t tell; but he can make out the creature’s forelimbs now, lightly palping the bodies or body of the Rat King. And the tangled thing is fading, shrinking away. It was perhaps its conjoined forces which strove and suffered to give birth to this other – the King himself.