‘You’re to go to your chambers,’ he announced. ‘Dr. Harrow says you are not to talk to anyone.’ He swallowed and avoided my eyes, then abruptly stared directly at me for the first time. ‘I told her that I hadn’t seen you yet but would make certain you knew.’
I nodded quickly and looked away. In a moment he was gone, and I started upstairs.
‘I saw Dr. Leslie before,’ Anna commented before she walked outside toward her cottage. ‘He smiled at me and waved.’ She hesitated, biting her lip thoughtfully. ‘Maybe he will play with me this time,’ she announced before turning down the rain-spattered path.
Dr. Harrow stood at the high window in the Home Room when I arrived. In her hand she held a drooping hibiscus flower.
‘Shut the door,’ she ordered. I did so. ‘Now lock it and sit down.’
She had broken the hibiscus. Her fingers looked bruised from its stain: jaundiced yellow, ulcerous purple. As I stared she flung the flower into my lap.
‘They know it was you,’ she announced. ‘They matched your retina print with the masterfile. How could you have thought you’d get away with it?’ She sank onto the bed, her eyes dull with fatigue.
The rain had hung back for several hours, a heavy iron veil. Now it hammered the windows again, its steady tattoo punctuated by the rattle of hailstones.
‘I did not mean to kill her,’ I murmured. I smoothed my robe, flicking the broken blossom onto the floor.
She ground the hibiscus beneath her heel, took it and threw it out the window. ‘Her face,’ she said: as if replying to a question. ‘Like my brother Aidan’s.’
I stared at her blankly.
‘When I found him,’ she went on, turning to me with glittering eyes. ‘On the tree.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dr. Harrow.’
Her lips tightened against her teeth when she faced me. A drop of blood welled against her lower lip. I longed to lean forward to taste it, but did not dare. ‘She was right, you know. You steal our dreams…’
‘That’s impossible.’ I crossed my arms, shivering a little from the damp breeze. I hesitated. ‘You told me that is impossible. Unscientific. Unprofessional thinking.’
She smiled, and ran her tongue over her lip to lick away the blood. ‘Unprofessional? This has all been very unprofessional, Wendy. Didn’t you know that?’
‘The tenets of the Nuremberg Act state that a scientist should not perform any research upon a subject which she would not undergo herself.’
Dr. Harrow shook her head, ran a hand through damp hair. ‘Is that what you thought it was? Research?’
I shrugged. ‘I – I don’t know. The boy – Your twin?’
‘Aidan…’ She spread her fingers against the bed’s coverlet, flexed a finger that bore a simple silver ring. ‘They found out. Teachers. Our father. About us. Do you understand?’
A flicker of the feeling she had evoked in bed with her brother returned, and I slitted my eyes, tracing it. ‘Yes,’ I whispered. ‘I think so.’
‘It is –’ She fumbled for a phrase. ‘Like what is forbidden here, between empaths and staff. They separated us. Aidan…They sent him away, to another kind of – school. Tested him.’
She stood and paced to the window, leaned with a hand upon each side so that the rain lashed about her, then turned back to me with her face streaming: whether with rain or tears I could not tell. ‘Something happened that night…’ Shaking her head furiously she pounded the wall with flattened palms. ‘He was never the same. He had terrible dreams, he couldn’t bear to sleep alone– That was how it started–
‘And then he came home, for the holidays…Good Friday. He would not come to Mass with us. Papa was furious; but Aidan wouldn’t leave his room. And when we returned, I looked for him, he wasn’t there, not in his room, not anywhere…
‘I found him. He had –’ Her voice broke and she stared past me to the wall beyond. ‘Apple blossom in his hair. And his face –’
I thought she would weep; but her expression twisted so that almost I could imagine she laughed to recall it.
‘Like hers…’
She drew nearer, until her eyes were very close to mine. I sniffed and moved to the edge of the bed warily: she had dosed herself with hyoscine derived from the herbarium. Now her words slurred as she spoke, spittle a fine hail about her face.
‘Do you know what happens now, Wendy?’ In the rain-streaked light she glowed faintly. ‘Dr. Leslie was here tonight. They have canceled our term of research. We’re all terminated. A purge. Tomorrow they take over.’
She made a clicking noise with her tongue. ‘And you, Wendy. And Anna, and all the others. Toys. Weapons.’ She swayed slightly as she leaned toward me. ‘You especially. They’ll find him, you know. Dig him up and use him.’
‘Who?’ I asked. Now sweat pearled where the rain had dried on her forehead. I clutched a bolster as she stretched a hand to graze my temples, and shivered.
‘My brother,’ she murmured.
‘No, Dr. Harrow. The other – who is the other?’
Smiling she drew me toward her, the bolster pressing against her thigh as she reached for the NET’s rig, flicking rain from the colored wires.
‘Let’s find out.’
I cried out at her clumsy hookup. A spot of blood welled from her temple and I protectively touched my own face, drew away a finger gelled with the fluid she had smeared carelessly from ear to jaw. Then, before I could lie down, she made the switch and I cried out at the dizzy vistas erupting behind my eyes.
Aniline lightning. Faculae stream from synapse to synapse as ptyalin floods my mouth and my head rears instinctively to smash against the headboard. She has not tied me down. The hyoscine lashes into me like a fiery bile and I open my mouth to scream. In the instant before it begins I taste something faint and caustic in the back of her throat and struggle to free myself from her arms. Then I’m gone.
Before me looms a willow tree shivering in a breeze frigid with the shadow of the northern mountains. Sap oozes from a raw flat yellow scar on the trunk above my head where, two days before, my father had sawed the damaged limb free. It had broken from the weight; when I found him he lay pillowed by a crush of twigs and young leaves and scattered bark, the blossoms in his hair alone unmarked by the fall. Now I stand on tiptoe and stroke the splintery wound, bring my finger to my lips and kiss it. I shut my eyes, because they burn so. No tears left to shed; only this terrible dry throbbing, as though my eyes have been etched with sand. The sobs begin again, suddenly. The wrenching weight in my chest drags me to my knees until I crouch before the tree, bow until my forehead brushes grass trampled by grieving family. I groan and try to think of words, imprecations, a curse to rend the light and living from my world so abruptly strangled and still. But I can only moan. My mouth opens upon dirt and shattered granite. My nails claw at the ground as though to wrest from it something besides stony roots and scurrying earwigs. The earth swallows my voice as I force myself to my knees and, sobbing, raise my head to the tree.
It is enough; he has heard me. Through the shroud of new leaves he peers with lambent eyes. April’s first apple blossoms weave a snowy cloud about his brow. His eyes are huge, the palest, purest green in the cold morning sun. They stare at me unblinking; harsh and bright and implacable as moonlight, as languidly he extends his hand toward mine.
I stagger to my feet, clots of dirt falling from my palms. From the north the wind rises and rattles the willow branches. Behind me a door rattles as well, as my father leans out to call me back to the house. At the sound I start to turn, to break the reverie that binds me to this place, this tree stirred by a tainted wind riven from a bleak and noiseless shore.
And then I stop, where in memory I have stopped a thousand times; and turn back to the tree, and for the first time I meet his eyes.
He is waiting, as he has always waited; as he will always wait. At my neck the wind gnaws cold as bitter iron, stirring the collar of my blouse so that a
lready the chill creeps down my chest, to nuzzle there at my breasts and burrow between them. I nod my head, very slightly, and glance back at the house.
All the colors have fled the world. For the first time I see it clearly: the gray skin taut against granite hills and grassless haughs; the horizon livid with clouds like a rising barrow; the hollow bones and nerveless hands drowned beneath black waters lapping at the edge of a charred orchard. The rest is fled and I see the true world now, the sleeping world as it wakes, as it rears from the ruins and whispers in the wind at my cheeks, this is what awaits you; this and nothing more, the lie is revealed and now you are waking and the time has come, come to me, come to me…
In the ghastly light only his eyes glow, and it is to them that I turn, it is into those hands white and cold and welcome that I slip my own, it is to him that I have come, not weeping, no not ever again, not laughing, but still and steady and cold as the earth beneath my feet, the gray earth that feeds the roots and limbs and shuddering leaves of the tree…
And then pain rips through me, a flood of fire searing my mouth and ears, raging so that I stagger from the bed as tree and sky and earth tilt and shiver like images in black water. Gagging I reach into my own throat, trying to dislodge the capsule Emma Harrow has bitten; try to breath through the fumes that strip the skin from my gums. I open my mouth to scream but the fire churns through throat and chest, boils until my eyes run and stain the sky crimson.
And then I fall; the wires rip from my skull.
Beside me on the floor Dr. Harrow thrashed, eyes staring wildly at the ceiling, her mouth rigid as she retched and blood spurted from her bitten tongue. I recoiled from the scent of bitter almond she exhaled; then watched as she suddenly grew still. Quickly I knelt, tilting her head away so that half of the broken capsule rolled onto the floor at my feet. I waited a moment, then bowed my head until my lips parted around her broken jaw and my tongue stretched gingerly to lap at the blood cupped in her cheek.
In the tree the boy laughs. A bowed branch shivers, and then, slowly, rises from the ground. Another boy dangles there, his long hair tangled in dark strands around a leather belt. I see him lift his head and, as the world rushes away in a blur of red and black, he smiles at me.
A cloud of frankincense. Seven stars limned against a dormer window. A boy with a bulldog puppy; and she is dead.
I cannot leave my room now. Beside me a screen dances with colored lights that refract and explode in brilliant parhelions when I dream. But I am not alone now, ever…
I see him waiting in the corner, laughing as his green eyes slip between the branches and the bars of my window, until the sunlight changes and he is lost to view once more, among the dappled and chattering leaves.
Family
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates (1938–) is an American author who has published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novel them (1969) won the National Book Award, and her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to portraying compelling, complex characters, Oates excels at writing stories with a New Gothic or weird sensibility, many of them terrifying or disturbing. ‘Family’ (1989) is a tale of weird science fiction horror and strange ritual that reads like the love-child of Shirley Jackson and China Miéville.
The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to be fixed – neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall. A thermal haze of inexpressible sweetness, though bearing tiny bits of grit or mica, had eased into the Valley from the industrial region to the north and there were nights when the sun set at the western horizon as if it were sinking through a porous red mass, and there were days when a hard-glaring moon like bone remained fixed in a single position, prominent in the sky. Above the patchwork of excavated land bordering our property – all of which had formerly been our property in Grandfather’s time: thousands of acres of wheat, corn, oats, and open grazing land – a curious trembling rainbow sometimes defined itself, its colors shifting even as you stared, shades of blue, blue-green, blue-purple, orange, orange-red, orange-yellow, a translucent yellow that dissolved into mere moisture as the thermal breeze stirred, warm as an exhaled breath. And if you had run to tell others of the rainbow it was likely to be gone when they came. ‘Liar,’ my older brothers and sisters said, ‘don’t say such things if you don’t mean them!’ Father said, frowning, ‘Don’t say such things at all if you aren’t certain they will be true for others, not simply for yourself.’
This begins in the time of family celebration – after Father succeeded in selling all but a few of the acres of land surrounding our house, his inheritance from Grandfather, and he and Mother were giddy as children with relief at having escaped the luckless fate of certain of our neighbors in the Valley, rancher-rivals of Grandfather’s and their descendants, who had sold off their property years ago, before the market had begun to realize its full potential. (Full potential were words that Father often uttered, rolling the words about in his mouth like round, smooth stones whose taste absorbed him.) Now they were landless, and their investments were shaky and they had made their homes in cities of increasing inhospitality, where no country people could endure to live for long. They had virtually prostituted themselves, Father said, sighing, and smiling – and for so little! It was a saying of Grandfather’s that a curse would befall anyone in the Valley who gloated over a neighbor’s misfortune, but as Father said, it was damned difficult not to feel superior in this instance. And Mother vehemently agreed.
Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora cocked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley – for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, ‘planned’ communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonishing, towerlike buildings of aluminum and glass and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in sunshine like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird’s talons, taking your breath away. ‘The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,’ Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow-moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth.
So mesmerized was Father by the transformation of the Valley, perceived with dreamlike acuity through the twin lenses of his binoculars, the poor man often forgot where he was; failed to come down for dinner, or for bed; and if Mother, thinking to indulge him, or hurt by his indifference to her, did not send one of the servants to summon him, he was likely to spend the entire night on the roof…and in the morning, smiling sheepishly, he would explain that he’d fallen asleep, or, conversely, that he had been troubled by having seen things for which he could not account – shadows the size of longhorns moving beyond our twelve-foot barbed-wire fence, and mysterious winking lights fifty miles away in the foothills. Mother dismissed the shadows as optical illusions caused by father’s overwrought constitution, or the ghosts of old, long-since-slaughtered livestock; the lights, she said, were surely from the private airport at Furnace Creek – had Father forgotten already that he’d sold a large parcel of land for a small airport there? ‘These lights more resemble fires,’ Father said stubbornly. ‘And they were in the foothills, not in the plain.’
There were times then of power failures, and financial losses, and Father was forced to give up nearly all of our ser
vants, but he retained his rooftop vigil, white-clad, powerful lenses to his eyes, for he perceived himself as a witness and thought, should he live to a ripe old age, as Grandfather had (Grandfather was in his ninety-ninth year when he died, and then in a fall from a wasp-stung horse), he would be a chronicler of our time, like Thucydides of his, for ‘Is there a world struggling to be born, or only struggle?’
Because of numerous dislocations in the Valley, of which we learned by degrees, the abandonment of houses, farms, livestock, even pets, it happened that packs of dogs began to roam about looking for food, particularly by night, poor starveling creatures that were becoming a nuisance in the region and should be, as authorities urged, shot down on sight – these dogs being not feral by birth of course but formerly domesticated terriers, setters, cocker spaniels, German shepherds, Labrador retrievers, even the larger and coarser breed of poodle – and it was the cause of some friction between Mother and Father that, despite his presence on the roof at all hours of the day and night, Father failed nonetheless to see a band of dogs dig beneath our fence and silently make their way to the dairy barn, where with terrifying efficiency they tore out the throats – and surely this could not have been in silence! – of our last six holsteins, and our last two she-goats, preparatory to devouring the poor creatures; nor did Father notice anything out of the ordinary on the night that two homeless derelicts, formerly farmhands of ours, impaled themselves on the fence (which was electrically charged, though in compliance with County Farm and Home Office regulations) and were found, dead, in the morning. (It was Kit, our sixteen-year-old, who found them, and the sight of the men, he said, tore his heart – so skinny, gray, grizzled, he scarcely recognized them. And the crows had been at them early.)
Following this episode Father journeyed to the state capital, with the purpose of taking out a loan, and reestablishing, as he called it, old ties with his politician friends, and Mother joined him a few days later for a greatly needed change of scene, as she said – ‘Not that I don’t love you all, and the farm, but I need to breathe other air for a while’ – leaving us under the care of Mrs. Hoyt our housekeeper and our eldest sister, Cory. The decision to leave us at this time was not a judicious one: Mother had forgotten that Mrs. Hoyt was in poor health, or perhaps she had decided not to care; and she seemed ignorant of the fact that Cory, for all the innocence of her marigold eyes and melodic voice, was desperately in love with one of the National Guardsmen who patrolled the Valley in jeeps, authorized to shoot wild dogs and, upon certain occasions, vandals, would-be arsonists, and squatters who were deemed a threat to the public well-being. And when Mother returned, unaccompanied by Father, after what seemed to us a very long absence (two weeks? two months?) it was with shocking news: She and Father had, after heart-searching deliberation, decided that, for the good of all concerned, they must separate – they must officially dissolve the marriage bond. Mother’s voice wavered as she spoke but fierce little pinpoints of light shone in her eyes. We children were so taken by surprise we could not speak at first. Separate! Dissolve! For the good of all! We stood staring and mute; not even Cory, Kit, and Dale, not even Lona, who was the most impulsive of us, found words with which to protest; the youngest children began whimpering helplessly, soon joined by the rest – and by our few remaining servants; and Mrs. Hoyt, whose features were already bloated by illness. Mother said, ‘Don’t! Please! I can hardly bear the pain myself!’ She then played a video of Father’s farewell to the family, which drew fresh tears…for there, suddenly framed on our television screen, where we had never seen his image before, and could not in our wildest fancies have imagined it, was Father, somberly dressed, his hair in thin steely bands combed wetly across the dome of his skull, and his eyes puffy, an unnatural sheen to his face as if it had been scoured hard. He sat stiffly erect in a chair with a high ornately carved back; his fingers were gripping the arms so tightly the blood had drained from his knuckles; his words were slow, halting, and faint, like the progress of a gut-shot deer across a field, but unmistakably his: Dear children your mother and I after thirty years of marriage…very happy marriage have decided to…have decided to…have decided to… One of the low-flying helicopters belonging to the National Guardsmen soared past the house, making the television screen shudder, but the sound seemed to be garbled in any case, as if the tape had been clumsily cut and spliced; there were miniature lightning flashes; and Father’s clear face turned liquid, melting horizontally, his eyes long and narrow as slugs and his mouth distended like a drowning man’s; and all we could hear were sounds, not words, resembling Help me or I am innocent or I love you dear children – and then the screen was dead.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 162