The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  The only sound was the crackle of flames from the tin-roofed building. Moments later, however, I heard a patter of applause. I looked behind me: the gooks were all applauding Tuu, who was smiling and bowing like the author of a successful play. I was shocked at their reaction. How could they be concerned with accolades? Hadn’t they been dazzled, as I had, their humanity diminished by the mystery and power of Stoner’s metamorphosis? I went over to them, and drawing near, I overheard an officer congratulate Tuu on ‘another triumph.’ It took me a while to register the significance of those words, and when I did I pushed through the group and confronted Tuu.

  ‘ “Another triumph”?’ I said.

  He met my eyes, imperturbable. ‘I wasn’t aware you spoke our language, Mr. Puleo.’

  ‘You’ve done this before,’ I said, getting angry. ‘Haven’t you?’

  ‘Twice before.’ He tapped a cigarette from a pack of Marlboros; an officer rushed to light it. ‘But never with an American spirit.’

  ‘You coulda killed me!’ I shouted, lunging for him. Two soldiers came between us, menacing me with their rifles.

  Tuu blew out a plume of smoke that seemed to give visible evidence of his self-satisfaction. ‘I told you it was a risk,’ he said. ‘Does it matter that I knew the extent of the risk and you did not? You were in no greater danger because of that. We were prepared to take steps if the situation warranted.’

  ‘Don’t bullshit me! You couldn’t have done nothin’ with Stoner!’

  He let a smile nick the corners of his mouth.

  ‘You had no right,’ I said. ‘You–’

  Tuu’s face hardened. ‘We had no right to mislead you? Please, Mr. Puleo. Between our peoples, deception is a tradition.’

  I fumed, wanting to get at him. Frustrated, I slugged my thigh with my fist, spun on my heel, and walked off. The two soldiers caught up with me and blocked my path. Furious, I swatted at their rifles; they disengaged their safeties and aimed at my stomach.

  ‘If you wish to be alone,’ Tuu called, ‘I have no objection to you taking a walk. We have tests to complete. But please keep to the road. A car will come for you.’

  Before the soldiers could step aside, I pushed past them.

  ‘Keep to the road, Mr. Puleo!’ In Tuu’s voice was more than a touch of amusement. ‘If you recall, we’re quite adept at tracking.’

  Anger was good for me; it kept my mind off what I had seen. I wasn’t ready to deal with Stoner’s evolution. I wanted to consider things in simple terms: a man I had hated had died to the world a second time and I had played a part in his release, a part in which I had no reason to take pride or bear shame, because I had been manipulated every step of the way. I was so full of anger, I must have done the first mile in under fifteen minutes, the next in not much more. By then the sun had risen above the treeline and I had worked up a sweat. Insects buzzed; monkeys screamed. I slowed my pace and turned my head from side to side as I went, as if I were walking point again. I had the idea my own ghost was walking with me, shifting around inside and burning to get out on its own.

  After an hour or so I came to the temporary housing that had been erected for the populace of Cam Le: thatched huts; scrawny dogs slinking and chickens pecking; orange peels, palm litter, and piles of shit in the streets. Some old men smoking pipes by a cookfire blinked at me. Three girls carrying plastic jugs giggled, ran off behind a hut, and peeked back around the corner.

  Vietnam.

  I thought about the way I’d used to sneer the word. ’Nam, I’d say. Viet-fucking-nam! Now it was spoken proudly, printed in Twentieth Century-Fox monolithic capitals, brazen with hype. Perhaps between those two extremes was a mode of expression that captured the ordinary reality of the place, the poverty and peacefulness of this village; but if so, it wasn’t accessible to me.

  Some of the villagers were coming out of their doors to have a look at the stranger. I wondered if any of them recognized me. Maybe, I thought, chuckling madly, maybe if I bashed a couple on the head and screamed ‘Number Ten VC!’ maybe then they’d remember. I suddenly felt tired and empty, and I sat down by the road to wait. I was so distracted, I didn’t notice at first that a number of flies had mistaken me for a new and bigger piece of shit and were orbiting me, crawling over my knuckles. I flicked them away, watched them spiral off and land on other parts of my body. I got into controlling their patterns of flight, seeing if I could make them all congregate on my left hand, which I kept still. Weird shudders began passing through my chest, and the vacuum inside my head filled with memories of Stoner, his bizarre dream, his terrible Valhalla. I tried to banish them, but they stuck there, replaying themselves over and over. I couldn’t order them, couldn’t derive any satisfaction from them. Like the passage of a comet, Stoner’s escape from Cam Le had been a trivial cosmic event, causing momentary awe and providing a few more worthless clues to the nature of the absolute, but offering no human solutions. Nothing consequential had changed for me: I was as fucked up as ever, as hard-core disoriented. The buzzing sunlight grew hotter and hotter; the flies’ dance quickened in the rippling air.

  At long last a dusty car with a gook corporal at the wheel pulled up beside me. Fierman and Witcover were in back, and Witcover’s eye was discolored, swollen shut. I went around to the passenger side, opened the front door, and heard behind me a spit-filled explosive sound. Turning, I saw that a kid of about eight or nine had jumped out of hiding to ambush me. He had a dirt-smeared belly that popped from the waist of his ragged shorts, and he was aiming a toy rifle made of sticks. He shot me again, jiggling the gun to simulate automatic fire. Little monster with slit black eyes. Staring daggers at me, thinking I’d killed his daddy. He probably would have loved it if I had keeled over, clutching my chest; but I wasn’t in the mood. I pointed my finger, cocked the thumb, and shot him down like a dog.

  He stared meanly and fired a third time: this was serious business, and he wanted me to die. ‘Row-nal Ray-gun,’ he said, and pretended to spit.

  I just laughed and climbed into the car. The gook corporal engaged the gears, and we sped off into a boil of dust and light, as if – like Stoner – we were passing through a metaphysical barrier between worlds. My head bounced against the back of the seat, and with each impact I felt that my thoughts were clearing, that a poisonous sediment was being jolted loose and flushed from my bloodstream. Thick silence welled from the rear of the car, and not wanting to ride with hostiles all the way to Saigon, I turned to Witcover and apologized for having hit him. Pressure had done it to me, I told him. That, and bad memories of a bad time. His features tightened into a sour knot and he looked out the window, wholly unforgiving. But I refused to allow his response to disturb me – let him have his petty hate, his grudge, for whatever good it would do him – and I turned away to face the violent green sweep of the jungle, the great troubled rush of the world ahead, with a heart that seemed lighter by an ounce of anger, by one bitterness removed. To the end of that passion, at least, I had become reconciled.

  The Function of Dream Sleep

  Harlan Ellison®

  Harlan Ellison (1934–) is an iconic writer called ‘one of the great living American short story writers’ by The Washington Post. His career has spanned over fifty years and he has won more awards for his work than any other living speculative fiction writer, with seventy-five books and over seventeen-thousand short stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays, essays, and a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media. He was editor and anthologist for two ground-breaking science fiction anthologies, Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions. Although several classic earlier stories might have fit this anthology, 1988’s ‘The Function of Dream Sleep’ best exemplifies Harlan Ellison’s contributions to the weird tale.

  McGrath awoke suddenly, just in time to see a huge mouth filled with small, sharp teeth closing in his side. In an instant it was gone, even as he shook himself awake.

  Had he not been staring at the flesh,
at the moment his eyes opened from sleep, he would have missed the faintest pink line of closure that remained only another heartbeat, then faded and was gone, leaving no indication the mouth had ever existed; a second – secret – mouth hiding in his skin.

  At first he was sure he had wakened from a particularly nasty dream. But the memory of the thing that had escaped from within him, through the mouth, was a real memory – not a wisp of fading nightmare. He had felt the chilly passage of something rushing out of him. Like cold air from a leaking balloon. Like a chill down a hallway from a window left open in a distant room. And he had seen the mouth. It lay across the ribs vertically, just below his left nipple, running down to the bulge of fat parallel to his navel. Down his left side there had been a lipless mouth filled with teeth; and it had been open to permit a breeze of something to leave his body.

  McGrath sat up on the bed. He was shaking. The Tensor lamp was still on, the paperback novel tented open on the sheet beside him, his body naked and perspiring in the August heat. The Tensor had been aimed directly at his side, bathing his flesh with light, when he had unexpectedly opened his eyes; and in that waking moment he had surprised his body in the act of opening its secret mouth.

  He couldn’t stop the trembling, and when the phone rang he had to steel himself to lift the receiver.

  ‘Hello,’ he heard himself say, in someone else’s voice.

  ‘Lonny,’ said Victor Kayley’s widow, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour…’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said. Victor had died the day before yesterday. Sally relied on him for the arrangements, and hours of solace he didn’t begrudge. Years before, Sally and he…then she drifted toward Victor, who had been McGrath’s oldest, closest…they were drawn to each other more and more sweetly till…and finally, McGrath had taken them both to dinner at the old Steuben Tavern on West 47th, that dear old Steuben Tavern with its dark wood booths and sensational schnitzel, now gone, torn down and gone like so much else that was…and he had made them sit side by side in the booth across from him, and he took their hands in his…I love you both so much, he had said…I see the way you move when you’re around each other…you’re both my dearest friends, you put light in my world…and he laid their hands together under his, and he grinned at them for their nervousness…

  ‘Are you all right; you sound so, I don’t know, so strained?’ Her voice was wide awake. But concerned.

  ‘I’m, yeah, I’m okay. I just had the weirdest, I was dozing, fell asleep reading, and I had this, this weird– ‘He trailed off. Then went back at it, more sternly: ‘I’m okay. It was a scary dream.’

  There was, then, a long measure of silence between them. Only the open line, with the sound of ions decaying.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he said, thinking of the funeral service day after tomorrow. She had asked him to select the casket. The anodized pink aluminum ‘unit’ they had tried to get him to go for, doing a bait-and-switch, had nauseated him. McGrath had settled on a simple copper casket, shrugging away suggestions by the Bereavement Counselor in the Casket Selection Parlor that ‘consideration and thoughtfulness for the departed’ might better be served by the Monaco, a ‘Duraseal metal unit with Sea Mist Polished Finish, interior richly lined in 600 Aqua Supreme Cheney velvet, magnificently quilted and shirred, with matching jumbo bolster and coverlet.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘I was watching television, and they had a thing about the echidna, the Australian anteater, you know…?’ He made a sound that indicated he knew. ‘And Vic never got over the trip we took to the Flinders Range in ’82, and he just loved the Australian animals, and I turned in the bed to see him smiling…’

  She began to cry.

  He could feel his throat closing. He knew. The turning to tell your best friend something you’d just seen together, to get the reinforcement, the input, the expression on his face. And there was no face. There was emptiness in that place. He knew.

  He’d turned to Victor three dozen times in the past two days. Turned, to confront emptiness. Oh, he knew, all right.

  ‘Sally,’ he murmured. ‘Sally, I know; I know.’

  She pulled herself together, snuffled herself unclogged and cleared her throat. ‘It’s okay. I’m fine. It was just a second there…’

  ‘Try to get some sleep. We have to do stuff tomorrow.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, sounding really quite all right. ‘I’ll go back to bed. I’m sorry.’ He told her to shut up, if you couldn’t call a friend at that hour to talk about the echidna, who the hell could you call?

  ‘Jerry Falwell,’ she said. ‘If I have to annoy someone at three in the morning, better it should be a shit like him.’ They laughed quickly and emptily, she said good night and told him he had been much loved by both of them, he said I know that, and they hung up.

  Lonny McGrath lay there, the paperback still tented at his side, the Tensor still warming his flesh, the sheets still soggy from the humidity, and he stared at the far wall of the bedroom on whose surface, like the surface of his skin, there lay no evidence whatever of secret mouths filled with teeth.

  ‘I can’t get it out of my mind.’

  Dr. Jess ran her fingers down his side, looked closer. ‘Well, it is red; but that’s more chafing than anything out of Stephen King.’

  ‘It’s red because I keep rubbing it. I’m getting obsessive about it. And don’t make fun, Jess. I can’t get it out of my mind.’

  She sighed and raked a hand back through her thick auburn hair. ‘Sorry.’ She got up and walked to the window in the examination room. Then, as an afterthought, she said, ‘You can get dressed.’ She stared out the window as McGrath hopped off the physical therapy table, nearly catching his heel on the retractable step. He partially folded the stiff paper gown that had covered his lap, and laid it on the padded seat. As he pulled up his undershorts, Dr. Jess turned and stared at him. He thought for the hundredth time that his initial fears, years before, at being examined by a female physician, had been foolish. His friend looked at him with concern, but without the look that passed between men and women. ‘How long has it been since Victor died?’

  ‘Three months, almost.’

  ‘And Emily?’

  ‘Six months.’

  ‘And Steve and Melanie’s son?’

  ‘Oh, Christ, Jess!’

  She pursed her lips. ‘Look, Lonny, I’m not a psychotherapist, but even I can see that the death of all these friends is getting to you. Maybe you don’t even see it, but you used the right word: obsessive. Nobody can sustain so much pain, over so brief a period, the loss of so many loved ones, without going into a spiral.’

  ‘What did the X-rays show?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘But there might’ve been something. Some lesion, or inflammation; an irregularity in the dermis…something!’

  ‘Lonny. Come on. I’ve never lied to you. You looked at them with me, did you see anything?’ He sighed deeply, shook his head. She spread her hands as if to say, well, there you are, I can’t make something sick where nothing sick exists. ‘I can work on your soft prostate, and I can give you a shot of cortisone in the ball joint where that cop worked you over; but I can’t treat something out of a penny dreadful novel that doesn’t leave any trace.’

  ‘You think I need a shrink?’

  She turned back to the window. ‘This is your third visit, Lonny. You’re my pal, kiddo, but I think you need to get counseling of a different sort.’

  McGrath knotted his tie and drew it up, spreading the wings of his shirt collar with his little fingers. She didn’t turn around. ‘I’m worried about you, Lonny. You ought to be married.’

  ‘I was married. You’re not talking wife, anyway. You’re talking keeper.’ She didn’t turn. He pulled on his jacket, and waited. Finally, with his hand on the doorknob, he said, ‘Maybe you’re right. I’ve never been a melancholy sort, but all this…so many, in so short a time…maybe you’re right.’

  He opened the door.
She looked out the window. ‘We’ll talk.’ He started out, and without turning, she said, ‘There won’t be a charge for this visit.’

  He smiled thinly, not at all happily. But she didn’t see it. There is always a charge, of one kind or another.

  He called Tommy and begged off from work. Tommy went into a snit. ‘I’m up to my ass, Lonny,’ he said, affecting his Dowager Empress tone. ‘This is Black goddam Friday! The Eroica! That Fahrenheit woman, Farrenstock, whatever the hell it is…’

  ‘Fahnestock,’ Lonny said, smiling for the first time in days. ‘I thought we’d seen the last of her when you suggested she look into the possibility of a leper sitting on her face.’

  Tommy sighed. ‘The grotesque bitch is simply a glutton. I swear to God she must be into bondage; the worse I treat her, the more often she comes in.’

  ‘What’d she bring this time?’

  ‘Another half dozen of those tacky petit-point things. I can barely bring myself to look at them. Bleeding martyrs and scenes of culturally depressed areas in, I suppose, Iowa or Indiana. Illinois, Idaho, I don’t know: one of those places that begins with an I, teeming with people who bowl.’

  Lonny always wound up framing Mrs. Fahnestock’s gaucheries. Tommy always took one look, then went upstairs in back of the framing shop to lie down for a while. McGrath had asked the matron once, what she did with all of them. She replied that she gave them as gifts. Tommy, when he heard, fell to his knees and prayed to a God in which he did not believe that the woman would never hold him in enough esteem to feel he deserved such a gift. But she spent, oh my, how she spent.

  ‘Let me guess,’ McGrath said. ‘She wants them blocked so tightly you could bounce a dime off them, with a fabric liner, a basic pearl matte, and the black lacquer frame from Chapin Molding. Right?’