‘I went out in the corridor. It was coming from Miss Corvier’s room on the other side of the attic. I knocked on her door, but no one answered. Tried the door. It wasn’t locked. So I went in. I thought maybe that the cat was stuck somewhere. Or hurt. I don’t know. I just wanted to help, really.
‘Miss Corvier wasn’t there. I mean, you know sometimes if there’s anyone in a room, and that room was empty. Except there’s something on the floor in the corner going Mrie, Mrie…And I turned on the light to see what it was.’
He stopped then for almost a minute, the fingers of his left hand picking at the black goo that had crusted around the neck of the ketchup bottle. It was shaped like a large tomato. Then he said, ‘What I didn’t understand was how it could still be alive. I mean, it was. And from the chest up, it was alive, and breathing, and fur and everything. But its back legs, its rib cage. Like a chicken carcass. Just bones. And what are they called, sinews? And, it lifted its head, and it looked at me.
‘It may have been a cat, but I knew what it wanted. It was in its eyes. I mean.’ He stopped. ‘Well, I just knew. I’d never seen eyes like that. You would have known what it wanted, all it wanted, if you’d seen those eyes. I did what it wanted. You’d have to be a monster not to.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I used my boots.’ Pause. ‘There wasn’t much blood. Not really. I just stamped, and stamped on its head, until there wasn’t really anything much left that looked like anything. If you’d seen it looking at you like that, you would have done what I did.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘And then I heard someone coming up the stairs to the attic, and I thought I ought to do something, I mean, it didn’t look good, I don’t know what it must have looked like really, but I just stood there, feeling stupid, with a stinking mess on my boots, and when the door opens, it’s Miss Corvier.
‘And she sees it all. She looks at me. And she says, You killed him. I can hear something funny in her voice, and for a moment I don’t know what it is, and then she comes closer, and I realize that she’s crying.
‘That’s something about old people, when they cry like children, you don’t know where to look, do you? And she says, He was all I had to keep me going, and you killed him. After all I’ve done, she says, making it so the meat stays fresh, so the life stays on. After all I’ve done.
‘I’m an old woman, she says. I need my meat.
‘I didn’t know what to say.
‘She’s wiping her eyes with her hand. I don’t want to be a burden on anybody, she says. She’s crying now. And she’s looking at me. She says, I never wanted to be a burden. She says, that was my meat. Now, she says, who’s going to feed me now?’
He stopped, rested his gray face in his left hand, as if he was tired. Tired of talking to me, tired of the story, tired of life. Then he shook his head and looked at me and said, ‘If you’d seen that cat, you would have done what I did. Anyone would have done.’
He raised his head then, for the first time in his story, looked me in the eyes. I thought I saw an appeal for help in his eyes, something he was too proud to say aloud.
Here it comes, I thought. This is where he asks me for money.
Somebody outside tapped on the window of the café. It wasn’t a loud tapping, but Eddie jumped. He said, ‘I have to go now. That means I have to go.’
I just nodded. He got up from the table. He was still a tall man, which almost surprised me: he’d collapsed in on himself in so many other ways. He pushed the table away as he got up, and as he got up he took his right hand out of his coat pocket. For balance, I suppose. I don’t know.
Maybe he wanted me to see it. But if he wanted me to see it, why did he keep it in his pocket the whole time? No, I don’t think he wanted me to see it. I think it was an accident.
He wasn’t wearing a shirt or a jumper under his coat, so I could see his arm, and his wrist. Nothing wrong with either of them. He had a normal wrist. It was only when you looked below the wrist that you saw most of the flesh had been picked from the bones, chewed like chicken wings, leaving only dried morsels of meat, scraps and crumbs, and little else. He only had three fingers left, and most of a thumb. I suppose the other finger bones must have just fallen right off, with no skin or flesh to hold them on.
That was what I saw. Only for a moment, then he put his hand back in his pocket and pushed out of the door into the chilly night.
I watched him then, through the dirty plate-glass of the café window.
It was funny. From everything he’d said, I’d imagined Miss Corvier to be an old woman. But the woman waiting for him, outside, on the pavement, couldn’t have been much over thirty. She had long, long hair, though. The kind of hair you can sit on, as they say, although that always sounds faintly like a line from a dirty joke. She looked a bit like a hippy, I suppose. Sort of pretty, in a hungry kind of way.
She took his arm and looked up into his eyes, and they walked away out of the café’s light for all the world like a couple of teenagers who were just beginning to realize that they were in love.
I went back up to the counter and bought another cup of tea and a couple of packets of crisps to see me through until the morning, and I sat and thought about the expression on his face when he’d looked at me that last time.
On the milk train back to the big city I sat opposite a woman carrying a baby. It was floating in formaldehyde, in a heavy glass container. She needed to sell it, rather urgently, and although I was extremely tired we talked about her reasons for selling it, and about other things, for the rest of the journey.
The Cage
Jeff VanderMeer
Jeff VanderMeer (1968–) is an American writer and editor sometimes associated with the New Weird because of his surreal, grotesque fictions set in fantasy city of Ambergris. A World Fantasy Award-winner, VanderMeer has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and Philip K. Dick awards. Spanning a period of five hundred years, the Ambergris Cycle consists of City of Saints & Madmen (2001), Shriek: An Afterword (2006), and Finch (2009). Short story collections include Secret Life (2004) and The Third Bear (2010). His major influences include Vladimir Nabokov and Angela Carter. The creepy and luminous ‘The Cage’, reprinted from City of Saints, chronicles the dangerous impulse to deliberately seek out the weird.
The hall contained the following items, some of which were later catalogued on faded yellow sheets constrained by blue lines and anointed with mildew:
– 24 moving boxes, stacked three high. Atop the boxes stood
– 1 stuffed black swan with banded blood-red legs, its marble eyes plucked, the empty sockets a shock of outrushing cotton (or was it fungus?), the bird merely a scout for the
– 5,325 specimens from far-off lands placed on shelves that ran along the four walls and into the adjoining corridors, lit with what he could later only describe as a dark light: it illuminated but did not lift the gloom. Iridescent thrush corpses, the exhausted remains of tattered jellyfish floating in amber bottles, tiny mammals with bright eyes that hinted at the memory of catastrophe, their bodies frozen in brittle poses. The stink of chemicals, a whiff of blood, and
– 1 phonograph, in perfect condition, wedged beside the jagged black teeth of 11 broken records and
– 8 framed daguerreotypes of the family that had lived in the mansion. On vacation in the Southern Isles. Posed in front of a hedge. Blissful on the front porch. His favorite picture showed a boy of seven or eight sticking his tongue out, face animated by indecipherable delight. The frame was cracked, a smudge of blood in the lower left corner. Phonograph, records, and daguerreotypes stood atop
– 1 long oak table covered by a dark green cloth that could not conceal the upward thrust that had splintered the surface of the wood. Around the table stood
– 8 oak chairs, silver lion paws sheathing their legs. The chairs dated to back before the reign of Trillian the Great Banker, the first true ruler of Ambergris. He could not help but wince no
ting the abuse to which the chairs had been subjected, or fail to notice
– 1 grandfather clock, its blood-spattered glass face cracked, the hands frozen at a point just before midnight, a faint repressed ticking coming from somewhere within its gears, as if the hands sought to move once again, and beneath the clock
– 1 embroidered rug, clearly woven in the north, near the city of Morrow, perhaps even by one of his own ancestors. It depicted the arrival of Morrow cavalry in Ambergris at the time of the mass disappearances known as the Silence, the horses and riders bathed in a halo of blood that might, in another light, be seen as part of the tapestry. Although no light could conceal
– 1 bookcase, lacquered, stacks with books wounded, ravaged, as if something had torn through the spines. Beside the bookcase
– 1 solicitor, dressed all in black. The solicitor wore a cloth mask over his nose and mouth. It was a popular fashion, for those who believed in the dangers of the ‘Invisible World’ newly mapped by the Kalif’s scientists. Nervous and fatigued, the solicitor, eyes blinking rapidly over the top of the mask, stood next to
– 1 pale, slender woman in a white dress. Her hooded eyes never blinked, the ethereal quality of her gaze weaving cobwebs into the distance. Her hands had recently been hacked off, the end of the bloody bandage that hid her left nub held by
– 1 pale gaunt boy with wide, twitchy eyes. At the end of his other arm dangled a small blue-green suitcase, his grasp as fragile as his mother’s gaze. His legs trembled in his ashgrey trousers. He stared at
– 1 metal cage, three feet tall and in shape similar to the squat mortar shells that the Kalif’s troops had only the year before rained down upon Ambergris during the ill-fated Occupation. An emerald green cover hid its bars from view. The boy’s gaze, which required him to twist neck and shoulder to the right while also raising his head to look up and behind, drew the attention of
– 1 exporter-importer, Robert Hoegbotton, 35 years old: neither thin nor fat, neither handsome nor ugly. He wore a drab grey suit he hoped displayed neither imagination nor lack of it. He too wore a cloth mask over his (small) nose and (wide, sardonic) mouth, although not for the same reasons as the solicitor. Hoegbotton considered the mask a weakness, an inconvenience, a superstition. His gaze followed that of the boy up to the high perch, an alcove set halfway up the wall where the cage sat on a window ledge. Rivulets of rain seethed against the window’s thick green glass. It was the season of downpours in Ambergris. The rain would not let up for days on end, the skies blue-green-grey with moisture. Fruiting bodies would rise in all the hidden corners of the city. Nothing in the bruised sky would reveal whether it was morning, noon, or dusk. It was an atmosphere well suited to the city’s subterranean inhabitants, the gray caps, who in recent years came and went like the ebb and flow of a tide – now underground, now above ground, as if in a perpetual migration between light and dark – appearing suddenly and unwanted, only to disappear just as quickly. As they had here.
Nothing could make one safe. Witnessing the great spasm among the rich of buying houses without basements, or with stone floors, Hoegbotton had been tempted to branch out into real estate, but who knew how long the frenzy would last? No one had yet proven that such a measure, or any measure, helped. The random nature of the events had instilled a certain fatalism. Most of the city’s inhabitants had no choice but to go about their business, hoping they would not be next.
The solicitor was talking and had been for what seemed to Hoegbotton like a rather long time.
‘That black swan, for example, is in bad condition,’ Hoegbotton said, just to slow the solicitor’s relentless chatter.
The solicitor wiped his beaded forehead with a handkerchief tinged a pale green.
‘The bird? The bird,’ the solicitor said, ‘is in superb condition. Missing eyes, yes. Yes, this is true. But,’ he gestured at the walls, ‘surely you see the richness of Daffed’s collection.’
Thomas Daffed. The last in a long line of driven zoologists. Daffed’s wife and son stood beside the solicitor, the remnants of a family of six.
Hoegbotton frowned. ‘It’s a fine collection, very fine’ – and he meant it; he admired a man who could so single-mindedly, perhaps obsessively, acquire such a diverse yet unified assortment of things – ‘but my average customer needs a pot or an umbrella or a stove. I stock the odd curio from time to time, but a collection of this size?’ Hoegbotton shrugged the famous shrug of indifference, perfected over years of haggling, that disguised a more predatory sentiment.
The solicitor stared at Hoegbotton as if he did not believe him. ‘What’s your offer? What will you take?’
‘I’m still calculating that figure.’
The solicitor stood uncomfortably close to Hoegbotton, his breath sour and thick, a great smudge of a man. He was sweating profusely. A greenish pallor had begun to infiltrate his skin. ‘You might consider a little haste. Should I call Slattery or Ungdom instead?’ As if in the grip of a new, perhaps deadly emotion, his voice seemed more distorted than the mask, which puffed in and out from the violence of his speech.
Hoegbotton took a step back from the ferocity of the solicitor’s distress. The names of his chief rivals had made a little vein in his left eyelid pulse in and out. Especially Ungdom – towering John Ungdom, he of the wide belly, steeped in alcohol and pork lard.
‘Call for them, then,’ he said, staring the solicitor down.
Neither Slattery nor Ungdom would come. Despite being ruthless, their devotion to their job was incomplete, insufficient, inadequate. Hoegbotton imagined them both taken up into the rain and torn to pieces by the wind. As they deserved, for the simple damning fact of their fear.
The solicitor’s gaze bored into his cheek for a long moment. Then with a sigh of defeat the foul presence was gone. The solicitor slumped into one of the chairs, loosening his collar with all the urgency of a suffocating man.
‘I’m sorry for your loss – all of your losses,’ Hoegbotton said, turning to the mother and child who stood in mute acceptance of their fate. ‘I promise I won’t keep you much longer.’ He meant the words sincerely, but knew his intent was meaningless to them in that moment.
The solicitor made a noise between a groan and a choke that Hoegbotton did not bother to catalog. His thoughts had returned to the merchandise: rug, clock, bookcase, phonograph, table, desk. What price might they accept?
Even then, Hoegbotton might not have included the cage in his calculations if the boy’s stare had not kept flickering wildly toward it and back down again, stuttering like Hoegbotton’s own over the remnants of a success that had become utter failure. For of all the outlandish things in the room – the boy’s own mother to be counted among them – the boy seemed most agitated by the cage, an object that had no more been created to harm him than the green suitcase that hung from his arm.
‘Tell me about the cage,’ Hoegbotton said suddenly, surprising himself. ‘The cage up there’ – he pointed – ‘is it for sale, too?’
The boy stiffened, stared at the floor. Outside, his father, brother, and two sisters were being burned as a precaution, the bodies too mutilated to have withstood a viewing anyway.
A reflexive sadness ran through Hoegbotton, even as he noted the delicacy of the silver engravings on the legs of a nearby chair and the authentic maker’s mark stitched onto the cushioned seat.
He smiled at the boy, whose gaze remained directed at the floor. ‘Don’t you know you’re safe now?’ The words sounded ludicrous.
The woman turned to look at Hoegbotton. Her eyes were black as an abyss; they did not blink and reflected nothing. He felt for a moment balanced precariously between the son’s alarm and the mother’s regard.
‘The cage was always open,’ the woman said, her voice gravelly, something stuck in her throat. ‘We had a bird. We always let it fly around. It was a pretty bird. It flew high through the rooms. It – No one could find the bird. After.’ The terrible pressure of the word after appeared to be too mu
ch for her and she fell back into her silence.
‘We’ve never had a cage,’ the boy said, the dark green suitcase swaying. ‘We’ve never had a bird. They left it here. They left it.’
A kind of rapturous chill ran through Hoegbotton. The sleepy gaze of a pig embryo floating in a jar caught his eye. Opportunity or disaster? The value of an artifact they had left behind might be considerable. The risks, however, might be more than considerable. This was the third time in the last nine months that he had been called to a house visited by the gray caps. Each of the previous times, he had escaped unharmed. In fact, he had come to believe that late arrivals like himself, who took precautions and knew their history, were impervious to any side effects.
Yet even he had experienced moments of discomfort, as when, at the last house, he had walked down a white hallway to the room where the merchandise awaited him and found a series of dark smudges and trails and tracks of blood. Halfway there, he had spied a dark object, shaped like a piece of dried fruit, glistening from the floor. Puzzled, he had stood there for a moment, only to recoil when he realized it was a human ear.
This time, according to the messenger Hoegbotton paid to keep him apprised of potential opportunities, the solicitor had arrived in the early afternoon to find the bodies and survivors. Arms and legs had been stuck into the walls between specimen jars, arranged in intricate poses that displayed a perverse sense of humor.
A tingling sensation crept into Hoegbotton’s fingertips. A price had materialized in his mind. The silence became more absolute. All around, dead things watched one another, saw everything but remembered nothing.
‘Two thousand – for everything.’
The solicitor sighed, almost crumpled in on himself. The woman blinked rapidly, as if puzzled, and then stared at Hoegbotton with a hatred more real for being so distant. All the former protests of the solicitor, even the boy’s fear, were nothing next to that look. The red at the end of her arms had become paler, as if the white bandages had begun to heal her.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 201