The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  ‘What will you do now?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said irritably. ‘Go home and watch Crossroads, I suppose. What else is there?’

  It was the rush hour. As we pushed our way through the pedestrians the traffic was beginning to congeal at the junction of Peter Street and Deansgate, where no one ever obeys the traffic lights. Lucas turned down toward the shop. He had spotted quite a large crowd of students and children gathered in front of the cracked window. They seemed to be waiting for the door to open. The younger ones kept trying it, rattling the handle then pressing their noses to the plate glass; they peered into the gloomy depths of the place, where they could just make out looming empty shelves and torn posters. The students, meanwhile, leaned against the wall with their hands in their pockets; and it was one of them who got up the courage to approach us, unzipping a plastic holdall.

  ‘Want to buy some records?’ he asked in a slow voice. He offered the open bag for inspection. This seemed to incense Lucas, who blinked and rubbed his forehead wildly.

  ‘It’s closed down, you stupid bugger!’ he shouted. ‘Can’t you see?’

  The rest of them turned slowly, like cattle interrupted drinking, and stared at him.

  ‘Closed! Finished! Understand? You won’t be getting any more of that here!’

  He laughed. He swayed.

  ‘What’s the matter Lucas?’ I said. ‘Come away!’

  He pushed at me.

  ‘Leave me alone, I’m all right,’ he said. In a quieter voice he advised the crowd, ‘Piss off and find someone else.’ They watched him stagger off down Peter Street towards the Midland Hotel, their eyes uncommunicative and inturned. Some of the younger ones laughed or catcalled uncertainly. He was obviously in difficulties. He kept stopping, holding his head, looking round as if he wondered where he was. I went after him. Suddenly he wobbled over to the edge of the pavement, got down on his knees, and began to vomit almost carefully into the gutter. People from the bus queues on the steps of the Free Trade Hall moved hesitantly toward him. He looked lonely and embarrassed, wiping his mouth with his handkerchief, blinking and grinning up into the light that was causing him so much pain. ‘What can I do, Lucas?’ I said. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Just piss off.’

  Twenty or thirty people now surrounded us. At the front stood the women from the bus stop, clutching their shopping bags and umbrellas, a ring of grayish anxious faces. Behind them men from the car showrooms and drawing offices struggled quietly for a better view. What was the matter? It was a car accident: it was two men fighting. A woman had fainted. It was a dog. Lucas squirmed about, moaning with pain, squinting up at them as they discussed him, screwing up the flesh round his eyes against the migrainous, coronal light that flared round their heads. Then, quite suddenly, the headache seemed to leave him. He shoved me away and jumped lightly to his feet. He looked more relaxed and healthy than I had ever seen him.

  ‘What do you know of Egnaro?’ he demanded in a loud and scornful voice.

  Surprised and puzzled, the crowd drew back from him. This seemed to amuse him. He laughed, and spat in the gutter.

  ‘What will you ever know?’ he pressed them.

  Some of them shook their heads. He winked horribly at the women, grinned at the men. They backed off further, but he had their attention.

  ‘You,’ he went on, ‘with your supermarket tunes and your Wimpey houses! You with your insurance policies!’

  He darted forward, ransacked briefly some woman’s shopping while she stared helplessly on, and held up a packet of ‘Daz.’ ‘You,’ he accused triumphantly, ‘with your Blue Whitener!’

  He sneered at them; he imitated their favorite TV personalities; his effect on them was astonishing.

  ‘If you want to know about the Golden Land,’ he challenged them, ‘you must go there!’ The schoolchildren worked their way forward through the crush and gazed up at him. He regarded them indulgently. ‘You must suffer as I have,’ he told them, ‘in its swamps! You must itch with its fevers and yellow rashes, tremble on its lee shores, wade through its fetid deltas until your feet rot on your legs!’

  The children cheered.

  Lucas shook his finger in admonition. He put his hands on his hips. ‘I know you!’ he cried. ‘You whisper that word among yourselves when you think I can’t hear! But dare you speak it aloud? Dare you?’

  I hadn’t any idea what to do for him. In the end I abandoned him there with his puzzled but enchanted audience: a fat latter-day Errol Flynn or Mario Lanza, recruiting for some trumpery, desperate expedition against the Incas among the crumbling jungles of Hollywood’s ‘new’ world. His eyes were flashing, his curly hair was plastered to his forehead, he had gone insane. As I walked off I thought, ‘He’s spent his life exploiting their fantasies to subsidize his own. This is his punishment.’ I was quite wrong.

  ‘That place is not for you!’ I heard him cry, and they groaned. ‘That place is for dreamers!’

  One word hung in the air above him, heavy with promise yet bubbling and buoyant, a marvelous word sparkling with mystery and force: he had only to open his mouth and it would speak itself. A policeman was approaching the crowd from the direction of St. Peter’s Square.

  That was four months ago. I did not see Lucas again until yesterday, although for a while I made regular visits to Peter Street, hoping he might be drawn back to the scene of his failure. What I expected of him I don’t know: that he should recover from his breakdown, I suppose, and begin again – he had, after all, paid me in cash. I imagined him in the dirty streets behind Woolworths or the Ardwick Centre, trying to raise finance among the market stalls and pet shops where he had begun his career, two patches of black sweat growing steadily under the arms of his safari suit as his peculiar splay-footed walk carried him from disappointment to disappointment. But the place remained deserted (it was to re-open much later as an extension of Halfords’ already profitable bicycle department); Lucas seemed to vanish into his own fiction; and all I could do was stare at my reflection in the cracked plate glass.

  At about this time I began to have my own intimations of Egnaro.

  There was nothing original about my seduction; it was dismally similar to Lucas’s own, except that it began with a dream.

  I was standing in a high narrow room with white walls. It was very hot; but in through the room’s single window came the sound of waves, and those scents which water draws from a dry shore. There was a thread of music, one phrase repeated over and over again on some stringed instrument. I went to the window but the view was blocked by a tree. All I could see through its long dark branches was a blur of sunlight. Where a ray of light penetrated the curious leafage, it filled the room with a dusty glow the color of geranium petals; from this I guessed it would soon be dark. Standing in that room, soothed by its proportions, I knew I was in some country so foreign I could not imagine it. Hearing those few notes endlessly repeated, I felt assuaged and expectant, as if by a glimpse of happiness to come. I heard someone begin to say,

  ‘Comfort us now & in the hour of our deaths.’

  When I woke it was with an unbearable pang of nostalgia. Boarding the train at Stockport that morning I heard a woman say distinctly, ‘The coast, they claim, is a must at this time of year,’ and I knew I was lost. Since then I have kept a little notebook. The television advertisements are full of clues. One shows a tiger running in slow motion across a heartbreaking landscape of sand dunes; another, for banking services, a horse splashing through shallows. I record them all.

  Like Lucas I have ransacked the atlases and encyclopedias, finding nothing. Unlike him I have visited the great seaports: London, Glasgow, Liverpool. By Southampton Water I sat down and wept; the wind was full of the sound of foreign voices, the scent of foreign fruit; I was dizzy with expectation. But no great fleet is gathering. Nothing can be seen of the great preparations which haunted Lucas and which now haunt me. In the governmental buildings near St. James’s Park, they look blankly at
you if you mention Egnaro; in the offices of the Geographical Society they can tell you nothing. And yet somewhere they are gutting the records of old expeditions; repairing ancient maps; cross-examining old sailors who – three days battered by ice and gales in 1942 under the Southern Cross, hunted by some lean German raider – saw, or only thought they saw, a smudge of land on a heaving horizon, a ripple of white ice cliffs out from which may flow that current of warm, fresh, mysterious water…

  I am able to see myself quite clearly on these useless journeys, these errands run on behalf of my own imagination: but I cannot stop: and I understand now why Lucas had such difficulty in describing his condition. It is like inhabiting two worlds at once.

  As I take my first hesitant steps away from the seashore, setting out through the shattered limestone hinterlands into the deep interior of the mystery, I begin to feel a need for reassurance – for an exchange of maps and notes – for some dialogue with those who have made the journey before me. Yesterday, on an impulse, I went back to the Lucky Lotus, that staging post or coaling port on the way to Egnaro. I suppose I had known all along that I would find him there when I needed him. He was sitting at his table in the alcove, putting bits of sweet and sour pork into his mouth while he read the paper folded alongside his plate.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ he said. ‘I was just thinking about you.’ And when I had ordered my food he began talking about himself.

  He had been to America, he said, since getting his affairs in order. If he was a bit fatter, that was why. New partners – he didn’t want to be specific at this stage – had paid off most of his old debts, and he was ready to start a new business. America had opened his eyes. ‘Fast food,’ he said. ‘That’s where the real money is. Hamburgers. Bloody hell, you should see the way they do it over there!’ It was like a production line. You took the customers’ money, passed them through the system as quickly as possible, and ejected them at the other end. ‘They hardly have time to get the muck down them before they’re out on the street again and the next lot are coming in!’ It was wonderful. ‘Fast food, that’s where it is.’

  I watched him eat his rice pudding and custard, smacking his lips appreciatively, nodding and winking at the waitresses. I noticed that he had replaced his old leather briefcase with a brand new plastic one. He used the word ‘secret’ constantly. ‘The secret’s in the condiments,’ he would say: ‘Give them onion relish and they’ll eat anything.’ And: ‘In and out fast, that’s the secret.’ He had a second liqueur; he seemed quite willing to stay and talk. He asked me if I would like to get in on the ground floor of fast food with him, and I said I would. He didn’t turn the conversation to old times, and I suspected he would have resisted me if I had. I sat listening to his new dreams, watching the hands of the clock.

  ‘Well,’ he said eventually. ‘Time to push off I suppose.’

  I still had not brought myself to ask. I knew now how he had felt every time he took out The Castles of the Kings and offered it to some puzzled traveling salesman. I watched the waitresses surround him – twittering ‘Costa’ costa’ costa”, like little drab birds – as he got up to go, and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. He paid the bill with a credit card. We walked along Deansgate and down Peter Street towards the cab rank outside the Midland Hotel. As we passed the shop, with its mended window and brand new Halfords’ sign, I managed to say:

  ‘By the way. All that “Egnaro” stuff–’

  For a moment he looked puzzled. Then he laughed. ‘Oh, you don’t have to worry about that,’ he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. ‘I’ve finished with all that. I can’t think why I made so much fuss. It’s nothing at all when you know, is it?’

  I knew then that if I reached out I would touch some transparent membrane which had grown up between us to protect the secret. I nodded hopelessly. ‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘Good.’ I arranged to meet him again soon. I arranged to meet his backers. I walked away, and later caught my train. I shan’t see him again. Old maps are useless. I confess to you now as Lucas confessed to me under the coats in the Lucky Lotus last February – out of fear, out of puzzlement, out of loneliness.

  Wherever I am I think about it: whatever I do is tainted by it: but if you were to ask me what Egnaro is I could give you no answer. In my most despairing moments I believe that the human race exists solely to give it expression. No one, I suspect, can have any clear understanding of it. All events are its signature: none are. It does not exist: yet it is quite real. The secret is meaningless before you know it: and, judging by what has happened to Lucas, worthless when you do. If Egnaro is the substrate of mystery which underlies all daily life, then the reciprocal of this is also true, and it is the exact dead point of ordinariness which lies beneath every mystery.

  The Little Dirty Girl

  Joanna Russ

  Joanna Russ (1937–2011) was an important American writer, academic, and critic whose ground-breaking dystopian novel The Female Man (1975) and influential nonfiction tract How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983) have unfortunately overshadowed a body of short fiction as various and rich as that of Angela Carter or Shirley Jackson. Russ wrote both science fiction and fantasy, with a number of stories coming from a horror or weird fiction slant. Collections include The Zanzibar Cat (1983), (Extra) Ordinary People (1985) and The Hidden Side of the Moon (1987). ‘The Little Dirty Girl’ (1982), like previous stories by Margaret Irwin and Robert Aickman, has an essential clarity yet abiding weirdness not usually found in supernatural tales of this type.

  Dear_____,

  Do you like cats? I never asked you. There are all sorts of cats: elegant, sinuous cats, clunky, heavy-breathing cats, skinny, desperate cats, meatloaf-shaped cats, waddling, dumb cats, big slobs of cats who step heavily and groan whenever they try to fit themselves (and they never do fit) under something or in between something or past something.

  I’m allergic to all of them. You’d think they’d know it. But as I take my therapeutic walks around the neighborhood (still aching and effortful after ten months, though when questioned, my doctor replies, with the blank, baffled innocence of those Martian children so abstractedly brilliant they’ve never learned to communicate about merely human matters with anyone, that my back will get better) cats venture from alleyways, slip out from under parked cars, bound up cellars steps, prick up their ears and flash out of gardens, all lifting up their little faces, wreathing themselves around my feet, crying Dependency! Dependency! and showing their elegantly needly little teeth, which they never use save in yearning appeal to my goodness. They have perfect confidence in me. If I try to startle them by hissing, making loud noises, or clapping my hands sharply, they merely stare in interested fashion and scratch themselves with their hind legs: how nice. I’ve perfected a method of lifting kitties on the toe of my shoe and giving them a short ride through the air (this is supposed to be alarming); they merely come running back for more.

  And the children! I don’t dislike children. Yes I do. No I don’t, but I feel horribly awkward with them. So of course I keep meeting them on my walks this summer: alabaster little boys with angelic fair hair and sky-colored eyes (this section of Seattle is Scandinavian and the Northwest gets very little sun) come up to me and volunteer such compelling information as:

  ‘I’m going to my friend’s house.’

  ‘I’m going to the store.’

  ‘My name is Markie.’

  ‘I wasn’t really scared of that big dog; I was just startled.’

  ‘People leave a lot of broken glass around here.’

  The littler ones confide; the bigger ones warn of the world’s dangers: dogs, cuts, blackberry bushes that might’ve been sprayed. One came up to me once – what do they see in a tall, shuffling, professional, intellectual woman of forty? – and said, after a moment’s thought:

  ‘Do you like frogs?’

  What could I do? I said yes, so a shirt-pocket that jumped and said rivit was opened to disclose Mervyn, an exquisite little being the col
or of wet, mottled sea-sand, all webbed feet and amber eyes, who was then transferred to my palm where he sat and blinked. Mervyn was a toad, actually; he’s barely an inch long and can be found all over Seattle, usually upside down under a rock. I’m sure he (or she) is the Beloved Toad and Todkins and Todlekrancz Virginia Woolf used in her letters to Emma Vaughan.

  And the girls? O they don’t approach tall, middle-aged women. Little girls are told not to talk to strangers. And the little girls of Seattle (at least in my neighborhood) are as obedient and feminine as any in the world; to the jeans and tee-shirts of Liberation they (or more likely their parents) add hair-ribbons, baby-sized pocket-books, fancy pins, pink shoes, even toe polish.

  The liveliest of them I ever saw was a little person of five, coasting downhill in a red wagon, her cheeks pink with excitement, one ponytail of yellow hair undone, her white tee-shirt askew, who gave a decorous little squeak of joy at the sheer speed of it. I saw and smiled; pink-cheeks saw and shrieked again, more loudly and confidently this time, then looked away, embarrassed, jumped quickly out of her wagon, and hauled it energetically up the hill.

  Except for the very littlest, how neat, how clean, how carefully dressed they are! with long, straight hair that the older ones (I know this) still iron under waxed paper.

  The Little Dirty Girl was different.

  She came up to me in the supermarket. I’ve hired someone to do most of my shopping, as I can’t carry much, but I’d gone in for some little thing, as I often do. It’s a relief to get off the hard bed and away from the standing desk or the abbreviated kitchen stools I’ve scattered around the house (one foot up and one foot down); in fact it’s simply such a relief –