I could not see the old woman at all, could not even make out her vague shape behind the light, but I told her I was staying with the Lady Melissa, to impress her old country crone’s snobbery. She exclaimed and muttered when she heard Melissa’s name; when she spoke again, her manner was almost excessively conciliatory. She has to be careful, poor old woman, all alone in the house; thieves come for lead from the roof and young couples up to no good come and so on and on. But, if I am the Lady Melissa’s guest, then she is sure it is perfectly all right for me to shelter here. No, there is no telephone. I must wait here till the storm dies down. The new snow will have blocked the lane by now – we are quite cut off! she says; and titters.
I must follow her carefully, walk this way; she gives me a hand out of the mess, so much broken glass…take care. What a crash, when the chandelier came down! You’d have thought the world had come to an end. Come with her, she has her rooms; she is quite cosy, sir, with a roaring fire. (What weather, eh?)
She led me solicitously out of the glass trap and took me past our phantoms moving like deep sea fish in the choked depths of the mirror; up the stairs we went, through the ruins of the house I thought I had explored in my waking faint or system of linked hallucinations, snow induced, or, perhaps, induced by a mild concussion. For I am shaky and a little nauseous; I grasp the banisters too tight.
The doors shudder on their hinges. I glimpse rooms with the furniture spookily shrouded in white sheets but the beam of her torch does not linger on anything; her carpet slippers go flipperty-flopperty, flipperty-flopperty, she is an intrepid negotiator of the shadows. And still I cannot see her clearly, although I hear the rustle of her dress and smell her musty, frowsty, second-hand clothes store, typical crone smell, like grandma’s smell, smell of my childhood women.
She has, of course, ensconced herself in the nursery. And how I gasped, in my mild fever, to see so many dolls had set up camp in this decay!
Dolls everywhere higgledy-piggledy, dolls thrust down the sides of chairs, dolls spilled out of tea chests, dolls propped up on the mantelpiece with blank, battered faces. Had she gathered all the dolls of all the departed daughters of the house here, around her, for company? The dolls stared at me dumbly from glass eyes that might hold in suspension the magic snow-storm that trapped me here; I felt I was the cynosure of all their blind eyes.
And have I indeed met any of these now moth-gnawed creatures in this room before? When I first fainted in the hall, did I fall back in time to encounter on a white beach of years ago this young lady, whose heavy head drops forward on her bosom since her limp body has lost too much sawdust to continue to support it? The struts of her satin crinoline, stove in like a broken umbrella. Her blousy neighbour’s dark red silk dress has faded to a thin pink but she has not lost her parasol because it had been sewn to her hand and her straw bonnet with the draggled feathers still hangs by a few threads from the brunette wig now awry on a china scalp.
And I almost tripped over a poor corpse on the floor in a purplish jacket of balding velvet, her worn, wax face raddled with age, only a few strands left of all that honey-coloured hair…
Yet if any of the denizens of that imaginary nursery were visiting this one, slipped out of my dream through a warp of the imagination, then I couldn’t recognise them, thank God, among the dolls half loved to death and now scattered about a room whose present owner had consecrated it to a geriatric cosiness. Nevertheless, I felt a certain sense of disquiet, not so much fear as foreboding; but I was too preoccupied with my physical discomfort, my horrid aches, pains and scratches, to pay much attention to a prickling of the nerves.
And in the old woman’s room, all was as comforting as a glowing fire, a steaming kettle could make it, even if eldritchly illuminated by a candle stuck in its own grease on to the mantelpiece. The very homeliness of the room went some way towards restoring my battered spirits and the crone made me very welcome, bustled me out of the sheepskin coat with almost as much solicitude as if she knew who it belonged to, set me down in an armchair. In its red plush death-throes, this armchair looked nothing like those bleached, remembered splendours; I told myself the snow had got into my eyes and brain. The old woman crouched down to take off my wet shoes for me; poured me thick, rich tea from her ever-ready pot; cut me a slice of dark gingerbread that she kept in an old biscuit tin with a picture of kittens on the lid. No spook or phantom could have had a hand in the making of that sagging, treacly, indigestible goody! I felt better, already; outside, the blizzard might rage but I was safe and warm, inside, even if in the company of an authentic crone.
For such she undeniably was, bent almost to a hoop with age, salt and pepper hair skewered up on top of her head with tortoiseshell pins, a face so eroded with wrinkles it was hard to tell whether she was smiling or not. She and her quarters had not seen soap and water for a long time and the lingering, sour, rank odour of uncaredforness faintly repelled me but the tea went down like blood. And don’t you remember the slops and old clothes smell of grandma’s kitchen? Colin Clout’s come home again, with a vengeance.
She poured tea for herself and perched on top of the pile of old newspapers and discarded clothing that cushioned her own chair at the other side of the fire, to sip from her cup and chatter about the violence of the weather whilst I went on thawing myself out, eyeing – nervously, I must admit – the dolls propped on every flat surface, the roomful of bedizened raggle-taggles.
When she saw me looking at the dolls, she said: ‘I see you’re admiring my beauties.’ Meanwhile, snow drove against the curtainless window-panes like furious birds and blasts echoed through the house. The old woman thrust her empty cup away in the grate, all at once moved as if by a sudden sense of purpose; I saw I must pay in kind for my kind reception, I must give her a piece of undivided attention. She scooped up an armful of dolls and began to introduce them to me one by one. Dotty. Quite dotty, poor old thing.
The Hon. Frances Brambell had one eye out and her bell-shaped, satin skirt had collapsed but she must have been a pretty acquisition to the toy cupboard in her day; time, however, has its revenges, the three divorces, the voluntary exile in Morocco, the hashish, the gigolos, the slow erosion of her beauty…how it made the old woman chuckle! But how enchanting the girl had looked when she was presented, the ostrich feathers nodding above her curls! I looked from the old woman to the doll and back again; now the crone was animated, a thick track of spittle descended her chin. With an ironic laugh, she tossed the Hon. Frances Brambell to one side; the china head bounced off the wall and her limbs jerked a little before she lay still on the floor.
Seraphine, Duchess of Pyke, wore faded maroon silk and what had once been a feathered hat. She hailed, initially, from Paris and still possessed a certain style, even in her old age, although the Duchess had been by no means a model of propriety and, even if she carried off her acquired rank to the manner born, there is no more perfect a lady than one who is no better than she should be, suggested the old woman. In a paroxysm of wheezing laughter, she cast the Duchess and her pretensions on top of the Hon. Frances Brambell and told me now I must meet Lady Lucy, ah! she would be a marchioness when she inherited but had been infected with moth in her most sensitive parts and grown emaciated, in spite of her pretty velvet riding habit. She always wore purple, the colour of passion. The sins of the fathers, insinuated this gossipy harridan, a congenital affliction…the future held in store for the poor girl only clinics, sanatoria, a wheel-chair, dementia, premature death.
Each doll’s murky history was unfolded to me; the old woman picked them up and dismissed them with such confident authority I soon realised she knew all the little girls whose names she’d given to the dolls intimately. She must have been the nanny here, I thought; and stayed on after the family all left the sinking ship, after her last charge, that little daughter who might, might she not? have looked just like my imaginary blonde heiress, ran off with a virile but uncouth chauffeur, or, perhaps, the black saxophonist in the dance band of
an ocean liner. And the retainer inherited the desuetude. In the old days, she must have wiped their pretty noses for them, cut their bread and butter into piano keys for them…all the little girls must once have played in this very nursery, come for tea with the young mistress, gone out riding on ponies, grown up to come to dances in wonderful dresses, stayed over for house parties, golf by day, affairs of the heart by night. Had my Melissa, herself, danced here, perhaps, in her unimaginable adolescence?
I thought of all the beautiful women with round, bare shoulders discreet as pearls going in to dinner in dresses as brilliant as the hot-house flowers that surrounded them, handsomely set off by the dinner-jackets of their partners, though they would have been far more finely accessorised by me – women who had once filled the whole house with that ineffable perfume of sex and luxury that drew me greedily to Melissa’s bed. And time, now, frosting those lovely faces, the years falling on their head like snow.
The wind howled, the logs hissed in the grate. The crone began to yawn and so did I. I can easily curl up in this armchair beside the fire; I’m half asleep already – please don’t trouble yourself. But, no; I must have the bed, she said.
You shall sleep in the bed.
And, with that, cackled furiously, jolting me from my bitter-sweet reverie. Her rheumy eyes flashed; I was stricken with the ghastly notion she wanted to sacrifice me to some aged lust of hers as the price of my night’s lodging but I said: ‘Oh, I can’t possibly take your bed, please no!’ But her only reply was to cackle again.
When she rose to her feet, she looked far taller than she had been, she towered over me. Now, mysteriously, she resumed her old authority; her word was law in the nursery. She grasped my wrist in a hold like lockjaw and dragged me, weakly protesting, to the door that I knew, with a shock of perfect recognition, led to the night nursery.
I was cruelly precipitated back into the heart of my dream.
Beyond the door, on the threshold of which I stumbled, all was as it had been before, as if the night nursery were the changeless, unvaryingly eye of the storm and its whiteness that of a place beyond the spectrum of colours. The same scent of washed hair, the dim tranquillity of the night light. The white-enamelled crib, with its dreaming occupant. The storm crooned a lullaby; the little heiress of the snow pavilion had eyelids like carved alabaster that hold the light in a luminous cup, but she was a flawed jewel, this one, a shattered replica, a drawing that has been scribbled over, and, for the first time in all that night, I felt a pure fear.
The old woman softly approached her charge, and plucked an object, some floppy, cloth thing, from between the covers, where it had lain in the child’s pale arms. And this object she, cackling again with obscure glee, handed to me as ceremoniously as if it were a present from a Christmas tree. I jumped when I touched Pierrot, as if there were an electric charge in his satin pyjamas.
He was still crying. Fascinated, fearful, I touched the shining teardrop pendant on his cheek and licked my finger. Salt. Another tear welled up from the glass eye to replace the one I had stolen, then another, and another. Until the eyelids quivered and closed. I had seen his face before, a face that had eaten too much bread and margarine in its time. A magic snow-storm blinded my eyes; I wept, too.
Tell Melissa the image factory is bankrupt, grandma.
Diffuse, ironic benediction of the night light. The sleeping child extended her warm, sticky hand to grasp mine; in a terror of consolation, I took her in my arms, in spite of her impetigo, her lice, her stench of wet sheets.
The Meat Garden
Craig Padawer
Craig Padawer (1961–) is an American fiction writer whose work has appeared in Conjunctions, Fiction International, and After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology. He received his master’s degree in fiction writing from Brown University. ‘The Meat Garden’ (1996) comes to the weird from the surreal, creating a snapshot of a war both familiar and dislocatingly strange. According to Padawer, the story had its inspiration in both the Iraq War and ‘the notion of a body at war with itself…[the tumor] that would inevitably bloom into my father’s death was growing essentially in his mind. It was transforming him in every possible way – not just physically, but mentally. I still find that notion simultaneously terrifying and somehow absurdly beautiful.’
They humped it over metal hills and down through tortured valleys of scrap and smoking slag. For two days, Pilorus had been bitching about how he was swelling inside his suit. His tongue grew so thick that the grunts couldn’t understand what he was saying anymore – but it didn’t matter: they’d been hearing it for days. By late afternoon he was having trouble breathing, lagging badly behind the column so that Wally had to keep falling back to push him along. That night, in their trench, while he tried to eat a can of peaches, something broke inside his throat. And then the thing happened to his hands. It was awful and beautiful and later Wally would feel guilty at the way he’d just sat there, watching in fascination as Pilorus went through those hard changes. The hardest changes Wally had ever seen, until the Consolidation came along and rewrote the rules.
Toward the end, his head burst in a blizzard of seeds that hung in the lamplight and drifted slowly to the ground like a tiny division of poison paratroopers. Only then did Wally reach for his mask and scuttle out of the trench.
The platoon took friendly fire from behind and was harassed along its flanks by rogue Vegan units that had skipped over to Mack through some warp in ideology or the mysterious exigencies of politics. They wore their body armor even after the deep heat had set in, and on certain blistering noons Wally thought he could smell himself cooking inside the government steel. A crack leafhead sniper could thread a seed through a seam in an armadillo suit with all the accuracy of a seamstress, but a grunt would pay any price for the illusion of safety. And so they sweated it. In some sectors the air was so thick with pod shrapnel and spore that they had to wear pollen masks. And they took weird casualties there.
It was a problem of sensation. If it sometimes took minutes to realize you’d just lost your leg to a Mechanical Mary, it could take days before you knew that a Vegan round was germinating inside you, and weeks before your body began to blossom into death. Seed flak passed into you like a bullet fired in a dream, soft and bloodless – you couldn’t tell an entry from a mosquito bite; and there were artillery spores so small they could enter the flesh without leaving any wound at all. In the absence of any pain by which to forecast his death, every grunt imagined he was dying at any given moment.
Mack fire, when it came, was almost a relief. A clock rocket with its shrapnel of escapements and flaming numerals provided instant blood, bones, burning hair. The ringing alarm let you know your time was up as the blast blew the memories out of your meat like a bad odor. And a television bomb would instantly blind you with its eruption of images as its icons burned through your flesh and imprinted themselves on your bones in tiny hieroglyphs that recounted the brief history of the body’s destruction. There was no ambiguity to such wounds. You were either hit or whole, and you knew which pretty quickly.
But a Vegan wound was a covert wound. Once planted in flesh, the round put out roots and tendrils. It drank the blood out of the body and began to feed on the meat until its branches grew inside the victim’s skin like a second set of bones and the body burst into flower. Sometimes you could see a grunt’s face freeze with the knowledge. But most of the time it just arrived, like some sudden agonizing spring, some personal season of devastation. The body ripened with that secret penetration and then almost overnight the wounds opened and the limbs went rigid. A grunt’s first reaction always seemed to be a sort of admiration for the beauty of his own destruction. Wally watched guys look on in fascination as their fingertips burst and the first buds unfolded from their bones.
Vegan ammunition took root in the rubble and the grunts came down out of molten metal hills into steaming basins of greenery where birds clotted the trees and shrieked above their tents at night. They
ran spider wire out on the perimeter and laid down trip flares and mirror mines designed to kill the enemy with his own image. Mack anti-floral units operating in their sector hauled spare bladders filled with Blue Elixir and shrivel spray: Intel reports said they could defoliate a Vegan ammo dump in twenty minutes, but what the grunts knew was that the stench could melt your eyes. The enemy was doing such a thorough job that HQ decided to can their crop dusters. Anyway, Mack was just relocating the vegetation: the next barrage would fall two clicks north or east and begin to sprout in a matter of hours. From the air, the sector looked like a scorched grunt undergoing hair restoration. Acres of scrap and dust patched with horticulture. Jungle rose and fell overnight. Their maps were meaningless. And each temporary forest was an ambush waiting to happen.
One night in some nameless cube of greenery not marked on their maps, Wally crawled out of his tent to squat in the rain and he watched through the hole in his poncho as a scissor of lightning clipped through the canopy and suddenly revealed the jungle to be a vast impersonation of vegetable artillery, bark boots and moss fatigues. He was crawling back in a panic when the first zook whistled through the leaves and exploded against the backdrop of trees with a heavy splurt. He screamed ambush but something had happened to his ears and he couldn’t hear himself. Tracers flashed through the canopy and the grunts were spilling out of their tents with defoliant grenades and half-assembled flame guns. As Wally scrambled in, Reno tossed him a piece and he found himself crouched in a nest of vines firing a music gun that he’d lifted off a dead Mack a week before. Wherever he aimed, the notes blew holes in the rain and trees exploded in flaming arpeggios. He spotted a sniper clothed in leaves beneath the slow fall of a phosphor flare, and when he pulled the trigger, music erupted from the barrel and entered the verdant figure in the form of a vicious dance that bent his bones into clefs and fiddled off his flesh in melodic intervals as his body disintegrated into music and the meat’s melody multiplied into the cacophony of death.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 185