The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  I didn’t have to push through the line. The witnesses, clear up to the wicket, made way for me without comment. A few feet beyond the rail, the registrar, a seedy, balding man with flakes of dandruff on his coat, horn-rimmed glasses balanced precariously on the tip of his nose, and a cigarette butt between thin lips, sat hunched at a desk behind a litter of papers, too absorbed in his work to look up. No one at the head of the queue made any attempt to draw his attention. Perhaps they had been waiting for hours. From time to time he would lay his pen on the blotter, set his burnt-out cigarette in the scallop of a plastic ashtray heaped with other twisted butts and charcoaled matches, and blow into his mittens to warm his nose. Over his shoulder, in a small area shut off from the roundhouse proper by a hospital screen, two guards were bending over a rumpled cot. They had just finished stripping a young woman who had made no effort to resist. She was lying on her stomach, her blond head turned to the crumbling wall. Her flesh took color with the cold while the guards went through her clothes in silence, turning each piece inside out, the pockets too, without finding so much as a tube of lipstick. A foot or two from the head of the cot, a stretcher lay across the arms of a dilapidated captain’s chair, the canvas wound neatly around its wooden rods. The registrar closed his book, smoothed back what was left of his greasy chestnut hair and, almost mechanically, crushed his dead cigarette in the ashtray. Some witnesses near me pressed toward the gate. A nervous shuffle. Murmurs. Maybe he wasn’t looking at me at all. He seemed a bit dazed, as though he had come to the end of a prolonged stupor and had still to take his bearings. Behind him, one of the guards had found what looked to be a metal snuffbox in the inside pocket of the girl’s corduroy jacket. There was something, after all. Perhaps she was a student. No books. So early in the morning? Her watch had stopped at 4:20. I should have asked someone in line for the correct time. An absurd shyness after having walked through deserted streets for so long. The registrar’s eyes were set far apart. An effect, no doubt, of the glasses. Bifocals. Lunar crescents cast over the stubble of his beard. He appeared to be staring right through me. Dark circles under loose bags of skin. If he could have seen my bag it would have been less awkward for the two of us. The guard was turning the snuffbox over in his hand, pressing his thumb to the catch. I fished through my pockets for something I might use as a means of identification. All I could come up with was a prescription pad that must have crumpled when I fell at the end of the little footbridge. Down to its last few sheets. Enough to get me through, even though I had to inch my way along the rail to the wicket gate, knocking my knees against the balusters. Other hands were searching my pockets. I let them. There was nothing left to find. The registrar snatched up a half-squashed pack of cigarettes, tapped it against his fingers, and held it out to me.

  – Sure you won’t have one? Menthol. Something to cool the lungs, eh? It’s the only kind I can stand now.

  He put one to his lips, flicked his lighter a couple of times, producing a few sparks.

  – Shit. Got a match? Please, sit down. Hey, one of you guys gimme a light?

  He had turned to the guards. They were standing over the girl. Just standing. Looking at each other now and again as though they were reluctant, or merely too tired, to go on. The taller one, almost a silhouette between the top of the registrar’s head and the floor-lamp bulb which cast a white ellipse on the hospital screen (a nimbus lit the down along the turned-up ridge of his nose), worked his jaw in and out. But his lips were closed. He let his eyes wander from the cot to the registrar while his hand, absently, began to smooth the tousled hair of the girl.

  – Sorry. Don’t neither of us smoke.

  The two of them were bending over her as the registrar turned to me. Again, he was looking somewhere past my eyes. Slowly. Gently. They rolled her onto her side. Then, taking her under the arms and knees, they lifted her and laid her on her back so that her legs projected off the foot of the cot, and her feet, which had turned outward, rested on the cold cement.

  – Anybody there got a light?

  Someone tapped the back of my chair and handed me a book of matches. I passed it to the registrar. He opened it, tore out a match, struck its blue tip – a rasp, the sudden burst of fire – on the flint-strip. He cupped his mittens over the cigarette, drawing hard. The flame lent a warm glow to his face, two flickering glints in the curvature of his lenses. Shaking the match out, he tossed it into the ashtray. It fell, a thread of curling smoke in its wake.

  – Of course, you must realize, we’re about to close this receiving station. Not an inch of room left, as you can see. Or are you here to make an identification?

  They must have come for me before morning. A woman had been found lying in the gutter. I told the father to call the police. Have they brought her in yet?

  – I’m sure you know how difficult it would be for us to locate this woman now. I’ve been sitting here since last night trying to put these affairs in order. It’s impossible. Even if she is here – and that’s highly unlikely, given the time of morning you claim to have answered the call – you’d have to get one of the custodians to take you around the outermost circle and, you can see for yourself, we’ve all got our hands full. I hope you’ll put that in your report. By then it’ll be too late to do any good. Not that I’m complaining! Far from it. Are you sure the old man remembered to phone the police? Maybe he was a bit deaf, or senile, and what you told him didn’t sink in. He might be waiting for you to go back there now. To claim the body. But I seriously doubt she’s here. You can look for her on your own, if you like. The odds are against it. This one here is the last sleeper I’ve accepted, and she came in late last night. The custodians are only getting to her now. We have to strip them, if only to look for a birthmark or some other physical identification when there are no effects. No stone left unturned. You understand. I don’t make the rules.

  One of the guards was kneeling, flashlight in hand, between the blond girl’s thighs. The other one leaned forward with her soiled feet, a dead weight, crossed behind his head.

  – Yes, the vagina and the rectum, too. We’ve had a lot of drunks brought in. Some of them crap all over the floor. But you, of all people, realize how necessary it is to make a complete examination. You’d be surprised what we find sometimes. It pays to be thorough, because later, when everything is being sorted out, certain questions will be asked. Questions that we won’t be able to laugh away so easily. Jesus, the paperwork! And I don’t dare go to sleep, myself. Who knows what would happen? At least none of us will wind up in one of these circles. God, what a smell! I wish you would tell them about the smell. Every once in a while it comes back to me full force. Well, it’ll be over soon enough. I’ve been authorized to terminate all receiving procedures. I have to wait now for my replacement. He should’ve been here already. Must have gotten held up at the main office. Paperwork. I was just tidying up a few things. You know, don’t like to leave a messy house. From now on the roundhouse will be admitting only relatives and other such witnesses for the purposes of identification. You wouldn’t believe how many of these clowns have been carried in here without so much as a driver’s license or even a voter’s card. People who, for the most part, were found in the streets.

  I almost forgot. There’s another one. Not far from here, I think. A man stuck, head first, in a garbage bin.

  – That’s a new one.

  By the docks. I tied a certificate to one of his toes.

  – The docks? Oh, you mean the other side of town. Out of our jurisdiction, anyway. With any luck, he’ll turn up at the movies. You know, the Omega? You’ll have to go there to track the woman down. That’s where she’d be taken, if the old man remembered to make the call. We’re moving the whole operation there. They’ve already started to receive.

  A button at the bottom of the phone dial pulsed with light.

  – Yeah……What?……Uh-huh…yeah, sure……Okay…right…

  They had begun to dress the girl. Her blouse was on. She was still nak
ed from the waist down. One of the guards tapped the registrar’s chair with the handle of a brush whose bristles were caked in luminous green paint.

  – What number?

  The registrar put his mittened hand over the mouthpiece, cradled the receiver between chin and shoulder, reopened his ledger and answered, after a pause…

  – Eight. One. One. Twenty-five.

  You can scour the mustiest tomes of this library for the early legends, wives’ tales and remedies against the dread disease. The old man has let his beard grow out uncombed for days. He emerges on one of the upper tiers, leaning over the brass rail with shelves of antique books rising out of a shadow from three sides of the deep recess behind him, and makes a sign for you to come up. The only other light glows dimly on a caged rostrum near the check-out desk at the end of the main hall. You have walked across the darkness, the clop of your heels echoing off the distant ceiling, rebounding from hidden corners, through all the levels and tiers, until you reach the foot of an iron stair, one of many that spiral into the upper depths of the library. He beckons you with a vague gesture, silently, as though all words have been put away for a time between the pages of a book he has yet to locate, which is why, in spite of everything (the epidemic, the rumors of his disappearance and death), he, the antiquarian, has taken up residence here in one of the abandoned lofts, making his bed upon towering piles of yellowed newsprint no one asks for anymore. Not even a watchman to keep him company through the long hours of the night, to pass the time with him in idle conversation if only he could rouse himself to speak a word or two. He walks with a blind man’s cane, tapping the planks beneath his feet and the sections of cast-iron grillwork, each with its unique design, below the railing which keeps him from the abyss. He knows how to walk in the dark, if the occasion should arise; but, thus far, each recess of books in the tier he now inhabits conceals a small bulb that floods a yellow light from above. The switches are hidden in the corners of the outermost shelves. Each night, as he makes his rounds, the light follows him. He never scruples to double back, having flicked one switch on, to click the switch of the preceding recess off. What he loses in time and legwork is more than compensated by the saving of electricity, for it is entirely possible that no one will come to replace the bulbs which have burnt out. The watchman has gone to tend the victims of this terrible disease. No one is spared. Architectural Design is already lost in darkness. It’s only a matter of time, perhaps just hours, minutes, before another recess goes. He might, of course, venture out into the foggy streets for a new bulb. There are none in the janitor’s closet. He had often gone to look under the basement stairwell, but there were only crates packed with straw, leaning mops, pails full of dirty rags tucked behind the joists. For a younger man it would be less of a problem to replace the bulb. Plenty of ladders about – aluminum rungs painted brown, a ridged mat nailed to each of the narrow steps to guard against an unexpected slippage. But he was old. Staring into his own grave, as he liked to tell his wife before the sickness came. There was no guarantee that any of the shops would be open, including his own, which he hadn’t been to for almost a month. When the landlady died he gathered up some provisions, left his wife without a word of fond farewell, and set out for the library. He knew that she would have sent word after him to the old house lost in a mist behind the tree where an animal rocked its nights away in the branches. To the roundhouse, she or her brother would have come to look for him amid sleepers whose pale faces turned toward a blackness beyond the measure of time and space. He has read the histories, all the ancient registers of lore and quackery. And now he stands, beckoning you, making a sign which brooks no glib interpretation. He might, for all the world, be swatting a fly as he waits for you. And when you have reached the top of the clankering spiral – you come up through the hole in an iron grate, without light, your eyes straining toward that lunar mass of gray-white beard – he will conduct you on a long, meandering tour through the darkness (you will not be able to find your way back so easily), at the end of which, two steps down, where he parts the wine-colored drapes of an opera loge, you are seated at a school desk overlooking the black gulf of the library theatre. A legal pad lies on the desk. You will be able to take notes. Nothing more will escape you. There’s a pen dangling underneath from a copper chain. A candle at your feet, near a book of matches. It’s just thick enough to be fitted into the inkwell. You will stop here in silence with the old man sitting behind you, his armchair turned to the wall as you strike a match, waiting for the curtain to rise. At the top of the pad, above the first of the aqua lines, someone has written: Hist. of Medicine.

  The pantomime begins under the thatched roof of a hut. Through the opening, snowflakes drift and churn in gusts of wind against the night. You would be expected to note here that the hut is empty, though in the middle of the floor a small fire has recently burned. There remains a heap of glowing embers. A rude flap made of canvas, like a topsail, suddenly unrolls to cover the opening. On it these words, painted in blood, seen by the light of the coals: Eld Wanderer. A pickaxe and shovel lean, one crossed on the other, by the wall to the right of the flap. The interior of the hut, whose upper reaches are lost in a conical shadow, bristles with tufts of straw. Curtain.

  Behind you the old man goes into his cigarette cough, a gravelly hack which he tries in vain to stifle as he keeps himself amused by making Chinese shadows on the wall, hands clasped to shape the profile of a boxer dog, or a cat. He passes through the whole repertoire of illusive silhouettes. Then, with an unintelligible whisper, he turns toward you, begging the loan of five or six sheets of paper, which can easily be spared since the pad is full. He assures you by a series of emphatic gestures that, should you have need of it, a second pad has been placed inside the desk for your convenience. You raise the lid a crack, just enough to slip your hand through. You can feel it, a pad. Also, a pair of manicure scissors. Both of which you hand to him.

  The next scene of the pantomime is staged to represent the night. Without stars. A silver web gleaming under the moon. The sky, completely black, against which the patterns work their geometric transformations. Symmetries intermesh so delicately that a breath might blow them out of shape or cause an unmendable tear. Euclidean and non-Euclidean allures. The threads swerve in a hypothetical sphere beneath the dome of a long-vanished planetarium. Some of the seats are rocking, giving off abrupt squeaks in the dark. An unseen cat meows. Who can tell how far the web continues, beyond the touch of moonlight, into an emptied cosmos? Curtain.

  Yellow curlicues seesaw gently to the floor behind you. All this time, while your eyes were turned to the void, the old man has been snipping away, cutting himself a miniature fool’s cap with two diminutive windows giving on the inside of the cone. When he turns his head in a certain way the flickering candlelight shines through. A pale square with indistinct borders winks open and shut at the base of the pyramidal shadow. The old man balances an oblong cut-out on the bridge of his nose in such a way that it reappears in silhouette behind the curtained ‘window’ on the wall of the loge.

  The third tableau depicts a winding gallery cluttered with recently vacated beds. An old château where giant birds of prey walk, tipping the great chandeliers with their downy skulls – vultures, cormorants on holiday from the sea, eagles bald or bristling with a thick head of fur to be smoothed down, almost mechanically, with dampened wing-feathers whenever they catch a glimpse of themselves in the tall mirrors between the gallery windows. Windows opening on a garden overgrown with weeds. The granite fountain, covered by verdigris moss, whose dried-up basins languish under a black sediment, flanked by two armless statues: a faun, with cheeks puffed out, blowing imaginary panpipes; an ancient bronze of the Huntress, her nose eaten away by the pox of time and weather. Both against a cloudless afternoon sky. The mammoth birds are looking for someone. They veil their eyelids against the shafts of window-light. Curtain.

  You find a deck of playing cards inside the desk. The old man becomes excited. He dro
ps the pad and scissors on the floor and holds out his hands. He fans the deck into a perfect circle and thrusts it, face down, under your chin. Pick a card. Any card. You draw the eight of spades. He closes the fan, shuffles the deck, shapes it into a tidy stack, and places it carefully between his feet. The old man’s mind is wandering. His lips move. A garbled noise escapes his clenched gums in a spray of spittle. Now he turns his face to the wall. A voice comes over the loudspeaker.

  – In the fourth and last tableau, the curtain rises on three wax figures. Narcolept, oh Narcolept! It seems as though daylight will never come! They have all but reached the end. One, dragged along the pavement by the other two, his feet cradled in their hands. From offstage, electric fans waft clouds of dry-ice vapor under the lamps. They cannot see the street. The buildings. Across the footlights. Lost.

  Before the mask. I must at least go through the motions for as long as the antitoxin can keep me awake. An increase from 0.5ml. of a 2,000 million per ml. vaccine, given as the first dose. My eyelids are getting heavy. A little while, and yet a while longer, to follow the tick of the clock (corner-of-the-eye hallucinations: livid specks that seem to jump out of the walls before a glance decomposes them), and I will have begun to dream. A window impossible to distance. Somewhere beyond the grimy panes there was, there is, another room, high above Promontory Wall, where he used to spend his time.