The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  He used to come at night to play rummy with the landlady. An old man who seldom spoke a word. Piece by piece. She had to give him everything. To pay off her debts. The other rooms were emptied. Those tenants who preferred to stay on, those who were afraid to leave their empty rooms, had to make do with cardboard boxes the old man had brought over from his shop. Already he was feeling a vague sense of guilt at having won so often at cards. Facing her for hours through the long nights across a narrow stretch of baize-covered mahogany, half in the amber glow from the tasseled shade of the floor lamp, half in a darkness tinted faintly green by the canaries’ night-light (a phosphorescence above small, flitting shadows under the cage cover), he held the little fan of kings, queens, jacks and numbers close to his vest, puffing at his black cigar. Not wanting to look her in the eye – her face was indistinct, she leaned over the table, pouring him another cup of sassafras tea – he stared at the painted china plates that hung in brackets from the musty wallpaper. The canaries had gone to sleep under their oilcloth tent, knowing that night had come in spite of the shuffling cards and the intermittent murmur of voices. One day they died. Their claws stuck up behind the feeder at the bottom of the cage. The landlady was left alone. That’s another story. Because of illness, the first excuse he could find without increasing his sense of guilt even more, the antiques man no longer came. She buried the canaries in the yard, by the picket fence where the grass runs back to a pond dense with nymphæceous leaves. The room of the less-than-shadow silhouette, teetering at the edge of oblivion, had been left with a few sticks of furniture.

  A map, framed under a sheet of glass, the only serviceable mirror. That, at least, could never be carted away. It belonged to no one.

  Then, one night, the landlady dies. The other tenants are either sleeping or have been taken off somewhere by force. They’ve come to put her in a sack with their bright-red rubber gloves. Without bothering to close her eyes. They lift the sack onto a stretcher. A stretcher which they have had to stand up in the doorway to get from the cramped foyer, through the light of its small stained-glass transom, to the porch. No room in the cliff cemetery. They have to leave it here, propped against a window. The dead piled one on another, to feed the worms. The sack expands. The house is still. One is free to wander from room to empty room.

  Now that the flies have gathered, it begins to imitate their buzz as it slowly deflates. Without light. The reflection of a window in the lower depths of the map. A putrid stain spreads over it, driving the flies mad. From room to empty room. Cardboard boxes. Wax cartons for milk and orange juice. Butcher’s paper rolled in a ball. Crumbs, to feed the mice. Footfalls. Creaking struts. The alarm…Five minutes more.

  Now return to the railhead, a charred scaffolding of wood under spurge and dandelion. By leaving the corridor. In a room over the veranda – a bed, a chair, a map on the wall, an ashtray on the chair spotted with burns from a black cigar – someone gets up to open the window. The sycamore rattles. No more than the frayed tips of the nearest branches beyond the slate roof. From the window above, nothing. Not even the faintest trace of a beige rectangle lost behind veining silhouettes now that the light has gone out. The alarm clock rattles by the bed. On and on to the clump of nettles, scarcely distinguishable from the fog at the end of the lot. Shards of emerald and amber buried in the grass, broken beer bottles, crushed soda cans, old candy wrappers, their colors bleached by rain. An odor of garbage and banana peels that the mist keeps from rising higher, mixed with ashes and smoke.

  The hollow begins or ends in the rough channel cut through the underbrush by what’s left of the tracks on a bed of blackened gravel, hinted in the grass. The ties, where they can be found at all, are uneven. The rails have gone to rust. It’s easy to lose sight of them altogether for a long stretch of time. To wander off course and never find them again. No ties, no pebbles, no rails. Gaps. All along the base of Promontory Wall where the dead are bunked. One could track the boulders, level by level, as one marks the barnacled hull of a ship for the tide, by generations. Somewhere close to this place. Another mound left by recent excavations. Where skeletons were unearthed. Chinamen dredged up from the bottom to build a railroad in the early days. When the job was done, they were forced to dig a wide ditch. To lie down in it. No bullets. No knives. Their skulls were crushed. Most were still alive when they were shoveled under. That was long ago. After the exhumation their bones, piled high on a pyre of rags soaked with gasoline, were left to burn.

  Soon the grass thins out. There are no more tracks. The pebble-bed comes up again. Rotted ties give way to other wrecks. Old bricks cut a zigzag down the middle of the street, where the rails sink in. No sign of the roundhouse.

  An alley near the docks. That smell of tar and creosote. Turbid water. Invisible keelboats rock in their moorings. Black figures on a sidewalk. Indistinct. Something lies in the haze of erubescing smoke that billows tinny music through the transom of an open doorway.

  Too small to be a drunk sleeping it off on the cobbled walk amid foaming puddles and slivers of bottle-glass, far larger than a child, covered with red fur in the bar-light, it opened its jowls as I drew nearer – a pink tongue livering between fangs and drooling mutton chops – listlessly raising its head. The head of a dog, or an anaconda that had swallowed a dog in one gulp. Its breath came in shallow mists tinted the color of blood. Its muzzle drooped to its paws, ears lowering. It took a last look around through half-lidded, glistening eyes, attuned to the new odor, listening, almost as a matter of form, for the least echo before its eyes closed again. I had to step over it, passing under the sign of an uncoiling snake.

  Threads of undulating cigar smoke interlaced with what I could imagine as the aroma of peanut shells, spilt beer and liquor, all rubbed into the masonite bartop, saturating its cushioned stools, its wide mirror broken into panels by gilt marbling, hidden between shelves of bottles and their reflections, drained by the reddish light from green and amber into hues of black and tangerine or, like the chess pieces on one of the little tables against the opposite wall – hardly visible behind the bottles and the venous streaks – into the same shade of pink. There, in reflection, by the curtained windows – the panes were painted black to mask a dingy passageway, a wall of crumbling bricks that led to what must have been one of the piers – two men, wasting away under their thread-bare jackets, were having a game, staring not at the board between their identically folded hands, nor at each other, but off into space. The beer foam left traces of weblike film in their drained glasses.

  All but the last of the bar stools were free. An old man sat hunched over his empty shot glass, the bill of a wickerwork cap slouched over his eyes, oblivious to the mounting rhythms of La Valse. The music was reaching its lyrical peak. The speaker buzzed above the bar mirror. A vague tremor passed through its clutter of bottles as the old man began to make frantic signals to the bartender, who had his eyes closed and was swaying back and forth on his chair by the register, beating time with pudgy, hairless arms. The bass was so deep that, at the point where every instrument was playing, the dynamics of the orchestra having reached its utmost pitch, I felt the floor tremble under me, sending a rattle up in spiraling orbits around my head.

  Sudden silence. An oboe or an English horn. Footsteps as the music quieted. A clack of heels on linoleum through the back passage. Odd patches of cement filling in rough gaps under the stools where the old floor had worn away. The tables sat on poles that flared into the sawdust in wide, cast-iron bases. Following the perspective of this dimly lit motif, I came to the young barmaid at the end of the line of tables. A tall, red-haired girl, dressed in a halter and tight, faded jeans speckled with flecks of dried paint, biting a hangnail on the little finger of her left hand, a serving tray under her arm.

  – Whiskey! cried the old man with a toothless grin, grabbing the girl by the seat of her pants as she lumbered by, pulling her to him, nearly falling off his stool in the process. He whispered something in her ear. The barman snapped out of his
musical revery.

  – Goddamnit, where the hell d’you think you are, Cappie!

  – Aw, shit, I’s justh tellin’ Joodie somrthin’. A sthecret.

  – Go on, get the hell out of here! You got your snootfull.

  – Gone, get on yerselth. Yer jus’ jealousth ’cause I goosthed-up lil’ Joojie ’stead o’ you. Right, Jood? Go ’head in back the bar, Alf wantsa goosth ya. C’mon, Alf, don’ be sh(uk!) shy.

  But Alf, having spoken his piece, was drifting back through the ebb and flow of cigar smoke into his lost dream of a Viennese ballroom – perfumed crinolines of satin, rustling watered silk, dappled by crystal tears of chandelier-light which glittered off the buttons and epaulettes of blazing military tunics. The chess players cocked an ear in his direction, without tearing their eyes from a fixity on dead space, until the barman came to himself again. By then, the old drunk had disappeared.

  One minute his face, like a wrinkled prune, was grimacing bare gums above the bar. Suddenly, it vanished. My eyes became accustomed to the reddish light. I had walked from the door to the table at the back, its votive flame guttering behind red glass embossed with pimples clustered in the shape of diamonds. A black wick, half submerged in the tallow, was rooted to a bed of gleaming yellow wax. A quivering, blue-edged leaf. If I were to blow it out, the charred wick-tip would burn off its glowing coal under a gray, sulfurous ribbon. I saw the old man again. His cap had fallen off and he was rolling in the sawdust, trying to get clear of the stool base and the brass bar which entangled his feet. I just wanted to sit. He began to crawl for the door where the ventilation fan wafted clouds of pink smoke through the transom into the mist of the alley. To let the flame go out. The last traces of reddish light that still escaped the Anaconda Bar found him clambering over the dog. One heard a brief whine and some heavy panting. Clouds of vapor. And he was gone.

  Hidden lamps through a veil of shifting tints, blending one into another, cast their iridescences on nickel honeycombed with pits of black-mottled faille. A festive glow threw the rest of the barroom into shadow. Violet to blue into green, from green into yellow, orange and red into violet. Cold, spectral metamorphoses, each so smooth that no one color gained a hold on the eye before another took it over. An illusion. There were no unadulterated colors. The ambient light was pitching into black. Chromescences, already tinged by a fading redness in the air, took on additional saturation from the hues out of which they had just emerged. Subtle, delicate gradations from one color to the next as in a mist passing through some strange chemical evolution. Green left whatever followed it with a greater susceptibility to red. From ultra-marine to chrome yellow, a traceable ‘tea-rose’ glow would overlap which, in turn, colored the orange that followed in the wake of yellow, bringing it dangerously close to ‘red’ long before red was due to come up again; by then, the images would have absorbed so many previous superimpositions of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ casts that the whole passage from indigo, across the spectrum, to violet would have masked its original chromatic properties. Theoretically, were the process to be accelerated, one might postulate with mathematical precision a third, a fourth, even so much as a fifth layering of afterimages, taking all the variables into account. Coordinates of each successive stage, mapped out on a hypothetical ‘chart of degrees of discoloration’, marking the length and breadth of this closed infinity until the retina becomes overloaded. Then the jukebox, along with the barroom, wiped out by a livid clot, loses form altogether. Disappears.

  A click. The waltz had subsided. When I peered down through the glass dome the light was deep yellow with blue vermiculation. The record slid with a whirr from the vertical turntable into its niche among the rank and file of other disks.

  – Took out all the crap. Kids used to come in wanting to dance. Disturbing the customers. Real pain in the ass. So I figured, what the hell, I’ll put in my own: Beethoven Schubert, Berlioz, Fauré, Czerny.

  The barman, the one the old sot had called Alf, was waddling toward me, his thick cigar butt smoking, held daintily aloft between thumb and forefinger.

  – Like opera? Don’t have to pay. Fixed it up special myself. All you do is push the right combination of buttons.

  The bar-light, gone from red to purple, touched his stray hair-ends as a nimbus. He lodged what remained of the butt in the gap between his middle teeth and bent toward the console. The rainbow suffused his open shirtfront, casting highlights under his nose and chin, tinting the smoke of his bobbing cigar as he leaned the full bulk of his weight on his arms, staring into silver depths.

  – I never get tired of this.

  His finger brushed lightly over the double row of ivory-colored keys, depressing one for the ‘letter,’ another for the ‘number’ of Selections from The Barber of Bagdad by Cornelius, all in one fluid motion. One of the chess players seemed about to make his move. That gnarled hand, brown splotches, veins neutralized by the tincturing light, hovered above a crenellated tower. The hum of metal, faint, as the turntable glided slowly past the file of records and came to a stop, dipping into the rack with its copper bracket-ring, drawing out an old ten-inch disk. The tone arm came forward to meet it. I could see his face, a gourd-shaped distortion in the darker reaches of the background, floating half-transparently behind the record rims.

  – Want a drink?

  I just came in to get my bearings.

  Then nothing. The disk was turning. The lights were still on. The phonograph needle was a hair short of making contact with the dusty groove. Alf bit hard into the butt between his clenched teeth (the ash dropped off), spit out what was left and muttered a vague obscenity, hitting the console repeatedly with the flat of his hand from top to bottom, his ear cocked to its every tremor as though listening for the faintest noise outside the door of a locked room at midnight.

  – Happens all the time. It’s an old machine. The antiques dealer offered me quite a pile for it. Joodie, get me the screwdriver, under the sink with the openers! But I wouldn’t part with it for anything. Practically had to fight the old bastard off. Said he wanted it as a gift for someone he admired. My ass! Christ knows what he really wanted it for. Who would buy an old heap like this? Hasn’t been ’round for a long time, though. No, goddamnit! The other screwdriver! Can’t you see this one’s too big? What the hell’s the matter with you? And get me a flashlight! So, how about it? You must be stifling. How do you manage to find your way around? Have one on the house, just name it. We’ve got soda, if you want it. Cigarettes, perhaps? A glass of water?

  Joodie was coming back with the flashlight and a small screwdriver in her hands. Out of the red smoke. From the doorway, over the head of the sleeping dog, I followed the noise of a distant fog-horn through the streets and alleyways. An old tub was putting out to sea. I thought I might be able to find the inner harbor. To follow the tracks from there. A negative of the jukebox lights still hovered before my eyes like a second mist, gradually dwindling to a translucent dot at the center of my field of vision. The clatter of something metal, hollowed into the shape of a drum, broke the silence and seemed to roll in my direction from around the corner. Footsteps. Laughter.

  I flattened myself against the bricks. Slowly, taking great pains to make no sound, I peered around the quoin. An old man was lying under a mound of garbage. Three men in shirtsleeves, their clothes askew, were trying to help him up. The one in the odd, yellow-plumed cap kept falling down.

  No. They were beating him up. I could see it clearly now. The three of them. Rolling him for his money. Their fists were busy everywhere, poking, prying, jabbing, trying to bring the old drunk out of his torpor by scooping up handfuls of rubbish and hurling them in his wilted face. It was the one they called Cappie, the tippler from the Anaconda Bar, lying there like a dishrag, or a puppet, allowing himself to be hoisted into a standing position by two of the laughing men while the third, the one sporting the panache, set the garbage bin aright with a distinct chuckle. Yes, it was the old sot. He could easily have come this far on his
hands and knees before blacking out. The prankster stood by, cap in hand, waving the yellow ostrich feather under the old man’s nose as the cohorts tipped him, head first, into the can.

  What could I do? One man against three. Dog tired. As it was, I could hardly stand up myself. All from the walking. My mind clouded. I could barely see to maneuver my way about. The goggles, not to mention the narrow eyeholes which could be knocked awry, put me at a tremendous disadvantage. There was another garbage can next to the one where Cappie’s legs stuck up like a V. His feet turned out at right angles. Motionless. I thought it best to wait.