When in May, 1886, I found myself at last in Paris, I naturally determined to throw myself on the charity of an old chum of mine, Eugene Marie d’Ardeche, who had forsaken Boston a year or more ago on receiving word of the death of an aunt who had left him such property as she possessed. I fancy this windfall surprised him not a little, for the relations between the aunt and nephew had never been cordial, judging from Eugene’s remarks touching the lady, who was, it seems, a more or less wicked and witch-like old person, with a penchant for black magic, at least such was the common report.

Why she should leave all her property to d’Ardeche, no one could tell, unless it was that she felt his rather hobbledehoy tendencies towards Buddhism and occultism might some day lead him to her own unhallowed height of questionable illumination. To be sure d’Ardeche reviled her as a bad old woman, being himself in that state of enthusiastic exaltation which sometimes accompanies a boyish fancy for occultism; but in spite of his distant and repellent attitude, Mlle. Blaye de Tartas made him her sole heir, to the violent wrath of a questionable old party known to infamy as the Sar Torrevieja, the “King of the Sorcerers.” This malevolent old portent, whose gray and crafty face was often seen in the Rue M. le Prince during the life of Mlle. de Tartas had, it seems, fully expected to enjoy her small wealth after her death; and when it appeared that she had left him only the contents of the gloomy old house in the Quartier Latin, giving the house itself and all else of which she died possessed to her nephew in America, the Sar proceeded to remove everything from the place, and then to curse it elaborately and comprehensively, together with all those who should ever dwell therein.

Whereupon he disappeared.

This final episode was the last word I received from Eugene, but I knew the number of the house, 252 Rue M. le Prince. So, after a day or two given to a first cursory survey of Paris, I started across the Seine to find Eugene and compel him to do the honors of the city.

Every one who knows the Latin Quarter knows the Rue M. le Prince, running up the hill towards the Garden of the Luxembourg. It is full of queer houses and odd corners,—or was in ’86,—and certainly No. 252 was, when I found it, quite as queer as any. It was nothing but a doorway, a black arch of old stone between and under two new houses painted yellow. The effect of this bit of seventeenth-century masonry, with its dirty old doors, and rusty broken lantern sticking gaunt and grim out over the narrow sidewalk, was, in its frame of fresh plaster, sinister in the extreme.

I wondered if I had made a mistake in the number; it was quite evident that no one lived behind those cobwebs. I went into the doorway of one of the new hôtels and interviewed the concierge.

No, M. d’Ardeche did not live there, though to be sure he owned the mansion; he himself resided in Meudon, in the country house of the late Mlle. de Tartas. Would Monsieur like the number and the street?

Monsieur would like them extremely, so I took the card that the concierge wrote for me, and forthwith started for the river, in order that I might take a steamboat for Meudon. By one of those coincidences which happen so often, being quite inexplicable, I had not gone twenty paces down the street before I ran directly into the arms of Eugene d’Ardeche. In three minutes we were sitting in the queer little garden of the Chien Bleu, drinking vermouth and absinthe, and talking it all over.

“You do not live in your aunt’s house?” I said at last, interrogatively.

“No, but if this sort of thing keeps on I shall have to. I like Meudon much better, and the house is perfect, all furnished, and nothing in it newer than the last century. You must come out with me to-night and see it. I have got a jolly room fixed up for my Buddha. But there is something wrong with this house opposite. I can’t keep a tenant in it,—not four days. I have had three, all within six months, but the stories have gone around and a man would as soon think of hiring the Cour des Comptes to live in as No. 252. It is notorious. The fact is, it is haunted the worst way.”

I laughed and ordered more vermouth.

“That is all right. It is haunted all the same, or enough to keep it empty, and the funny part is that no one knows how it is haunted. Nothing is ever seen, nothing heard. As far as I can find out, people just have the horrors there, and have them so bad they have to go to the hospital afterwards. I have one ex-tenant in the Bicêtre now. So the house stands empty, and as it covers considerable ground and is taxed for a lot, I don’t know what to do about it. I think I’ll either give it to that child of sin, Torrevieja, or else go and live in it myself. I shouldn’t mind the ghosts, I am sure.”

“Did you ever stay there?”

“No, but I have always intended to, and in fact I came up here to-day to see a couple of rake-hell fellows I know, Fargeau and Duchesne, doctors in the Clinical Hospital beyond here, up by the Parc Mont Souris. They promised that they would spend the night with me some time in my aunt’s house,—which is called around here, you must know, ‘la Bouche d’Enfer,’—and I thought perhaps they would make it this week, if they can get off duty. Come up with me while I see them, and then we can go across the river to Véfour’s and have some luncheon, you can get your things at the Chatham, and we will go out to Meudon, where of course you will spend the night with me.”

The plan suited me perfectly, so we went up to the hospital, found Fargeau, who declared that he and Duchesne were ready for anything, the nearer the real “bouche d’enfer” the better; that the following Thursday they would both be off duty for the night, and that on that day they would join in an attempt to outwit the devil and clear up the mystery of No. 252.

“Does M. l’Américain go with us?” asked Fargeau.

“Why of course,” I replied, “I intend to go, and you must not refuse me, d’Ardeche; I decline to be put off. Here is a chance for you to do the honors of your city in a manner which is faultless. Show me a real live ghost, and I will forgive Paris for having lost the Jardin Mabille.”

So it was settled.

Later we went down to Meudon and ate dinner in the terrace room of the villa, which was all that d’Ardeche had said, and more, so utterly was its atmosphere that of the seventeenth century. At dinner Eugene told me more about his late aunt, and the queer goings on in the old house.

Mlle. Blaye lived, it seems, all alone, except for one female servant of her own age; a severe, taciturn creature, with massive Breton features and a Breton tongue, whenever she vouchsafed to use it. No one ever was seen to enter the door of No. 252 except Jeanne the servant and the Sar Torrevieja, the latter coming constantly from none knew whither, and always entering, never leaving. Indeed, the neighbors, who for eleven years had watched the old sorcerer sidle crab-wise up to the bell almost every day, declared vociferously that never had he been seen to leave the house. Once, when they decided to keep absolute guard, the watcher, none other than Maître Garceau of the Chien Bleu, after keeping his eyes fixed on the door from ten o’clock one morning when the Sar arrived until four in the afternoon, during which time the door was unopened (he knew this, for had he not gummed a ten-centime stamp over the joint and was not the stamp unbroken) nearly fell down when the sinister figure of Torrevieja slid wickedly by him with a dry “Pardon, Monsieur!” and disappeared again through the black doorway.

This was curious, for No. 252 was entirely surrounded by houses, its only windows opening on a courtyard into which no eye could look from the hôtels of the Rue M. le Prince and the Rue de l’Ecole, and the mystery was one of the choice possessions of the Latin Quarter.

Once a year the austerity of the place was broken, and the denizens of the whole quarter stood open-mouthed watching many carriages drive up to No. 252, many of them private, not a few with crests on the door panels, from all of them descending veiled female figures and men with coat collars turned up. Then followed curious sounds of music from within, and those whose houses joined the blank walls of No. 252 became for the moment popular, for by placing the ear against the wall strange music could distinctly be heard, and the sound of monotonous chanting voices now and then. By dawn the last guest would have departed, and for another year the hôtel of Mlle. de Tartas was ominously silent.

Eugene declared that he believed it was a celebration of “Walpurgisnacht,” and certainly appearances favored such a fancy.

“A queer thing about the whole affair is,” he said, “the fact that every one in the street swears that about a month ago, while I was out in Concarneau for a visit, the music and voices were heard again, just as when my revered aunt was in the flesh. The house was perfectly empty, as I tell you, so it is quite possible that the good people were enjoying an hallucination.”

I must acknowledge that these stories did not reassure me; in fact, as Thursday came near, I began to regret a little my determination to spend the night in the house. I was too vain to back down, however, and the perfect coolness of the two doctors, who ran down Tuesday to Meudon to make a few arrangements, caused me to swear that I would die of fright before I would flinch. I suppose I believed more or less in ghosts, I am sure now that I am older I believe in them, there are in fact few things I can not believe. Two or three inexplicable things had happened to me, and, although this was before my adventure with Rendel in Pæstum, I had a strong predisposition to believe some things that I could not explain, wherein I was out of sympathy with the age.

Well, to come to the memorable night of the twelfth of June, we had made our preparations, and after depositing a big bag inside the doors of No. 252, went across to the Chien Bleu, where Fargeau and Duchesne turned up promptly, and we sat down to the best dinner Père Garceau could create.

I remember I hardly felt that the conversation was in good taste. It began with various stories of Indian fakirs and Oriental jugglery, matters in which Eugene was curiously well read, swerved to the horrors of the great Sepoy mutiny, and thus to reminiscences of the dissecting-room. By this time we had drunk more or less, and Duchesne launched into a photographic and Zolaesque account of the only time (as he said) when he was possessed of the panic of fear; namely, one night many years ago, when he was locked by accident into the dissecting-room of the Loucine, together with several cadavers of a rather unpleasant nature. I ventured to protest mildly against the choice of subjects, the result being a perfect carnival of horrors, so that when we finally drank our last crème de cacao and started for “la Bouche d’Enfer,” my nerves were in a somewhat rocky condition.

It was just ten o’clock when we came into the street. A hot dead wind drifted in great puffs through the city, and ragged masses of vapor swept the purple sky; an unsavory night altogether, one of those nights of hopeless lassitude when one feels, if one is at home, like doing nothing but drink mint juleps and smoke cigarettes.

Eugene opened the creaking door, and tried to light one of the lanterns; but the gusty wind blew out every match, and we finally had to close the outer doors before we could get a light. At last we had all the lanterns going, and I began to look around curiously. We were in a long, vaulted passage, partly carriageway, partly footpath, perfectly bare but for the street refuse which had drifted in with eddying winds. Beyond lay the courtyard, a curious place rendered more curious still by the fitful moonlight and the flashing of four dark lanterns. The place had evidently been once a most noble palace. Opposite rose the oldest portion, a three-story wall of the time of Francis I., with a great wisteria vine covering half. The wings on either side were more modern, seventeenth century, and ugly, while towards the street was nothing but a flat unbroken wall.

The great bare court, littered with bits of paper blown in by the wind, fragments of packing cases, and straw, mysterious with flashing lights and flaunting shadows, while low masses of torn vapor drifted overhead, hiding, then revealing the stars, and all in absolute silence, not even the sounds of the streets entering this prison-like place, was weird and uncanny in the extreme. I must confess that already I began to feel a slight disposition towards the horrors, but with that curious inconsequence which so often happens in the case of those who are deliberately growing scared, I could think of nothing more reassuring than those delicious verses of Lewis Carroll’s:—

“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice,
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice,
What I tell you three times is true,”—

which kept repeating themselves over and over in my brain with feverish insistence.

Even the medical students had stopped their chaffing, and were studying the surroundings gravely.

“There is one thing certain,” said Fargeau, “anything might have happened here without the slightest chance of discovery. Did ever you see such a perfect place for lawlessness?”

“And anything might happen here now, with the same certainty of impunity,” continued Duchesne, lighting his pipe, the snap of the match making us all start. “D’Ardeche, your lamented relative was certainly well fixed; she had full scope here for her traditional experiments in demonology.”

“Curse me if I don’t believe that those same traditions were more or less founded on fact,” said Eugene. “I never saw this court under these conditions before, but I could believe anything now. What’s that!”

“Nothing but a door slamming,” said Duchesne, loudly.

“Well, I wish doors wouldn’t slam in houses that have been empty eleven months.”

“It is irritating,” and Duchesne slipped his arm through mine; “but we must take things as they come. Remember we have to deal not only with the spectral lumber left here by your scarlet aunt, but as well with the supererogatory curse of that hell-cat Torrevieja. Come on! let’s get inside before the hour arrives for the sheeted dead to squeak and gibber in these lonely halls. Light your pipes, your tobacco is a sure protection against ‘your whoreson dead bodies’; light up and move on.”

We opened the hall door and entered a vaulted stone vestibule, full of dust, and cobwebby.

“There is nothing on this floor,” said Eugene, “except servants’ rooms and offices, and I don’t believe there is anything wrong with them. I never heard that there was, any way. Let’s go up stairs.”

So far as we could see, the house was apparently perfectly uninteresting inside, all eighteenth-century work, the façade of the main building being, with the vestibule, the only portion of the Francis I. work.

“The place was burned during the Terror,” said Eugene, “for my great-uncle, from whom Mlle. de Tartas inherited it, was a good and true Royalist; he went to Spain after the Revolution, and did not come back until the accession of Charles X., when he restored the house, and then died, enormously old. This explains why it is all so new.”

The old Spanish sorcerer to whom Mlle. de Tartas had left her personal property had done his work thoroughly. The house was absolutely empty, even the wardrobes and bookcases built in had been carried away; we went through room after room, finding all absolutely dismantled, only the windows and doors with their casings, the parquet floors, and the florid Renaissance mantels remaining.

“I feel better,” remarked Fargeau. “The house may be haunted, but it don’t look it, certainly; it is the most respectable place imaginable.”

“Just you wait,” replied Eugene. “These are only the state apartments, which my aunt seldom used, except, perhaps, on her annual ‘Walpurgisnacht.’ Come up stairs and I will show you a better mise en scène.”

On this floor, the rooms fronting the court, the sleeping-rooms, were quite small,—(“They are the bad rooms all the same,” said Eugene,)—four of them, all just as ordinary in appearance as those below. A corridor ran behind them connecting with the wing corridor, and from this opened a door, unlike any of the other doors in that it was covered with green baize, somewhat moth-eaten. Eugene selected a key from the bunch he carried, unlocked the door, and with some difficulty forced it to swing inward; it was as heavy as the door of a safe.

“We are now,” he said, “on the very threshold of hell itself; these rooms in here were my scarlet aunt’s unholy of unholies. I never let them with the rest of the house, but keep them as a curiosity. I only wish Torrevieja had kept out; as it was, he looted them, as he did the rest of the house, and nothing is left but the walls and ceiling and floor. They are something, however, and may suggest what the former condition must have been. Tremble and enter.”

The first apartment was a kind of anteroom, a cube of perhaps twenty feet each way, without windows, and with no doors except that by which we entered and another to the right. Walls, floor, and ceiling were covered with a black lacquer, brilliantly polished, that flashed the light of our lanterns in a thousand intricate reflections. It was like the inside of an enormous Japanese box, and about as empty. From this we passed to another room, and here we nearly dropped our lanterns. The room was circular, thirty feet or so in diameter, covered by a hemispherical dome; walls and ceiling were dark blue, spotted with gold stars; and reaching from floor to floor across the dome stretched a colossal figure in red lacquer of a nude woman kneeling, her legs reaching out along the floor on either side, her head touching the lintel of the door through which we had entered, her arms forming its sides, with the fore arms extended and stretching along the walls until they met the long feet. The most astounding, misshapen, absolutely terrifying thing, I think, I ever saw. From the navel hung a great white object, like the traditional roe’s egg of the Arabian Nights. The floor was of red lacquer, and in it was inlaid a pentagram the size of the room, made of wide strips of brass. In the centre of this pentagram was a circular disk of black stone, slightly saucer-shaped, with a small outlet in the middle.

The effect of the room was simply crushing, with this gigantic red figure crouched over it all, the staring eyes fixed on one, no matter what his position. None of us spoke, so oppressive was the whole thing.

The third room was like the first in dimensions, but instead of being black it was entirely sheathed with plates of brass, walls, ceiling, and floor,—tarnished now, and turning green, but still brilliant under the lantern light. In the middle stood an oblong altar of porphyry, its longer dimensions on the axis of the suite of rooms, and at one end, opposite the range of doors, a pedestal of black basalt.

This was all. Three rooms, stranger than these, even in their emptiness, it would be hard to imagine. In Egypt, in India, they would not be entirely out of place, but here in Paris, in a commonplace hôtel, in the Rue M. le Prince, they were incredible.

We retraced our steps, Eugene closed the iron door with its baize covering, and we went into one of the front chambers and sat down, looking at each other.

“Nice party, your aunt,” said Fargeau. “Nice old party, with amiable tastes; I am glad we are not to spend the night in those rooms.”

“What do you suppose she did there?” inquired Duchesne. “I know more or less about black art, but that series of rooms is too much for me.”

“My impression is,” said d’Ardeche, “that the brazen room was a kind of sanctuary containing some image or other on the basalt base, while the stone in front was really an altar,—what the nature of the sacrifice might be I don’t even guess. The round room may have been used for invocations and incantations. The pentagram looks like it. Any way it is all just about as queer and fin de siècle as I can well imagine. Look here, it is nearly twelve, let’s dispose of ourselves, if we are going to hunt this thing down.”

The four chambers on this floor of the old house were those said to be haunted, the wings being quite innocent, and, so far as we knew, the floors below. It was arranged that we should each occupy a room, leaving the doors open with the lights burning, and at the slightest cry or knock we were all to rush at once to the room from which the warning sound might come. There was no communication between the rooms to be sure, but, as the doors all opened into the corridor, every sound was plainly audible.

The last room fell to me, and I looked it over carefully.

It seemed innocent enough, a commonplace, square, rather lofty Parisian sleeping-room, finished in wood painted white, with a small marble mantel, a dusty floor of inlaid maple and cherry, walls hung with an ordinary French paper, apparently quite new, and two deeply embrasured windows looking out on the court.

I opened the swinging sash with some trouble, and sat down in the window seat with my lantern beside me trained on the only door, which gave on the corridor.

The wind had gone down, and it was very still without,—still and hot. The masses of luminous vapor were gathering thickly overhead, no longer urged by the gusty wind. The great masses of rank wisteria leaves, with here and there a second blossoming of purple flowers, hung dead over the window in the sluggish air. Across the roofs I could hear the sound of a belated fiacre in the streets below. I filled my pipe again and waited.

For a time the voices of the men in the other rooms were a companionship, and at first I shouted to them now and then, but my voice echoed rather unpleasantly through the long corridors, and had a suggestive way of reverberating around the left wing beside me, and coming out at a broken window at its extremity like the voice of another man. I soon gave up my attempts at conversation, and devoted myself to the task of keeping awake.

It was not easy; why did I eat that lettuce salad at Père Garceau’s? I should have known better. It was making me irresistibly sleepy, and wakefulness was absolutely necessary. It was certainly gratifying to know that I could sleep, that my courage was by me to that extent, but in the interests of science I must keep awake. But almost never, it seemed, had sleep looked so desirable. Half a hundred times, nearly, I would doze for an instant, only to awake with a start, and find my pipe gone out. Nor did the exertion of relighting it pull me together. I struck my match mechanically, and with the first puff dropped off again. It was most vexing. I got up and walked around the room. It was most annoying. My cramped position had almost put both my legs to sleep. I could hardly stand. I felt numb, as though with cold. There was no longer any sound from the other rooms, nor from without. I sank down in my window seat. How dark it was growing! I turned up the lantern. That pipe again, how obstinately it kept going out! and my last match was gone. The lantern, too, was that going out? I lifted my hand to turn it up again. It felt like lead, and fell beside me.

Then I awoke,—absolutely. I remembered the story of “The Haunters and the Haunted.” This was the Horror. I tried to rise, to cry out. My body was like lead, my tongue was paralyzed. I could hardly move my eyes. And the light was going out. There was no question about that. Darker and darker yet; little by little the pattern of the paper was swallowed up in the advancing night. A prickling numbness gathered in every nerve, my right arm slipped without feeling from my lap to my side, and I could not raise it,—it swung helpless. A thin, keen humming began in my head, like the cicadas on a hillside in September. The darkness was coming fast.

Yes, this was it. Something was subjecting me, body and mind, to slow paralysis. Physically I was already dead. If I could only hold my mind, my consciousness, I might still be safe, but could I? Could I resist the mad horror of this silence, the deepening dark, the creeping numbness? I knew that, like the man in the ghost story, my only safety lay here.

It had come at last. My body was dead, I could no longer move my eyes. They were fixed in that last look on the place where the door had been, now only a deepening of the dark.

Utter night: the last flicker of the lantern was gone. I sat and waited; my mind was still keen, but how long would it last? There was a limit even to the endurance of the utter panic of fear.

Then the end began. In the velvet blackness came two white eyes, milky, opalescent, small, far away,—awful eyes, like a dead dream. More beautiful than I can describe, the flakes of white flame moving from the perimeter inward, disappearing in the centre, like a never ending flow of opal water into a circular tunnel. I could not have moved my eyes had I possessed the power: they devoured the fearful, beautiful things that grew slowly, slowly larger, fixed on me, advancing, growing more beautiful, the white flakes of light sweeping more swiftly into the blazing vortices, the awful fascination deepening in its insane intensity as the white, vibrating eyes grew nearer, larger.

Like a hideous and implacable engine of death the eyes of the unknown Horror swelled and expanded until they were close before me, enormous, terrible, and I felt a slow, cold, wet breath propelled with mechanical regularity against my face, enveloping me in its fetid mist, in its charnel-house deadliness.

With ordinary fear goes always a physical terror, but with me in the presence of this unspeakable Thing was only the utter and awful terror of the mind, the mad fear of a prolonged and ghostly nightmare. Again and again I tried to shriek, to make some noise, but physically I was utterly dead. I could only feel myself go mad with the terror of hideous death. The eyes were close on me,—their movement so swift that they seemed to be but palpitating flames, the dead breath was around me like the depths of the deepest sea.

Suddenly a wet, icy mouth, like that of a dead cuttle-fish, shapeless, jelly-like, fell over mine. The horror began slowly to draw my life from me, but, as enormous and shuddering folds of palpitating jelly swept sinuously around me, my will came back, my body awoke with the reaction of final fear, and I closed with the nameless death that enfolded me.

What was it that I was fighting? My arms sunk through the unresisting mass that was turning me to ice. Moment by moment new folds of cold jelly swept round me, crushing me with the force of Titans. I fought to wrest my mouth from this awful Thing that sealed it, but, if ever I succeeded and caught a single breath, the wet, sucking mass closed over my face again before I could cry out. I think I fought for hours, desperately, insanely, in a silence that was more hideous than any sound,—fought until I felt final death at hand, until the memory of all my life rushed over me like a flood, until I no longer had strength to wrench my face from that hellish succubus, until with a last mechanical struggle I fell and yielded to death.

***

Then I heard a voice say, “If he is dead, I can never forgive myself; I was to blame.”

Another replied, “He is not dead, I know we can save him if only we reach the hospital in time. Drive like hell, cocher! twenty francs for you, if you get there in three minutes.”

Then there was night again, and nothingness, until I suddenly awoke and stared around. I lay in a hospital ward, very white and sunny, some yellow fleurs-de-lis stood beside the head of the pallet, and a tall sister of mercy sat by my side.

To tell the story in a few words, I was in the Hôtel Dieu, where the men had taken me that fearful night of the twelfth of June. I asked for Fargeau or Duchesne, and by and by the latter came, and sitting beside the bed told me all that I did not know.

It seems that they had sat, each in his room, hour after hour, hearing nothing, very much bored, and disappointed. Soon after two o’clock Fargeau, who was in the next room, called to me to ask if I was awake. I gave no reply, and, after shouting once or twice, he took his lantern and came to investigate. The door was locked on the inside! He instantly called d’Ardeche and Duchesne, and together they hurled themselves against the door. It resisted. Within they could hear irregular footsteps dashing here and there, with heavy breathing. Although frozen with terror, they fought to destroy the door and finally succeeded by using a great slab of marble that formed the shelf of the mantel in Fargeau’s room. As the door crashed in, they were suddenly hurled back against the walls of the corridor, as though by an explosion, the lanterns were extinguished, and they found themselves in utter silence and darkness.

As soon as they recovered from the shock, they leaped into the room and fell over my body in the middle of the floor. They lighted one of the lanterns, and saw the strangest sight that can be imagined. The floor and walls to the height of about six feet were running with something that seemed like stagnant water, thick, glutinous, sickening. As for me, I was drenched with the same cursed liquid. The odor of musk was nauseating. They dragged me away, stripped off my clothing, wrapped me in their coats, and hurried to the hospital, thinking me perhaps dead. Soon after sunrise d’Ardeche left the hospital, being assured that I was in a fair way to recovery, with time, and with Fargeau went up to examine by daylight the traces of the adventure that was so nearly fatal. They were too late. Fire engines were coming down the street as they passed the Académie. A neighbor rushed up to d’Ardeche: “O Monsieur! what misfortune, yet what fortune! It is true la Bouche d’Enfer—I beg pardon, the residence of the lamented Mlle. de Tartas,—was burned, but not wholly, only the ancient building. The wings were saved, and for that great credit is due the brave firemen. Monsieur will remember them, no doubt.”

It was quite true. Whether a forgotten lantern, overturned in the excitement, had done the work, or whether the origin of the fire was more supernatural, it was certain that “the Mouth of Hell” was no more. A last engine was pumping slowly as d’Ardeche came up; half a dozen limp, and one distended, hose stretched through the porte cochère, and within only the façade of Francis I. remained, draped still with the black stems of the wisteria. Beyond lay a great vacancy, where thin smoke was rising slowly. Every floor was gone, and the strange halls of Mlle. Blaye de Tartas were only a memory.

With d’Ardeche I visited the place last year, but in the stead of the ancient walls was then only a new and ordinary building, fresh and respectable; yet the wonderful stories of the old Bouche d’Enfer still lingered in the quarter, and will hold there, I do not doubt, until the Day of Judgment.

The post No. 252 Rue M. le Prince appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Asked to define her personal aesthetic as a writer here at WFR some time ago, Womack pithily responded that “Beauty is complicated.” An epigraph to “Orange Dogs”, the first story in Lost Objects, develops this sentiment further. It is ostensibly a quotation from an old German treatise on butterflies, and it reads “Sie warnen vor Giftigkeit”, or “They warn that they are poisonous.” For Monarchs and Pipevine Swallowtails, this is true. Beauty is complicated; so too are poisons, butterflies, the world. Womack attempts to shoulder that terrible awareness of apocalypse across this assembly of short stories. Some succeed; others, ambitious, stumble. On balance, they offer much to a generous reader. In the effort, they continue the response that weird fiction shapes to the question of the Anthropocene (Capitalocene? Chthulucene?), even while they broaden the ambit of weird fiction by introducing new spaces and settings for creative imaginations.

Womack is an Andalusian writer, graduate of the Clarion Creative Writing program, frequent editor, and co-founder of Ediciones Nevsky / Nevsky Books. These many filiations with the literary world yield a crop of diverse settings and characters in her stories. She cut her teeth in translating core texts of modern weird fiction from English into Spanish, including Karen Tidbeck’s Jagannath and Amatka, as well as the classics of gothic fiction from Mary Shelley and Charles Dickens to Lord Dunsany, and you can trace those influences in surprising fashion across the offerings here. The settings of Lost Objects range from an eerie Eastern Europe to a genetically-reinvented Scotland, and from a Thatcher-esque world of English mining to a frozen world of ice and storms. Her protagonists are intellectually curious but socially-marginal characters, children and librarians, old scientists and regretful scroungers. For a debut, Lost Objects looks to a great range of sources and shoulders an immense weight.

***

Lost Objects is divided into two sections. The first offers a number of shorter stories, of which one of the best is “Black Isle”, a story set in Scotland that concerns the generic reconstruction of entire species and biospheres. Other stand-outs are the mysterious “Marvels Do Not Oftimes Occur” and “Orange Dogs”, mentioned above. (You can also read “Orange Dogs” here on Weird Fiction Review if you are so inclined.) Across these stories, apocalypse and survival take on many faces, while human desires—and regrets—take flight in lyric moments of the imagination. Over and over again, the things humans make that will exist into the future are put in jeopardy. For example, “Black Isle” posits a mysterious company whose re-envisioning of the genetic sequence has allowed for massive changes to the ecological life and animal composition of the world after the sudden vanishing of birds and other animals. “Neo-Bio” has made artificial creatures such as blue bears and orange lizards possible—and also necessitates the laws against these aesthetic disasters. To the dismay of the scientists at the forefront of this change, however, all is not as it seems, and the recreation of the world according to XenoLab may not be as sustainable as claimed.

In contrast to the semi-recognizable corporate earth of “Black Isle”, “Orange Dogs” foresees a broken, limping world of scarcity wherein knowledge of the old world is rare and parcelled out, and where creatures that we may be familiar with have transformed beyond comprehension. What were once butterflies are now hunters that use venom, giant insects roam the world, seasons have changed, and floods have reworked the distribution of lands, cities, of lives. Anxieties over children and progeny of various kinds, natural or unnatural, recur in these stories, as do concerns with fraught relationships in the decay of social networks. Crucially, in these short stories, as in another of the more evocative tales, “Little Red Drops”, guilt and regret shadow each of the major characters. So too do acute if slightly akimbo one liners lodge themselves in the imagination. For example, see the one-line self-reflection provided by Olga, the narrator of the latter story: “What a fierce thing was she, a jilted woman.”

From the evidence provided, Womack prefers to frustrate resolution and the narrative impulse to tie up loose ends. Closure is clearly a relic of the past and can no longer anchor the lives of the people in her tales. Instead, climaxes frequently bring readers to a transformative awareness wherein the world itself—or at least the guilty, haunted visions of that we see through the eyes of Womack’s protagonists—seems to change. The first section of Lost Objects comes to a close with the book’s most intense effort to pay witness to change in its moment of world-altering gravity, “Marvels Do Not Ofttimes Occur”. Here, a “celestial phenomenon” leaves its prospective early modern viewer (placed in Nuremberg, 1561) astonished and alarmed. The pious recorder’s voice is particularly striking and plaintive—as poignant as a story of death, destruction, and disappearance can be. As the recorder writes there, “For all that we have suffered, and have deserved to suffer, may God grant us his help. I put my hand to this true account, at Nuremburg, the third anniversary of the death of Doctor Johannes Bugenhagen of Wollin. What would he have made of it I wonder.”

The second section of Lost Objects primarily consists of “Kingfisher”, a short story about a librarian whose relationship with birds, beauty, work, writing, and her husband result in a delirious turn of affairs. The beginning of this story is a blurred boundary between an initially recognizable world and a later turn toward something much weirder. Take this early passage, for instance. It in, the narrator-writer reflects on her sleepy life in a small village:

I was getting bored by then. Of the friendly faces, the easiness of it all. I started fantasising that I needed to deal with some obstacles in order to produce good material. That I needed to be a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit cold, a little bit unhappy. An excuse as good or as bad as any other, designed to clear my mind of the real fear: that I would never write again. My fellow classmates from the writing class I had attended were doing very well for themselves; some were doing incredibly well for themselves. I was ashamed of how jealous this made me: until then I had always thought I was a good person. I felt happy for them, but I also kept wondering why I could not be as successful as they were.

Given what follows, this passage suggests an uncanniness to the story in the sense that Tzvetan Todorov discussed years ago in The Fantastic. Its prosaic elements anchor the story in a world much like ours, one nervously familiar to that produced by the news headlines and deep-seated anxieties we all know too well. So too are the protagonist’s deep concerns with her employment and employability. The expensive education she has received has not prepared her for a living in a small village where fishing, farming, and small-holding are primary sources of economic and household sustenance.

Like those protagonists in the shorter stories, the narrator of “Kingfisher” feels intense regret when she reflects on the past. As she admits, “sometimes it felt as if all the sacrifices that my parents had made to provide me with a better future had been for nothing.” If the world of the past is one of capitalist expansion and sacrifice, one that foresaw only better tomorrows while it devoured the bone marrow of today, the new world is smaller and much reduced in ambition.

Possibilities that had been obvious to our parents even one generation back were now impossible dreams. Housing was unaffordable, so we would never own a place of our own, although at the same time there were hundreds, thousands, of houses and rooms empty up and down the country. They were just owned by other people, not us: banks and companies and trusts and corporations. […]  There were not many cars anymore, no air travel, although I was secretly happy about this. I remember flying once, when I was very little, how frightening it was, how miraculous it felt. But the wrong kind of miracle, like black magic. […] This brave new world was about wanting fewer things, not more things. There were no more certainties.

The disappearances that mark “Kingfisher” include those of animals and even children. Without tracing the story too closely, and following its dreams and nightmares, the revelations of the story yield perhaps less than the fact of the complex network that it is trying to harness into a coherent individual’s story during such transformative change. Womack’s book does not end there, however, but with the fleeting and yet majestic “A Place for Wild Beasts”. It might be the sequencing of the collection, but the opposition of the long and sometimes laborious “Kingfisher” with the brilliant snippet of “A Place for Wild Beasts” suggests that the best passages in Lost Objects are those in which the lyrical imagination is given room enough to take flight, at which point it—quicksilver—vanishes.

***

The contemporary imagination faces a plethora of near-unimaginable forces about which just enough is known for the mind to shy away in horror or disbelief. Among her inspirations from the gothic traditions of Spain and England, Womack cites newspaper material concerning climate change, social inequity, and the new Gilded Age culture. These things beggar the imagination, even as they are the creations of ordinary forces and human acts. Perhaps the most significant indication of this transformation is that the current geological epoch is named after human activity. In the time of the Anthropocene, telling stories about the future is fraught with anxiety. Merely imagining what a future might be like is difficult, both materially and emotionally. Historians Christophe Bonduel and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argue in their recent study The Shock of the Anthropocene that Anthropocentric imaginations must accept a “double reality”:

On the one hand, the Earth has seen other epochs in the last 4.5 billion years, and life will continue in one form or another with or without humans. But the new status that we are launching the Earth into will bring with them a disorder, penury and violence that will render it less readily habitable by humans.

Can this knowledge be incorporated into the vision of world-historical time that supplies literary fiction its material? Lost Objects suggests that it might be possible—maybe—in weird fiction. The multiple reductions and disappearances within Womack’s stories hint at what many people already know: society is unsustainable. As Andreas Malm notes with understated severity in The Progress of This Storm, “Expect more gifts of history to be withdrawn, one after the other, primarily from those who never received very many of them in the first place.” There is always more to consider. What is to be done when the intimate and everyday nature of work—its precarity for some and its meaninglessness for others—is “a scar across our collective soul”, in the words of anthropologist David Graeber. Perhaps, as the protagonist of “Kingfisher” wonders, our imaginations must catch up with our needs and desires, which must themselves freshly confront the world. As the editors of the recent book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet point out, “Life has been monstrous almost from its beginnings.”

What a world. There will always be fiction to offer an interpretive lens, a prophetic augury. With the publication of Lost Objects, Marian Womack rises to the challenge. She offers stories of crisis wherein the nature of human work and our capacity to prepare for and live within the future as we understand it are put to the question. They bear that weight about as well as can be expected. Cumulatively, they suggest than that the human ability to create a future is failing, and that the “lost objects” of the title are the dreamt-of lives that would—that could—exist however many years from now. Whatever form they take, the prediction that Womack makes with certainty is always this: they will be almost unrecognizable.

The post Review: “Lost Objects: Stories” by Marian Womack appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

He found her on the back porch again, watching the yard through the sliding glass door. He didn’t want to spook her, so he made some noise as he left the kitchen, bumped a chair, and made a light tap with one shoe on the metal threshold that separated the porch from the rest of the house. Then he stopped a few feet behind her and said, “What are you looking at, honey?”

“The rabbit. Matt, have you seen that rabbit?

“That was yesterday, Clara. Remember? I went down there, and I scooped it up with a shovel, and I dropped it into a trash bag. Some wild animal got to it. Rabbits can’t protect themselves very well. That was yesterday.”

“But it’s back.” Her voice shook. “Can’t you see it?”

He followed her gaze to the lower part of the lawn, where it dipped downhill to the fence. Shadows tended to pool there, making the area look damp even though it hadn’t rained in almost two months. Beyond were a field of weeds and wild­flowers, and the line of trees bordering the old canal. Beyond that was the interstate. You couldn’t see it, but you could certainly hear the traffic​—a vacillating roar that you could pretend was a river if you really tried.

The skinned and bloody rabbit had appeared there yesterday at the bottom of the yard, eased out of the shadows as if from a pool. And here was another one, its front legs stretched out toward the house, its body gleaming with fresh blood. This must have just happened. They must have had some sort of predator in the yard.

“I see it,” he said. “Something got another one.”

“Something terrible is happening,” she said. “I’ve been feeling it for weeks. And now this rabbit​—I see it every day. Sometimes just after sunrise, sometimes just before sunrise. I thought I was going crazy, but now you see it too. What do you think it wants? Can you tell me what it wants?”

Matt looked at her: her eyes red and unfocused, lips trembling. She was somewhere else inside her head. She was wearing this old green tube-​top thing. She’d never looked good in it. Her back was knotted, her shoulders pushed up, her arms waving around as she spoke. He figured she must be crazy tense if he noticed it​—he never noticed things like that.

He felt sorry for her, but he also felt scared for himself. The woman he had loved had been gone for years, and now he was left with this. He wasn’t a good enough person to handle something he hadn’t signed up for.

“It’s not the same rabbit, Clara. There must be a predator loose in the neighborhood. Probably just a big cat or maybe a dog. It’s just a dead rabbit. I’ll go get the shovel and take care of it. There’s nothing to get upset about.”

He didn’t really understand how her mind worked anymore. But maybe his being logical helped her. No one could say he hadn’t tried.

“There’s blood all over him,” she said. “He’s all torn up. Can’t you see that something terrible is going to happen, that something terrible is happening? Can’t you see it?”

She continued to stare at the rabbit in the yard. She wouldn’t turn around and look at him. It felt creepy, talking to her back all the time. He didn’t dare touch her when she was like this, like a fistful of nerves. He didn’t think she’d looked at him full in the face in days.

“It was a wild animal. It had a savage life. And something got to it. It’s not like a cartoon, Clara. Rabbits can’t protect themselves very well. Real rabbits in the wild, their lives are short and cruel.”

They hadn’t had sex in a long time. He’d been afraid to touch her. You can learn to live with crazy, but you can’t touch it. He couldn’t let her drive, and when he left her alone she called him at work every hour to complain about some new thing she’d suddenly realized was wrong. Their GP kept prescribing new pills for her, but he was just a kid, really. Matt was sure the fellow had no idea what was wrong with her.

“I haven’t been feeling right, Matt. Not for a very long time. Something terrible is going to happen​—can’t you sense that?”

“I know that’s what you feel, but just go lie down. Let me take care of this, and then I’ll come join you.” But he knew she wasn’t hearing, the way she stared, glassy-​eyed and the edge of her upper teeth showing. He stood in front of her and whispered, “Go inside now. Please.” When she didn’t respond he stepped closer to block her view of the yard and put one arm around her, gave her a bit of squeeze.

“Honey, just go inside and lie down. I’ll join you in a few minutes. Maybe I can even figure out what’s killing these rabbits, and I’ll deal with the thing. You just go inside.” Hopefully she’d be asleep when he was done. When she was asleep he could grab a drink, watch some TV, relax and unwind for once.

He grabbed a shovel and a trash bag and some gloves and started down the slope of the lawn. He’d generally neglected that part of the back yard. The ground there had always been mushy, unstable. He didn’t know much about ground water, septic systems, any of that stuff. But he figured it must be some sort of drainage issue, maybe because of the old canal, or maybe because of an old broken septic system, something like that. It didn’t smell too bad, just a little stagnant most of the time, a little sour. Only sometimes it stank like rotting meat. But they couldn’t afford to fix it whatever it was, so he’d just tried to ignore it.

The carcass wasn’t where he had seen it. In fact he couldn’t find the rabbit anywhere. He thought about that mysterious predator, and went back to the house and grabbed the rake that was leaning against the wall by the sliding glass doors.

He stood still, the rake held in both hands in front of him, raised like a club. He still didn’t see the rabbit. He felt unsteady, and shortened his grip on the handle. He imagined that the predator, whatever it was, had dragged the body off somewhere. Some of the more dangerous animals in the region—coyotes, a wildcat or two, once even a small bear​—had been known to wander out of the foothills and follow the canal into the more populous suburbs. He crept down the lawn toward the fence, afraid he might lose his footing. The grass looked shiny, slippery, as if the earth beneath were liquefying.

He detected a subtle reddish shadow as he got closer to the fence, and then saw that it was a spray of blood. The body had been pushed up against one of the fence posts, eviscerated, but still clearly some version of rabbit. He was glad Clara couldn’t see this. It must have suffered terribly, ripped and skinned alive, all gleaming, bright-​red muscle, damp white bone, strings of pale fat. But the muscle had no business being bright red like that, like some kind of rich dyed leather. He’d skinned squirrels with his dad​—he knew what a dead, skinned animal looked like, so dark and bruised. But this? This looked unreal.

He bagged it and trashed it, then brought out the hose to wash away the blood and any loose pieces of meat. That’s what you did with this sort of thing. That’s how you handled it. You cleaned up the mess and then you went on with your life. Later he grabbed his binoculars and studied the field and the trees beyond, checking for any signs of movement. He saw nothing. If he had been ambitious he would have climbed over the fence and walked through the field to the row of trees that bordered the canal. He could have followed that canal into some other place. The water might not be running through the canal anymore, but it was still a passage to something, wasn’t it? But he wasn’t ambitious. And he didn’t want to go there.

Matt drank and watched TV until about midnight. The house was a mess​—Clara hadn’t cleaned in weeks. He couldn’t abide a messy house, but he worked all day​—he didn’t have the time. But if he had the time he knew he’d do a great job. It wasn’t that hard keeping up a house​—you just had to understand how to manage time and not let it get away from you. He hadn’t signed up for this. He’d tried​—and you owed your wife at least to try. But everybody had limits. You couldn’t expect a man not to have his limits.

She didn’t wake up when he crawled into bed with her. Good thing​—she’d ask about the rabbit, and he didn’t want to talk about that damn rabbit anymore.

He woke up once and saw her standing at the window, looking out onto the back yard. He started to say something, started to ask her what was wrong, but he stopped himself. He was tired, and he knew what was wrong.

He woke up alone. He didn’t like waking up alone, but he didn’t want to answer any of her questions. He fell back asleep, and when he woke up again the room was bright from the sun coming through the window. He’d overslept, but at least it was the weekend. Nothing important ever came up on the weekend. They’d stopped doing the important stuff a long time ago.

“Clara, you up here?” She didn’t answer. “Clara!” Nothing. He got his pants and shoes on and went downstairs. He still couldn’t find her. He felt a little panicky, and he was mad at himself for feeling a little panicky. He made himself be methodical. He went back upstairs and searched each bedroom as he went down the hall. He wasn’t sure why they had all these bedrooms​—they didn’t have any kids. They had way too much house, but he’d gotten such a good deal on the place.

He felt a pressure building behind his eyes. He tried to shake it off. He went back into their bedroom and looked in the closet and in the master bathroom. He got down on his knees and looked under the bed. There were several socks, another larger, unidentifiable piece of clothing. He made a note to sweep under there later.

He called again from the top of the stairs. “Clara! Are you in the house?” Nothing. No steps, no rustle, just the soft hum of the refrigerator. He went downstairs and jerked open the front door, a little too hard. It banged against the rubber bumper mounted on the wall. He hadn’t realized it before, but he was beginning to feel pretty angry. Maybe she couldn’t help it, but this was ridiculous.

She wasn’t lying on the front lawn again, thank God. And the Subaru was still there, which was a big relief. Matt thought about getting in his car and driving around looking for her. But she could be anywhere, and besides, he knew that once you started chasing after someone like that it never ended, not until you’d given yourself a heart attack. She was a grown woman​—he shouldn’t have to be searching for her.

He made himself stop. Most things got better that way: taking a break, waiting. People needed to be patient, not make such a big deal out of everything.

He went out to the porch and sat down. That’s when he saw her kneeling down at the bottom of the yard, her back turned to him. Just like she always did. Her shoulders were heaving.

He slid open the door and stepped outside. “Clara?”

She didn’t speak, but he could hear her crying. Then he saw the blood streaks on her sleeves. He started running. “Clara!” Not again. Not again.

He came up behind her and grabbed her by the shoulders, twisting them to stop her from whatever she was doing. He grabbed both of her hands and raised them, trying to get a good look at her wrists. Her forearms, his hands, everything slick with blood. “Where’s the knife, Clara!”

She looked up at him, wide-​eyed and dull. “No knife. I didn’t see a knife.”

He couldn’t find any cuts on her wrists, her arms, her hands. He looked down at her knees, and then the grass, and then the bloody bits he was standing on. He jumped back in alarm. It was another rabbit, skinned and gutted, its flesh weeping fresh blood.

“It’s back!” she said, her voice rising. “It’s back!”

“Dammit, Clara. It’s not the same rabbit!”

She stared at him, her face tilted. “But how can you tell it’s a different rabbit? How do you know for sure?”

He started to explain, but what was there to explain? “Because this is real life. We live in real life, Clara! Just stay right here. I’ll get something to cover it with, and then we’ll go wash you up, okay?”

He ran into the garage and grabbed a drop cloth, and on his way out he grabbed the rake, too, just in case of, just in case he needed it. But when he got back Clara was gone. The rabbit was still lying there, but there was no sign of Clara in the yard. How could she have moved so quickly? He stared down at the rabbit. It looked like all the others, as far as he could tell. One huge eye, pushed almost out of its socket, stared up at him.

He looked around the yard, the edge of the house, inside the house. He couldn’t find her anywhere. He gave up. He imagined her walking around the neighborhood, her shirt bloody, her arms and hands bloody. Somebody would call the police. Well, the hell with it. He’d done everything he could.

Matt left the rabbit and went back inside. At least he could clean himself up. At least he could get that much done.

After his shower he grabbed a jar of peanut butter out of the fridge and stood at the kitchen window digging two fingers into the jar and eating the peanut butter right off them. Looking through the window into the porch and then through the sliding glass doors made the yard seem a pretty safe distance away. He could still see the fields and the line of trees beyond, and he was sure he’d be able to see any movement out there if there was any. But there wasn’t any. After a while he collapsed into that old chair on the back porch and sat watching the yard for a couple of hours. It was midafternoon by then and he hadn’t had any lunch. He supposed he could find something in the fridge to heat up, but then maybe Clara would come home. Fixing him something might occupy her, keep her mind off things.

He was actually pretty surprised she hadn’t shown up yet. If the police had picked her up they would have come by now. He was used to her being anxious, but she usually snapped out of it after an hour or so and managed to get going on whatever needed to be done. He’d call some of her friends but that woman Ann had moved away six months ago and he didn’t know any of the others, if there were any others. Clara never made friends easily, at least not since he’d known her.

He couldn’t get over those damn rabbits. Whatever had gotten to them, it must have wiped out an entire den. Why had the thing left its kills in his yard anyway? Like a house cat dropping the mouse it slaughtered at your feet. But you had to trust your eyes​—most of the time it was the one thing you could trust.

Clara needed to be back soon. She’d always been this timid thing, couldn’t protect herself worth a damn. Terrible things happened to timid creatures like that. She knew. That’s why she kept saying that. Well, terrible things do happen, Clara. It wasn’t too hard predicting that.

He must have dozed, because the back yard suddenly looked dimmer. That shady bit down by the fence had grown, spread half-​way up the yard toward the house. Lights were popping on over at the neighbors’.

He sat up suddenly as a chill grabbed his throat. “Clara!” he yelled as loud as he could to scare it away. Still no answer. He listened hard now. The refrigerator still hummed. It was like he was living by himself again.

He could check with all the neighbors, but the last thing he needed was for everybody to know his business. He could call the police, but would they even take a report? Maybe if he told them Clara was a danger to herself. She’d cut her wrists more than once, but she’d always botched the job. Timid people like that, he reckoned they intended to botch the job.

He thought about talking to some young policeman, trying to explain how Clara was, trying to explain about the skinned rabbits, how they must have a predator in the neighborhood, and how the cop would act deliberately patient, and condescending to this older guy who had just called in about his missing wife, who’d only been gone a few hours, probably on some impulsive shopping trip. Matt couldn’t bear it.

She’d been a lovely girl when he’d met her​—pretty, and shy. She’d made him feel like he was about the greatest man in the world. Then she got nervous, and then she got old, and surely she was crazy now. Maybe if he was truly a good man he could handle that​—he’d stick with her and make the best out of a sad situation. But people had to be realistic. Good men were few and far between.

Flashing red lights broke through the trees on the other side of the field. They made it look as if parts of that line of trees bordering the old canal were on fire. But then the wind shifted the branches a bit and he could see that he was mistaken. There were scattered fires on the interstate beyond. And many more lights and faint, but explosive noises. People shouting maybe. Or cars being pried open like clamshells to get to the meat inside. The Jaws of Life, that’s what they called them. But only if the people inside were still living. If not, then they were the Jaws of Death, weren’t they?

The radio was right by the chair, so he could have turned it on. But he’d rather wait until Clara showed up and then they could learn together what terrible thing might have happened over on the highway. Matt supposed it was an unhealthy thing in people, how listening or watching together as the news told the details of some new disaster tended to bring couples and families together.

He sat and watched the red flashes and the burning and listened hard for the noises and the voices until it was dark enough for the automatic yard lights to come on. The gnawing in his belly was painful but he had no interest in eating, assuming eating was even the sort of remedy required.

He could see everything, except for that shadowy region down near the fence. He could see the rake where he’d left it, and the folded-​up drop cloth. But there was no sign of that rabbit. Something had moved it, or maybe​—and the idea made him queasy​—it hadn’t been completely dead. Skinned, but not dead. Crawling around suffering.

As Matt’s eyes grew weary he found himself focusing on that area of shadow. It had always seemed odd that the longer you stared at a shadow the more likely you were to find other shadows swimming inside it. Something moved out of the edge. In the border between dark and light a skinned body lay in the slickened grass. Bleeding heavily, and this one much too large for a rabbit. Stripped to muscle and bone, it was an anatomical human figure made real. The skin over part of one breast remained. And when it reached its scarlet arms toward the house it called his name.

The post Red Rabbit appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Summer was half over before it had even begun. With a sense that my life was in the same state, I phoned Lizzie Shaw. She hadn’t changed.

They lived in East Dulwich now, she told me, her and Tim, in a little house ‘practically given’ them by a friend. She had worked for a while as a buyer for John Lewis. ‘You’d have been proud of me,’ she said. ‘I was properly industrious.’ She had bought a Mercedes. Enjoyed the money. Missed her kids. ‘I wasn’t getting home ‘til eight. I had a seventeen year old Polish girl looking after my family, I mean can you believe it?’ Jobs pall, she said, as soon as you start thinking like that. She said she couldn’t wait to see me. ‘People count more as you get older.’ She was thirty seven now. Then she said:‘I’m pregnant again,’ and burst into tears.

That house was always full of sex.

***

‘You will come and see us?’ Lizzie said.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Would that be a good idea?’

‘Please,’ she said.

I thought about it. I drove across London, intending to go there, but lost motivation somehow and fetched up in Brixton or Blackheath instead. Lizzie kept phoning. Would I go and see them again, or not?

‘Why don’t we meet where we used to?’ I suggested. ‘Just the two of us?’

‘It can’t be like that again,’ she warned me.

‘I know,’ I said.

I wanted to put the phone down and not speak to her for another three years.

‘All right then,’ she said. ‘When?’

We had lunch at Angels & Gypsies on Camberwell Church Street. She was late, a little nervous. ‘I can’t get over you,’ I said. The pregnancy threw her off-balance a little, but it suited her. ‘You look so well.’

We talked about her boys for a bit. She had got them into a good school. They were so grown up, she said. So emotionally intelligent. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without them, especially Ben.’ Of the buyer’s job she would only say: ‘I felt it was right at the time. But now I feel it’s right to be pregnant again.’

‘And how is Tim?’

‘Just the same,’ she said ‘You know Tim.’

I smiled. ‘I do,’ I said.

‘He’s converting the loft.’

‘Is he now?’ I said.

‘It’s such a little house,’ she said off-handedly. ‘He thought it would be a good idea. He thought it could be a studio.’ She ate some olives and then some bread. She sat back. ‘This is nice,’ she said vaguely. ‘I always loved this place.’

I knew that tone of voice.

‘What’s the matter?’ I said.

‘Oh, you know.’ She looked away suddenly. ‘It’s all he ever does now, really. The loft.’

I reached across the table and tried to take her hand. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t want that.’

She told me about Tim. Something happened to him, she said, the day he was forty. He went up into the loft. He liked it there, the very first time he stuck his head and shoulders up through the trapdoor. He called down from the top of the ladder, something like, ‘Hey!’ or, ‘Wow!’ and that was it. Something clicked for him. Soon he was up there every available day, working, but not at his job. He had started out to store things up there. Then he was going to convert it. Then he was moving himself into it, bit by bit. He even had his own TV up there.

‘He was forty,’ she said. Looking back, you could see that’s when it began. ‘His life was so good,’ she said. ‘But something went wrong with his view of it.’

After a pause she said,‘He misses you.’

I couldn’t take that seriously.

‘I bet he does,’ I said.

‘We both miss you.’

‘I’ve missed you,’ I said.

‘I know. I know,’ she said. ‘So you will come over? To supper?’

I began to say, ‘I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,’ but she was already adding:

‘Perhaps you can even talk some sense into him.’

‘I’m not the best person to do that.’

‘At least come to supper,’ she said. She put her hand over mine. ‘It’s so good to see you again,’ she said.

***

I shouldn’t have gone, but in the end I couldn’t see any reason not to. I was bored. I thought she might light my life up again.

Their street was like all the others packed between the railway and the hospital. Tubs of geraniums outside narrow-fronted terraces. Roadsters parked two wheels up on the pavement. The house was nice but far too small for them. By the time you had a family you were supposed to have moved down the road to the Village, or out of London altogether. East Dulwich – or Dull Eastwich, as Tim called it – was for younger people. They would have done better, he said, in Herne Hill: but you didn’t get the resale value.

He hadn’t changed much since I last saw him. You found people like Tim all over London. They had rowed a little at school. At the weekend they wore chinos and a good quality sailing fleece. Boat shoes with no socks. They all had the same tall, polite good looks. They never seemed to age: instead, their self-deprecation matured into puzzlement. They began to look tired. Tim liked to cook. He had his treasured cast iron saucepans from the 80s, his five-hob Lacanche range. I watched him, and drank a beer, and asked him how things were.

‘Oh, you know,’ he said vaguely. ‘Could you pass me that? No, the little one.’

Once we sat down to eat it became harder to sustain a conversation. ‘I wish I’d learned to cook,’ I said, as if I’d lived the kind of life which makes a thing like that impossible. He didn’t know what to say to that. Who would? This left things to Lizzie, who grew impatient. ‘It’s a chicken,’ she explained to me. ‘A child could cook it.’ He was quick to agree. ‘You could soon learn, you could soon learn.’ He slotted the plates into the dishwasher while she banged pudding down on the table.

‘Well that was good,’ I said when we’d eaten it.

‘I’m glad,’ Lizzie said. ‘The kitchen cost him twenty thousand pounds.’ When he only smiled at this, she added: ‘No one puts a twenty thousand pound kitchen in a house in East Dulwich. In the Village, yes. In East Dulwich, no.’   Tim shrugged a little. He looked away. Twenty thousand pounds was an exaggeration, the shrug said. It said that if you were going to cook you should have the right things.

While Lizzie made coffee in the kitchen, he gave me the tour. ‘We’d gone as far as we could without opening the loft,’ he said. You could see they had. ‘It was a bit of a push to find somewhere for the boys.’ Tim, you sensed, had turned his talents as easily to family life as to sport: but now he wasn’t quite sure how he came to have a family in the first place. I poked my head into the little room he used as a study.

‘No computer?’ I said.

He’d moved it up there already, he said. There had never been enough room down here. ‘Lizzie told me you were up to your neck in it,’ I said. The study was a mess. He laughed and looked rather tiredly at the heaps of stuff. ‘Eventually all this will go up there.’ I asked him if I could see the loft. ‘It’s a bit dusty at the moment,’ he said. ‘Probably better to wait.’ I didn’t press him, even though I knew Lizzie would have wanted me to; and I left not long later. Tim had his problems, I had mine. One of mine was that I didn’t really care one way or another about him. It’s hard to hide that. He knew it as well as I did, and she was the only one pretending not to know. I kept in touch. I went over there once or twice, for a meal, then let it lapse again. I was working anyway.

***

Three months later the phone rang.

I answered it. I said, ‘Hello?’

‘Hi. It’s Lizzie.’

I caught my breath.

‘Hi,’ I said, ‘I –’

‘There’s someone on the other line, hang on,’ she said. Then, ‘Hi. How are you, I’m sorry about that.’

‘No, it’s OK.’

After a pause she said: ‘It’s a girl.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘A girl!’

I sent flowers. I sent a card. I telephoned my friends as if I was the father. In two days Lizzie was on the phone again.

‘The baby’s home,’ she said, ‘but he won’t see it.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘We’re both back from the hospital, but he won’t see either of us.’

‘He won’t see his own baby?’

He wouldn’t see his own baby. He sent notes down from the loft.

‘I don’t know where to turn,’ Lizzie said.

‘Come on,’ I tried to encourage her, ‘he was a bit like this with the boys.’

‘Well now he’s got a girl and he won’t come down out of the loft to even look at her. What am I going to do?’

So I found myself in East Dulwich again, hoping to get a word alone with her. The house was full of wellwishers. Her women friends had long backs and sexy voices. The men were packed with the aimless brutal confidence of people barely thirty years old earning large sums of money at banking. Even their children were successful at something. I felt old and immature at the same time. Tim was nowhere to be seen, but no one mentioned that. He was in the loft of course, but no one mentioned that either. They had called the baby Emma. I held her while Lizzie had a proper drink. I couldn’t believe her fingernails.

‘Look,’ I told anyone who would listen, ‘they come with a manicure!’

The boys stared at me as if I was simple, and Emma started crying. I took her outside. I brought her back in. It was no good. She looked up at me angrily and flexed her spine. Her face went bright red.

‘Give her to me,’ said Lizzie. ‘She wants something you haven’t got.’

This drew laughs all round.

I was there a lot the first few weeks. I helped with this and that. I learned to change a nappy. Lizzie sat up in bed, looking exhausted but pleased. ‘They’ve taken it well,’ she said of the boys. She was proud of them. After a few days, though, they grew thoughtful, painted their faces, spent money on slime. They ran in and out of the small garden whooping and shouting: but magical thinking would not save them. Change was inevitable. The tribe was doomed.

Tim watched it all from a distance. His idea, you could see, was to ride it out. Six months after his daughter arrived, the loft was his home. He cooked up there, he slept up there. ‘He’s living on baked beans,’ Lizzie said. She looked down at the baby. ‘Essentially,’ she said in a tragic voice, ‘he’s left us.’ No one had any idea what he was doing. He hauled stuff up in a plastic dustbin. Whatever it was began coming down again within a few hours. There was a lot of bumping and banging which sometimes went on all night. She asked me, ‘What’s he doing up there, with all those power tools?’

I said it could be anything.

‘Is this something that happens to men?’ she said viciously, as if I was doing it too. Shortly afterwards he installed a good-quality pull-down ladder, but he rarely used it himself and the boys were forbidden to go near it. He was a man living away from his family.

‘He might as well have gone to Blackpool,’ Lizzie said. ‘You’ve got to talk to him.’

I tried. If nothing else, I thought, it would give me a glimpse of the loft. I went up the ladder. I stuck my head through the trap door. I got a confused idea of a much smaller space than I had expected, most of it curtained off by heavy tarpaulins which sagged from the roofbeams. He had put a floor in. Piles of eurothane insulation lay about under an unshaded low-wattage bulb, everything thick with damp-looking dust. It all seemed thoroughly miserable. Tim sat at an old school desk, his legs sticking out awkwardly at the sides, writing something on a sheet of ruled A4. The computer components stacked on the floor beside him were still done up in bubble-wrap. He hadn’t even bothered to unpack them.

‘Hi Tim,’ I said. ‘When do you think you might be finished?’

He got up quickly.

‘Probably better if we talk downstairs,’ he said.

He looked embarrassed. You don’t want your wife’s best friend to see you living in your attic. You don’t want him to think about what that means. I’d hoped I might shock him into talking about things. But in the end we just stood there awkwardly on the landing looking past one another, and all he would say was:

‘You have to get away somehow. You have to get away from it all.’

‘I don’t think Lizzie sees it that way,’ I said. ‘You know?’

This sounded futile, even to me.

After a moment I added: ‘I think she’d like to see more of you. The kids would too.’

He studied the floor and shook his head.

***

But Lizzie did want to see more of him. She wanted to see more of someone, anyway. She called me.

‘Come and meet me for a drink,’ she said. ‘I’m in need of, oh, something.’ She laughed. ‘I don’t know what I’m in need of.’ She left a pause and then said: ‘We could meet somewhere in town.’ I didn’t ask who would look after the baby.

All afternoon she seemed nervous. She kept taking her phone out of her bag, studying it with a faintly irritable expression, then putting it back again. She swirled her drink around her glass. She looked up at me once or twice, began to say something, decided not to. She was wearing skinny, low-cut velvet jeans. When she saw me looking at them she said, ‘Do you think they’re too young for me?’ They were a champagne colour, and they fastened at the back with a lace, like a shoe. She touched my arm.

‘It’s odd, isn’t it,’ she said, ‘how things happen? I always loved this suit of yours. Your only suit.’

She said, ‘I’ve never seen your house, have I?’

She drove us over to Walthamstow in the Mercedes. They always called it that, her and Tim: the Mercedes. As if they had other cars, two or three of them. When I showed her into the house she said, ‘It’s bigger than I thought it would be.’ She stared into the kitchen for a moment, then out into the garden. We went upstairs. She looked at the bicycle in the bedroom and said,‘ It’s so like you, all this. Really it is.’ She got her phone out again. She put it next to her ear and shook it. When nothing happened her expression hardened. Then she laughed. ‘It’s just what I expected, all of it.’

I don’t know what I expected. I’d been waiting for her for three years; longer. After about ten minutes I said, ‘I love your neck. The nape of it, here.’   Then I said: ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’ She twisted away immediately and we lay like that for a minute or two, awkward and embarrassed. My hand was still on her hip.

‘This is stupid,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Because it just isn’t grown up.’

I got off the bed angrily. When I looked back she had covered herself up with the sheet.

‘What do you want then?’ I said.

She shivered.

‘Can’t you get it any warmer in here?’

‘No.’

‘I just want him the way he was. I’ll have to leave him, if not. I don’t even know what’s going on in my own loft,’ she told me, with a false laugh. ‘Can’t you at least try and find that out from him?’

I shrugged. ‘Why should I do that?’

‘Don’t sulk,’ she warned.

***

The second time I went up into the loft, I heard a regular metallic scraping noise, more distant than you’d expect in a space that size. The light was off and something was happening behind the tarpaulins. ‘Tim?’ I said. But I said it cautiously, to myself, as if I didn’t want him to hear. I was curious. As much as anything else, I wanted to poke around. The tarpaulins were new, but they looked old. They sagged under their own weight, stiff to the touch, with fixed folds as if the dust had already worked its way into them. Perhaps it had. Around their edges I glimpsed the eerie white flicker of a butane lamp, or perhaps one of those portable fluorescent tubes.

I examined the desk, the abandoned computer, the piles of other stuff. Why would you keep a garden spade in a loft?

‘Tim?’

This time the noises stopped immediately. For a moment we were silent, each listening for the other. Then a draught seemed to go through the loft, along with a smell which reminded me of old-fashioned house gas. I saw the tarpaulins billow, hang, resettle; and he called from just behind them, ‘Hang on. I’ll be with you in a second.’ I backed away until I bumped into the desk, then descended the ladder. He followed me down and stood there rubbing his hands on an old towel as if he didn’t know what to do next. He was covered in white dust. His hands were scraped and banged, the knuckles enlarged as if he’d been doing manual work, outside work. His fingernails were broken.

‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ he said. ‘Lizzie shouldn’t really have encouraged you to come up.’

I couldn’t let him get away with that.

‘Tim,’ I said, ‘for God’s sake. What are you doing?’

‘I’m converting the loft,’ he explained patiently. ‘I’m converting the loft to give us more room.’ He didn’t want to be understood. He was exhausted, and that made me feel exhausted too. In the end I said:

‘You hire people to do the work. You don’t do that yourself.’

He shook his head.

‘It’s my loft,’ he said, with a certainty I admired.

While we were talking Lizzie came up the stairs carrying the baby. ‘Do either of you want coffee?’ she asked. Then she said to Tim: ‘I heard all that. What rubbish you talk.’ She began to cry. ‘You know it’s rubbish.’ Tim pulled himself to his feet and looked as if he might try to comfort her. She backed away. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s just an excuse. It’s just another excuse.’

‘Lizzie’s frantic, Tim,’ I told him. ‘You’ve hardly said hello to your own daughter.’

‘Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here!’ she said. She stood in front of me and wouldn’t let me turn away. ‘Can you see me?’ she demanded.

‘Lizzie –’

‘Well I’m real,’ she said. ‘You always pretend I’m not.’ Her voice went from contempt to puzzlement. ‘You’re as bad as he is.’ The baby wailed and waved its arms. ‘Now look what you’ve done, both of you.’

‘You asked me to come here,’ I reminded her.

I left them to it and went downstairs.

‘That’s right,’ she called after me. ‘Walk away. Walk away from everything, like you always do.’

After I left, I drove about in the dark, through Balham and Brixton, jumping traffic lights to the accompaniment of a Sonny Rollins CD. By the time I got home it was three o’clock in the morning, and she had left messages with my answering service. They were a mixed bunch. One said: ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’ Another said: ‘Is it any wonder no one will have you? It’s just so easy for you to leave people behind, isn’t it? Just so fucking easy.’ A third said, ‘Please don’t do this. Please answer, oh please, please.’ I could hear the baby crying in the background. ‘Please answer.’ But I didn’t; and I didn’t hear from her again for two or three months.

***

June.

The evening air was hammered like gold on to the rubbish in my front garden. I had been thinking about her all day.

Early summer had always been a dangerous time for us. Tim would be at work, we would go to the park. I would put my arm round her while we sat on a bench and watched the boys running about in the distance and she told me, at length but without ever saying it outright or irreversibly, why nothing could happen between us. ‘I’m making such a fool of myself!’ she would decide at last; then appeal, ‘But you do see some of what I mean, don’t you?’

‘Lizzie, I haven’t got the slightest idea what you’re talking about.’

I knew she would call, because in early summer, desperate with the smell of her, I had always been ready to give her the reassurance she needed.

‘Hello?’ I said.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘It’s me.’

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘There’s someone on the other line.’

‘Don’t do this,’ she begged.

‘Can I ring you back?’

She said: ‘You’ve got to come. It’s Tim.’

There was a confused scraping noise as if she had dropped the phone, and then all I could hear was her breathing, and a shout in the distance which might have been one of the boys.

‘Something awful’s happening,’ she said. ‘In the loft.’

She dropped the phone again.

By the time I got to Dulwich it was dark. The front door of their house was open on the empty street. Lizzie stood in the hall at the bottom of the stairs with the baby held along the crook of one arm. She was wearing a white bathrobe and she had her phone up to her ear. The hall seemed too hot, even for a night like that. It seemed packed with heat. Why would they have the heating on in June?

‘He’s up there now,’ she said.

I wondered if I should take the baby off her.

‘Lizzie? What’s wrong? What’s the matter?’

‘I thought I could get him to answer his phone. Get him to answer his bloody fucking phone for once,’ she said.

‘I’ll fetch him down.’

She stared at me. ‘That’s not it,’ she said.

‘I’ll just go up.’

There was fine white dust all over the stairs. I could hear the boys in their room, quarrelling over the PlayStation. The house seemed to get hotter from floor to floor, a dry heat which caught at your throat. ‘Tim?’ I called. Then louder: ‘Tim!’ No answer. I had caught Lizzie’s mood. I felt nervous, jumpy, angry with both of them. Why did I always have to be involved? Why couldn’t they put on their futile theatre without me? ‘Tim?’ Dust had silted down all over the upper landing. I stood at the foot of the pull-down ladder and listened. I went up far enough to poke my head into the loft. The air was full of a grey light which, dim and distributed at the same time, seemed to come from everywhere at once. I could hear a distant, measured chunking noise. It sounded like someone using an old-fashioned pickaxe to break concrete.

‘Tim!’ I called.

Almost immediately there was a loud crash. The house lurched, a powerful draught parted the tarpaulins. That was enough for me. As I went down the ladder I heard him tottering about up there, coughing in the dust. He seemed to be trying to drag some item of equipment across the floor. ‘Tim! For God’s sake!’ I called up from the landing. His face appeared briefly, framed by the trap.

‘The whole lot’s coming down,’ he said. ‘Tell her to get the kids out. See if you can persuade her to care about someone else for once.’

Lizzie, halfway up the stairs, heard this.

‘You sod,’ she said. ‘I’d do anything for those children.’

Everything seemed to lurch again. I got her by the arm and pulled her down the stairs and into the street. The boys, sensing the future like dogs before an earthquake, had already saved themselves. They couldn’t believe their luck. Their house was falling down. The hall was full of plaster. Cracks had opened up in the exterior walls. From above came the shrieking sounds of joists giving way under huge loads. It was so cool. They stood in the quiet street in the hot night air, staring up at the line of the roof where it had sagged into the void of the loft. Their father came running out, then stopped and turned as if he had forgotten something.

His house was done for. Window frames popped. The facade deformed and began to slip. Just before the roof fell in and it became obvious that the whole thing would come down on us if we didn’t move, I saw the tunnel he had been digging out of the loft. It hung in the air, transparent but luminous, perhaps three feet in diameter. Travelling north towards the river, it rose steeply until, at perhaps a thousand feet, it linked up with a complex of similar tunnels all across London. Hundreds of them, thousands, more than you could ever count, they rose up from the houses. A 787 Dreamliner was making its way down between them towards Heathrow, engines grinding, landing lights ablaze. When it had gone, the tunnels hung there for a moment like a great shining computer-generated diagram in the night sky, then began to fade.

‘See?’ Tim said. ‘What would you have done?’

‘We’ll come back,’ I promised him. ‘We’ll come back and find another way in –’

Lizzie didn’t seem to hear this. ‘Twenty thousand pounds on a kitchen,’ she said. She laughed.

Later, she sat on the kerb a little way down the street, with the boys on either side of her and the baby in her lap, thoughtfully watching the fire engines and drinking tea. Someone had given her a man’s woollen shirt to wear, wrapped a foil blanket loosely round her shoulders. The street was full of hoses and cables, generators, powerful lights. Firemen were picking over the rubble, and a television crew had arrived.

The post Cicisbeo appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

— The Editors

La Nuit (1908) by Léon Spilliaert

Ketter Greyson was an illusionist by trade, schooled and experienced in all of the attendant disciplines and varieties of performance, but if there was a trick to aging elegantly, or at least gracefully, it was one he was unable to master. While the Great Spettrini, his mentor, before disappearing amidst rumors of deviltry and dark doings, had affected a patriarchal, authoritative manner and a pointed Van Dyke beard of solid white, Greyson had grown paunchy and raspy, tentative and hesitant. His hair, which at one time he could sweep up into an imposing pompadour, had grown thin and wispy. His eyebrows, once tools of suggestion and dark insinuation, had become as overgrown and unruly as black thatch on a blighted landscape.

In the waning years of his life, Greyson carried on his person at all times a 19th century Sheffield dagger eight and one half inches long encased a scabbard of red leather. The handle was said to have been made of bone, specifically from the femur of a 119-year old magician still performing nightly in Prague. On the not infrequent occasions that Greyson performed in an unfamiliar venue or a private home, before entering, it was his custom to leap to the doorjamb, thrust the dagger’s blade into it, and lurch back, his hands raised in an aspect of defense and defiance. He would deduct from his fee the cost of the repair. One may find among his papers, housed in the archives of the Leeds Public Library, a weathered but still legible carbon copy of a contract with the Leeds Academy of Music which says as much. The practice was thought by many to have been an affectation, a peccadillo, or simply a mark of the man’s eccentricity. In point of fact, the custom was more significant than that.

***

Greyson the Great sprawled in the hotel bed face down as if hurled there, and he dreamed. A grey fog hung in the air just above a filthy river lined with sagging trees, as though it were the river’s spirit looking down upon its dying body. Old ladies in nightgowns were being swept helplessly along by the flood-swollen waters, and their rescuers, gruff old men in sheriff’s uniforms and hats, were pulling them onto the shore by their sagging, veined arms, calling them “goddamned fools.” Greyson himself stood on the shoreline in his underwear, crying, not for the women, but from embarrassment at his exposed paleness and flab. The mud covered his feet. He freed the big toe of his right foot, then his left. They popped from the mud. Plorp. Plorp. He stirred, awakened, flipped himself onto his back with considerable and vocal effort. The hotel room was unbearably hot. He would have written it off as haunted if not for having been taught that ghosts bring cold, not heat, to their haunts. He exited the bed, feet finding his slippers, and stepped into the hall, with its faded carpet and cracked wallpaper, to catch a cross-breeze, and indeed found one, though it was anemic and smelled vaguely of mold.

***

Greyson had traveled a long distance to this unfamiliar village after having been hired by telephone to perform at a child’s birthday party. The voice on the other end of the line had been brisk and businesslike. The caller had inquired as to Greyson’s fee and promptly offered double. In his younger days, the offer might have set bells of alarm chiming, but gigs had of late been sparse, and he was in arrears on his rent, his housing depending largely on the nearly exhausted generosity of his landlord, who was, thankfully, very much enamored of “artistic types.” The party was not scheduled until midnight—late, especially for a child’s party, but Greyson was no parent, so what did he know? His children were cooing doves, sniffing rabbits, and young female assistants in leotards, none of whom knew from bedtime.

Driving at dusk on a long rural road that paralleled the interstate, he had first seen the town, through a break in the thick forest, as a garland of twinkling yellow lights. The tree-lined road on which he was driving was devoid of streetlights until it emerged from the woods; after that point the occasional low cottage or trailer hunkered in the vapor glow, and then, after a hairpin turn, he found himself on a silent yellow-lit main strip cramped with businesses and restaurants, all caged and shackled despite the early hour. If not for the occasional hooded figure sitting in a doorway or meandering along a sidewalk, he might have thought he’d wandered into a still picture. He saw no recognizable chain store nor familiar corporate logo, save the yellow and red Shell sign impaled on a long pole many yards above a shack of a gas station, glowing like a blood-smeared moon.

The hotel was one street over from where the man on the phone had said it would be. The three-story clapboard building leaned like a drunk against a large, gnarled oak; in fact, the ancient tree had pushed itself up through a portion of the third floor balcony and had consumed a length of the railing. The institution was presided over by a skeletal baroness behind bulletproof glass. She was festooned with dusty scarves and a haphazard constellation of costume jewelry. She looked like a diseased Christmas tree. He afforded her neither courtesy nor conversation as he perfunctorily filled in and signed with his curving, ornate G the various forms required of him. She pulled from a hook a diamond shaped bit of plastic with the number 184 scrawled on it in marker; from it depended a small copper-colored key. She pushed it over to him, and only then did she tear away her gaze from the adding machine that squatted in front of her like a flattened frog.

“I want that room exactly the way you found it when you leave,” she said, her voice tattered from years of filter-less cigarettes.

Greyson raised an eyebrow. “I assure you I have no plans other than to sleep and to leave,” he said.

“I know your kind, and you had best mind your step.” She glanced down at his attaché and his wheeled case of tricks. “I wish you’d never come,” she said, and she did not sound angry. She sounded sad.

***

After a period of wandering the maze of hallways, he found himself back at Room 184. The room was equipped with a small television, tethered to the wall with a metallic arm with wires for veins. He turned it on. A blandly handsome television host hopped on one foot onto a gaudy set with a cityscape backdrop. The host acknowledged the cacophonous house band, pumping his arms and using his fingers for six-shooters. The band-leader, an elderly man with cataracts, clothed in a loosely tied blue bathrobe, shot back with one finger, ducking slightly behind his synthesizer keyboard. The host strode forward until his head hit the camera, leaving a sweaty blur on the lens.

He backed up, grinning wildly. “Have you heard this,” he asked. “Have you heard this, have you seen this, have you read this in the newspaper; did someone whisper this to you from a darkened doorway, from the hair-clogged shower drain in a condemned motel, from the tiny mouth of an anthill in a parking lot? Did the sultry but affected waitress hand you this on a grease-stained note with your check, did the leering priest mutter this to an indifferent congregation of layabouts, did the wind whisper this through the trees as you drove through the burnt remains of a forest, did a radio host intone this news from an ocean of static…” and on and on in such a manner until Greyson finally switched off the set, despite having had a desire to see the first guest, a movie star who had just lost his wife and baby daughters to the new and rampant strain of influenza.

Bereft of the television, he pulled from his attaché a few of his newly received catalogs. He began to flip through the flimsy pages, considering new illusions to add to his act: the Suit of Snakes, the Crying Dwarf, the Decapitation Hat, the Cabinet of Catastrophe. But he could find no inspiration. He consulted his wristwatch for the time, only to discover that the red second hand and the black minute hand had fallen and were resting in the form of a squashed X at the base of the glass. He could tell by the position of the hour hand that it was just past eleven o’clock. He resolved to dress, get a bite, and arrive in time to set up.

A few moments later Greyson stood before the full-length bathroom mirror, resplendent in glittery blue tuxedo top, orange bow-tie, and black cummerbund topping black pinstriped trousers. His shoes were blacked and shined, his hair glued in black lines against his skull, his brows and widow’s peak subtly accented with eyebrow pencil. He warped his face into a demented grin, shot his eyebrows up quickly, one after the other, and then sank them down slowly. His dentures were blindingly white, eyes tinted a devilish red with contact lenses.

***

Greyson had become interested in magic not because of having seen a performance nor perused a book, but because of a poster. In a glass display adjacent to the door of the Civic Hall, dramatically lit from below, the illustration depicted a long-limbed Spettrini on a field of purple, a gothic iron fence with intertwined skulls and snakes in the foreground and tilting and split gravestones behind him. He was dressed like a vampire, in a tuxedo with a black and red cape, his fingers bent, frozen in mid-gesticulation, his nails black and long. Between his hands a bat hovered upside down in streams of psychic energy, drawn by the artist as one might sketch a range of hillocks. One thin eyebrow was arched and his hair, black as an oil slick on a moonless night, was combed back and plastered flat to his cranium. His waxed mustache stuck out from the sides of his face like pipe cleaners. The very words on the poster seized Greyson’s imagination. Enchantments. Levitation. Necromancy. Resurrection. Its purpose was to advertise Spettrini’s upcoming performance at that very hall, a spectacle which Greyson was not to attend, due to the staunch religious beliefs of his parents, Catholics both, who saw all magic as black, as either a tool of the devil or a series of acts of simple chicanery. Even had Spettrini’s show not been concerned primarily with the macabre and the outré, he was more likely to be allowed admittance to an abattoir than to a performance of legerdemain and mentalism and illusion.

They could not prevent him, however, from sending letters to the illusionist, and that he did, letters written and rewritten and fretted over as Greyson attempted to find a tone respectful, admiring, but not too fawning. It was not an easy balance to achieve. But something in the missives must have drawn the man’s attention, for he agreed to meet with Greyson, to actually depart his home in the Connecticut town of Orford Parish and travel the considerable distance to Leeds.

Spettrini arranged to meet Greyson at The Tunnel Bar, a tavern housed in what had previously been a passageway to and from a now disused train station. Greyson fretted. He would not be admitted due to his age and youthful appearance, he claimed. Spettrini advised him to clear his head of concerns. They met after school on a Thursday. Spettrini ushered the boy in as though they owned the place, they sat and ordered with no questions asked nor identification demanded, and for two hours Spettrini talked with the boy about illusion, about his career, about his philosophies and his theories. Spettrini agreed to come back one Thursday per month, and for some time he kept his word.

The bar was furnished with quartets of oversized leather chairs situated around small tables of brass and glass. The only light came from sparse track lighting along the low, curved ceiling and the votive candles on the tabletops. It was not a place for the claustrophobic. The bar carried sound in strange and unpredictable ways: one might hear a snippet of conversation from ten tables away as clearly as if it were taking place in the immediate proximity. The two would meet at the farthest table, and Spettrini would proffer old handbills, newspaper clippings, and tales of a life of hotels, raucous audiences, and dalliances with dissolute women who’d haunt the door of his dressing room like wraiths. Greyson would sit rapt, drinking expensive cocktails paid for by his mentor, and dream of such a life for himself, far from classroom desks and droning, chalk-fingered schoolteachers.

After nearly eighteen months of meeting, during which Greyson learned not only many illusions, but the histories and controversies behind them, Spettrini abruptly stopped replying to Greyson’s letters. Their last meeting had been exciting, but exceedingly unsettling. The great magician had arrived in a state of distraction, his hair uncombed, the corner of his mouth turned down as if stuck that way. His white shirt was stained brown at the collar, and patches of unshaven stubble darkened his face in no discernible pattern. He muttered, repeated himself, ordered a second drink before having started the first. His breath was mephitic, and the alcohol, consumed in heroic quantities, served only to exacerbate the foul miasma. Finally, he’d leaned forward and grabbed Greyson’s shirt collar, squeezing it into his fist. “I’ve had a breakthrough,” he said, and his eyes blazed bright and manic. “Watch.”

He leant back and his eyes rolled to the whites. His hands gripped the arms of his chair, veins standing out blue and pulsing. A sound rolled through the room, like that of a heavy glass plate spinning on a marble surface. A wine glass shattered at a table near the entrance, then another. Greyson looked about him and saw that the glass tops of the tables were spinning, faster, faster, sending the candles careening to the walls. The lights flickered and the bottles and glasses clinked faster and faster and Greyson thought for a mad second that his mentor had summoned a ghost-train that would blast through the wall and roar through the tunnel, crushing and damning to nonexistence the few souls within. In the flickering lights, Greyson had a terrible hallucination: for a moment it seemed as though Spettrini’s head was sending tendrils of flesh back to the chair. Where the tendrils hit the surface, the leather took on the magician’s pallor, splotches of flesh spreading like spilled water, and then hair, white and wild, began sprouting from the flesh of the chair. Spettrini reddened, as did the chair, then, as the spinning tables slowed and the stroboscopic effect faded, so did the hallucination.

As the shaken staff rushed about with dustpans and mops, Spettrini released Greyson from his grip, rose from his seat, spun himself into his overcoat, and fled, with Greyson trailing him. Outside a seething and cold rain was pummeling the streets. It was loud on the awning under which they stood. Spettrini said, not bothering to raise his voice over the cacophony, There is much to learn, boy. There are places other than here, and limits far beyond what anyone has even considered, nor dreamed of exploring. And then he was in his black car and gone.

After three letters went unanswered, Greyson, standing on a ledge over a pit of despondency, made the decision to get on with his life, to be resolute, to perfect his illusions, to supplant his previous lessons with the solidity and quiet peacefulness of books. He spent his days in the library, his nights peering at illustrations and reading and rereading the biographies of the greats. His first performances were on coffeehouse stages, and they were received with an indifference that bordered on hostility. He supplemented his biographies and books of tricks with several volumes on the topic of public speaking, folded that learning into his routines, and began, slowly, to perfect an act. Once he had taken the step of moving from his parents’ home, he flourished.

His first shows, inspired heavily by Spettrini and by famed illusionist Black Herman, featured jars of elixirs and smoking potions in a looming black cabinet set in a landscape of tilting headstones and folded-hand stone angels. Selected audience members would be administered one or another of the “medicines” by a lithe assistant in a black leotard, and after some vamping on Greyson’s part, would crumple to the stage as though dead. The doctor of the house, played with a dour seriousness by his older cousin Ernest, would pronounce the poor soul right there on the stage, to the horror of his family members or friends in the audience. The body would be placed into a black casket on the stage, and the audience encouraged to chant a string of nonsense words invented by Greyson as the lights dimmed and shadows flitted in the rafters. The cadaver would then float up through the lid of the coffin and hover above it, spinning slowly, ethereal and ghostlike. Greyson would clap his hands, the house lights would blaze, blinding the audience, and when they dimmed and the crowd’s sight returned and the red and blue floating orbs faded from their views, the audience member would be standing behind the coffin, dazed. Two assistants would gingerly help the man back to his seat. Word got around.

A letter arrived at the Greyson household one day several years after Ketter had left. Nicholas Greyson looked at the return address in Connecticut, scowled at the ostentatious handwriting, and tore in two the envelope and the letter within. He deposited it in the trash with the eggshells and the chicken bones and the dust and he never spoke of it to his wife nor his son.

***

Greyson donned his overcoat to shield the street people from his splendor. He swept up his wheeled case, extended the handle, and exited the hotel in search of sustenance. The main street, as before, was shuttered. He passed junk shops, check-cashing establishments, a Gentleman’s Club called the Gilded Cardinal. The case bounced in his wake, wheels rumbling on the sidewalks like an extravagant drum roll. He passed a restaurant with white tablecloths, elaborate frescoes depicting teeming Roman squares, chairs upended on the tables, their limbs raised in the air as though vying to answer a question posed by a hat-stand behind a marble podium. Somewhere in the distance some poor soul launched into a terrible coughing jag punctuated with howling inhalations.

Soon he was beyond the commercial section, among bungalows and one-story clapboard houses, all flickering with the bluish light of televisions, otherwise apparently unlit. Intermittent streetlights provided weak pools of sepia. The bulbs, grouped in fours, were caked in thick dust. At least one of every four had burned out. Bugs swarmed in clouds around them, and from one depended a long web, at the end of which spun a large, dead, dried spider, its legs all touching at their ends, as in a grim ballet. He passed a neglected garden, all tangled vegetation; splintered, split stakes; and sagging string. Somewhere in its dark depths something started and then fled, causing dried and dying leaves to whisper and crunch. As it passed by him, a few stakes toppled, their string pulling down wilted stalks.

Presently he saw a vapor-lit parking lot, empty of cars, forming an unnecessarily large frame around a small yellow convenience store. There was no sign to tell him the name of the store, but a blue and red OPEN sign blinked and winked in its window, illuminating outdated and faded advertisements for cigarettes. The largest depicted an impossibly angular blonde on a field of nauseous yellow, a cigarette between her fingers, shrieking, all her teeth bared. Something in her eyes that caused him tremendous unease. He rushed inside, if only to put the blonde out of his sight. The light shone blindingly bright. He angled a hand at his brow and searched the aisles. Behind the rows of chips and jerky and candy he located a bin of nearly frozen sandwiches impaled with toothpicks and smothered in an excess of cellophane. He grabbed one at random. He approached the unmanned counter.

On the television behind the counter, the grinning talk show host held out a long-fingered hand to introduce a magician. Greyson dropped his sandwich and it landed with a small mortal thud. The magician was someone he knew, Haskell, a former apprentice of his, now grown, a young man, baby fat gone. His blonde hair was rolled in a gelled wave; unthinkably, he was clad in faded dungarees and an untucked shirt. He strutted the small stage, pointing out into the unseen crowd, vamping. He exuded confidence. He cocked an eyebrow and pulled pinched fingers up to his ear, slowly extracted a long, gnarled carrot, wincing as it emerged.

Hack! Charlatan!

Haskell placed the carrot on a telephone table, repeated the trick with his other ear. Then he paused. His eyes bugged out and his hand went to his throat, shielding his twitching Adam’s‑apple. His cheeks puffed out froglike and he affected nausea, dizziness. He staggered, and Greyson found himself staggering a few steps as well, leaning on a display, gaze affixed to the screen. Haskell’s stomach contracted, expanded. Then something appeared at his thin, pursed lips. He reached up a tentative hand and pulled. Rabbit ears. He hacked, gagged, stumbled forward. With a retch, he extracted a small rabbit into his cupped hands.

The rabbit was festooned with strings of saliva; a long line of drool, tinged with bright red blood, wavering slightly in the air, ran from the man’s bottom lip to the rabbit’s puffed tail. With a sweep of his arm he wiped the saliva away. With his other hand he held the rabbit aloft by the scruff of its neck. The animal looked frightened. The boy placed the rabbit on the table between the two carrots. He raised his arm and turned away from the camera. Tucked into the back of his dungarees was a shining cleaver. He turned back, his face impassive, raised the cleaver in the air.

“All set?” A clerk, thin, a wisp of a mustache, had appeared as though from a trapdoor.

“If by that vague phrase you mean have I been helped, I most certainly have not. If you mean am I ready to transact business, I am… and have been.” The clerk sniffed and the two wordlessly, with mutual contempt, exchanged currency for comestibles. Greyson looked back at the television. The blood-spattered talk show set was now teeming with sodden rabbits, tethered together by an expansive shivering and glistening web of spittle. The boy magician was fully bent in the center of the set, soaking in the shocked applause. The camera swung over to the host, who was clapping his hands together madly, then to the band leader, who pumped a yellow fist, howling. Horribly, the band leader’s bathrobe had fallen open. The clerk, now turned away from Greyson, gaped at the television. He began to applaud, and then to cough, hacking and gasping and clapping his hands. Greyson fled, his right hand fastened over his mouth and nose to prevent the transmission of germs.

He lugged his case to the curb and sat under a streetlight. The wrapping on the sandwich was voluminous and apparently without beginning or end. After considerable effort he was finally able to free the sandwich. It seemed to consist of cold cuts pink and grey between two greenish layers of mayonnaise in which was suspended shreds of lettuce browned at the edges. All of it—bread, meat, and condiments—tasted of old bologna. Greyson stood and tossed the thing into a trash can. He would attempt, perhaps, to sneak an hors d’oeuvre at the venue.

So, his stomach issuing bubbly complaints, he turned from the main thoroughfare and wended his way down narrow avenues with close-together houses, all dark and silent, watched over by crouching cars. He turned onto Tiffany Terrace. At its terminus stood the venue, a tall and profusely turreted mansion that rose high into the starry sky. It was as though the street were nothing more than a long driveway, the other houses mere guard shacks and dormitories for the service staff necessary to maintain a house of that size. The front was lit by spotlights, all the windows ablaze. On a current of air there wafted faint music, a jaunty steam calliope, hissing cymbals, a tuba stalking a muffled trumpet. There were shrieks and laughter and ragged coughing. It sounded like a carnival.

As he lugged his case along, he saw that the other houses on the street appeared to have been abandoned midway through their construction. Their frames leaned right and left; some were partially collapsed onto cross-hatches of warped plywood. Tattered tarpaulins lay strewn over piles of bricks and concrete blocks. Further along, there were only foundations, then giant geometric holes in the ground. He fancied he could sense things lurking in those would-be basements, splashing around in rainwater and muck, and he hastened his steps.

He attained the expansive porch, bouncing his case alongside him as he ascended the stone steps. The door sat open and he walked into the pink-tiled foyer and looked down both side halls and then into the balcony-lined room ahead. No! It cannot be! Among the guests, mingling, laughing, holding aloft a glass of white wine as he made his way through the crowd—Spettrini! The man was elderly, bent, but he moved like a boy, quick and alive. Greyson had heard he’d drowned, or been torn apart by a bear… but there he was… or… wait. Was it him? Greyson practically sprinted into the room, his case bouncing behind him, only to be accosted by a large man in a powder-blue caftan who slid from a side hallway and blocked Greyson’s view. The man’s brows and fat mustache were bright white. “This way,” he said. “You’re late, you’re late.”

He put his hand on Greyson’s shoulder, grabbed the case with his other hand, and they trotted down a short hall and into a couch-lined side room that ran the length of the house. From the ceiling hung a strange, bulbous chandelier, moist and glowing with reflected light. All about Greyson was a gurgling, rushing sound, as of strong currents of flowing water. As he was hastened along, in an adjacent room he spied Haskell, his former apprentice, apparently fresh from his television appearance. He was seated in an overstuffed easy chair, surrounded by revelers, cradling in his arms a small rabbit whose head lolled loosely—its neck had been broken. Haskell was disconsolate, his mouth slack and his tear-streaked face a shade of red one associates with profound sun-burns. In the next room stood the television host, laughing, all gums and teeth, each arm around the waist of a skeletal brunette whose spine jutted from her back like the teeth of serrated knives. Also in that room sat three shivering, wet old women wound tightly in towels, being tended to by paternal, mustachioed sheriffs whose bulging stomachs tested the integrity of their uniforms. And the convenience store kid chatting up a portly blonde in a garish pink pantsuit. And the actor he’d missed on the talk show, waiting for the bathroom, one hand gripping a white handkerchief into which he was gagging loudly, the other grabbing desperately at his crotch in a manner befitting a child.

Finally, Greyson was brought into what he took to be the great room. At its easternmost edge was a vast stage, ringed with chaise lounges, ancient chairs, thrones, couches. From the center of the ovoid chamber, a stone column, thicker than four stout men, rose ceilingward; from it curved great balconies of white marble. Monstrous red curtains obscured the windows; the ceiling was high and far away, a pink and blue blur. But the room was empty of people.

A voice spoke, echoing around the room. Come back to me, it said. I have so much to teach. There are passageways to be conjured, paths to be struck through the walls that confine us to this world. Into the room through an archway, side-by-side, strode the television host, Haskell, the convenience store clerk, an old woman in a soaked nightgown, and a sheriff. Their clothes melted away as though consumed by invisible fire, and they squeezed together shoulder to shoulder and elongated, horizontal creases forming across their bodies as they became fingers that reached out for Greyson as a section of the column split off and bent to form a great arm with blue veins surfacing and pulsing at the narrowing wrist. The arm attached to the fingers, the front-most section flattening into a palm.

As Greyson fled, the walls and ceiling began to vibrate, fluttering like sheets. A terrible shriek tore through the chamber and a figure appeared at the entrance toward which he was heading. It was the woman from the hotel. Freed from her yellow-windowed booth, she was flush with color: rouged cheeks, scarves of brilliant yellow, shining purple, leaf-green. Her scarves rippled as though in a stiff wind. She was ragged, aged, buffeted by time, and absolutely beautiful. “Run,” she said. “Get out of this house as fast as your feet can take you.” The walls shook and a terrible roar cycled throughout the house like a demon train on an intricate track. A set of white spikes rose from the floor and another sank through the ceiling. They dug into the woman at her neck and up through her left leg. A glut of blood bubbled at her mouth.

Greyson ran. He reached out his hand to touch hers as he passed her. Her skin was warm. There was a jolt, as of static electricity, and as Greyson exited, the chamber began to contract around him. He bounded down the red hall (which was now damp and tinged with purple), reached the porch, bounded to the walk, and ran down the center of the street. The roar was deafening now, the street lit nearly as bright as daylight from behind him. He turned.

The roof of the house was sprouting white and black hairs that crawled up like a profusion of snakes. The dormer windows went white, and eyeballs, blue and blazing, rolled down into view like window shades. The front door widened, moldings splintering and falling to the ground. It bent into a grin as on either side of him the half built-houses began to rise like jagged arms, sending clouds of dirt into the air. The road began to split and crumble. Greyson turned again and ran as Spettrini pushed himself out of the ground and the house that was his head ascended into the night sky.

The post Spettrini appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Volume 2 focuses on the Drifter’s subsequent exploits, namely his attempt to find a foothold in the highly secretive and clannish Dodge City Film Industry, ruled over by the enigmatic and possibly immortal filmmaker Blut Branson. In this excerpt, the Drifter watches one of Blut Branson’s films from within the Temple, a theater created specifically to show Branson’s works, in the style of Bayreuth for Wagner’s operas.

By this point in the Retrospective, which has a strict no reentry policy, meaning that all films must be watched in the gathering daze of those shown before, I’m losing track of the beginnings and endings, and my critical faculties are fading. It’s starting to feel like one ultra-long film, which I suspect is the Programmer’s intention.

Now I’m watching a pastoral, old-timey version of Dodge City, a little Shtetl-like, as Dodge City’s past can sometimes seem – as if the Old Country were located not overseas but deep in the Heart of America – when a Wanderer appears in Town, stealing in under milky cloud cover just before dawn, skulking among the pastures like a warlock in a Hungarian folktale: gaunt and black-cloaked, face obscured under a wide-brimmed felt hat. The camera hangs back as he takes a few preliminary turns around the pens that hold The Dodge City Farm Animals – pigs, sheep, cows, and goats by the looks of it, though I have the impression that some animals are playing others, as is often the case in Branson films, “casting is 99% of Directing” being one of Branson’s favorite phrases, if Branson on Branson is to be believed.

After pausing in what looks like contemplation for a moment, the Wanderer leans in to whisper something in one of the animals’ ears. As soon as he’s finished, the animal – a goat, by the looks of it – yawns exaggeratedly and falls over. At this point, I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be dead or sleeping.

***

Dead, as it turns out.

Over the next few days, the film reveals the method that the Slaughterer (now that we know what he is) uses: he simply strides up to one of the farm animals on those long legs of his, whispers in its ear, and stands back to watch it gently, even peacefully, keel over dead.

“What’s he whispering?” is, of course, the none-too-subtle subtext of the film at this point – the phrase itself is whispered among the townspeople, who always populate the backgrounds of Branson’s films, played by actual Dodge City citizens, naturally, though of course they appear more squalid and haunted-eyed than most actual people around here, even those culled from the Annex.

“What’s he whispering?” Indeed. I whisper the phrase in my seat during a montage in which ten or twelve animals are killed in quick succession, though, this being a Branson film, I know better than to expect a concrete answer by film’s end, which, since the films are all shown back-to-back, isn’t a moment I have especially high hopes of even being able to identify as such.

In fast montage, the slaughterer – known now as “the Harmless Slaughterer,” a phrase whose ambiguity doesn’t quite dawn on me until I reflect on it later, once the trance of the film has at long last been broken – whispers in the ears of all the farm animals of Dodge City, causing them to keel over one by one, until the entire stock of the Town has been reduced to meat, which, according to five or six interview testimonials included in this section of the film, is the sweetest, butteriest, and most delicious meat ever tasted in these parts.

“Like goat-lobster,” says an old man in overalls with an eye-patch. “Not that I’ve tried the real thing.”

***

The only problem, of course, is that once all the animals are dead, none are left to kill. At this point, to no one’s surprise but to everyone’s disappointment, the Harmless Slaughterer departs, into the same grey cloudiness he emerged from, seemingly never to return. It reminds me of those old-fashioned stories in which a false prophet emerges from the wilderness to tell a Town the End is nigh, and thus that they should go ahead and kill all their livestock and spend all their money and commit whatever Incest they’d been holding themselves back from, and then furtively departs when it turns out the End is a bit further off than initially projected.

Dodge City reverts, out of necessity, to a vegetarian diet, at least until new breeding calves and sheep can somehow be obtained. The memory of the meat produced by the Harmless Slaughterer grows in the minds of the populace, passed down through the generations in another fast montage, “to the point where” (according to the film’s narrator) “it could only be described as Manna from Heaven, so sweet and succulent that no latter-day meat could ever do it justice.”

***

Indeed, this latter-day meat – once a few scraggly specimens are culled from the nearby woods and hastily domesticated by a cabal of desperate farmers – is stringy, tough, and grey. Worst of all, the blood and fear of its death throes – carried out in a cloud of meth by frantic slaughterers in the old slaughterhouse – is so apparent in every bite that few Dodge City citizens can stomach it, ravenous though they surely are.

The people get to wishing the Harmless Slaughterer would return, which, in due time (this being a film, and thus in large part a wish fulfillment machine) he does. He strides back into Town, visibly aged though clad in the same black cloak and felt hat as before, totally impervious to the wreckage left in his wake, and gets back to work.

Or he would have, if he’d deemed any of the animals worth slaughtering. But clearly he doesn’t. “Not a single viable specimen in the lot,” he says to the camera, speaking in what, if I’m not mistaken, is Branson’s voice. “Vicious, dumb, half-feral,” he says, more to himself than to the camera now, staring at the muddy ground he’s standing on.

Thus it comes to be that he spends his days lounging by the fountain in Sacrifice Square, whittling a stick, speaking to no one. Summoned but unable to get down to work.

No one, that is, until three teenagers – two boys and a girl, cousins perhaps – creep out to where he sits and settle in beside him. For a moment, no one speaks.

The tension in the theater is heavy.

Then one of them, the girl, clears her throat and says, “Sir, we can’t help but ask … what did you whisper to those animals all those years ago? To make them taste so good?”

The Harmless Slaughterer smiles and motions for her to draw near. Clearly, he’s not going to respond except by example.

High on the fearlessness of youth, she takes him up on his offer. Brushing her hair from her ear, she takes a deep breath and presses it up to his mouth. He licks his lips and places them against her cartilage, and then begins to transmit whatever it is.

He leans back as she falls dead with a relaxed, slightly lewd smile on her face.

Entranced, unable to stop himself, one of the boys submits to the same fate, falling on top of her.

Then – this is clearly the climax of the film – the third boy leans in to listen to the Harmless Slaughterer’s message, but, instead of keeling over, he smiles, deviously I believe, and wipes his ear with his palm, as if to cleanse it of grease or oil, and kneels on top of his dead friends or cousins.

For a moment, he prays.

Then he begins to eat of their doubtlessly sweet flesh, tearing into their necks and bellies with his teeth and fingernails while the Harmless Slaughterer watches from above, neither perturbed nor impressed. The meat looks soft and supple, like slow-cooked barbecue, and I don’t mind saying that I experience a pang of hunger, here in the theater.

When he’s eaten his fill, the boy looks at the camera, motioning it in for a close-up, and says, lips covered in blood and flesh, “And this is one of the innumerable ways in which I became Blut Branson, uniquely vested, as I am, with private knowledge of God’s Will and the inner strength to utterly disobey it.”

Then, with a wink, he leans in and whispers in the Harmless Slaughterer’s ear. The film ends with the Harmless Slaughterer falling over onto the pile of partially eaten bodies while the boy who has now revealed himself as Blut Branson steals his hat and cloak and walks into the distance, vanishing into the same gloom the Harmless Slaughterer emerged from. Like the Harmless Slaughterer, he will eventually reemerge to entrance and perhaps annihilate Dodge City all over again, in his own time and in whatever manner he sees fit.

Until then, we wait for his next film to begin.

The post A Room in Dodge City Vol. 2 Excerpt: The Harmless Slaughterer appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Alison Moore’s first novel, The Lighthouse, won the McKitterick Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards. Reviewing her latest novel, Death and the Seaside, Nina Allan referred to her as ‘one of the most gifted and interesting writers of weird fiction in Britain today’. Her short stories have been included in Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror anthologies and collected in The Pre-War House and Other Stories. Her website is www.alison-moore.com.

***

On the day of the protest, Glenda decided to drive out to the retail park to buy weedkiller. She was just setting out, getting into third gear, when a pigeon dawdling in the road caused her to brake hard. The pigeon seemed oblivious, even when Glenda’s two-tonne car was virtually on top of it. Perhaps the car actually was on top of it, because having stopped dead, Glenda could not see the pigeon anywhere. She was just about to get out to look beneath her wheels when she saw the pigeon wandering to the side of the road. She watched its strangely sluggish progress, and then drove on, towards the edge of the village.

The garden was really Dougie’s responsibility, but work was taking it out of him these days. On his day off, he just lay on the sofa, with the cat asleep on top of him, or sometimes the cat fell asleep on the carpet or in the lengthening grass, wherever it happened to be. Dougie himself did not really sleep, he just lay there, with no energy for Glenda, or for his projects: at the far end of the overgrown garden, a half-dug pond had been abandoned; and the second-hand furniture that he had bought to spruce up was gathering dust in the spare room. The last piece he had done was the little table on which their telephone stood: he had spent weeks sanding and then staining and varnishing it, although Glenda hated it, the darkness of its wood, and its rickety, skeletal legs.

She had just got onto a faster stretch of road leading out of the village when another pigeon staggered out in front of her car, not even flinching away from the vehicle as she skimmed past. She wondered what was wrong with these pigeons; they were like zombies.

It was not just Dougie; it seemed to be everyone who worked at that factory. They had all lost their pep. No one in the village liked the factory, although the men needed the jobs; it employed hundreds of them. It was an ugly, stony-faced building, ruining what had been a nice stretch of riverside, at a spot where the locals used to swim—some still did, but not many. The women had been worrying about the factory’s emissions, about what exactly was going into the air. Sometimes the smoke that went into the clouds looked yellow. And was anything going into the river, anything that should not be? Dougie used to fish there, but he did not do that anymore. And there was that terrible smell, which had to be coming from the factory.

At the bend, where the road turned away from the river, there was a pigeon, flattened against the tarmac. Its grey wings were splayed around its crushed body. Its underbelly was turned up to face the sky, to face the wheels of the oncoming traffic. These pigeons reminded Glenda of the summer outbreak of flying ants, which did not fly off at the flap of a hand as houseflies did; or they reminded her of the houseflies themselves, the listlessness that came over them at the end of the summer, leaving them too slow to avoid the swatter. But she had never before noticed the phenomenon in birds or other creatures.

Glenda had written the council a letter, which the other women had signed. The letter asked questions about those emissions; it suggested that the factory might be affecting the health of the workers; it requested a thorough investigation and the suspension of operations pending the results. The men had not signed the letter. The letter had been forwarded to a secretary who would liaise with the relevant committee; it was then, after somebody’s holiday, to be discussed at a forthcoming meeting. Not having heard anything for a while, Glenda had left messages on a council answerphone. In the meantime, the women were going to go on a protest march. “We never used to take things lying down,” Glenda had said to the women. “When we were students, we used to march.” They used to go down to London, on coaches; they had marched through the capital in their thousands, to force things to change. “We should,” the women had said in response. “We should do that.” Since then, they had been meeting every Wednesday morning at Fiona’s house. Fiona had provided refreshments while they made placards, nailing boards to wooden sticks and painting slogans on them—WE WANT ANSWERS!—slogans that they would shout as they marched. They had photocopied flyers to put through people’s letterboxes. They had notified the local paper.

Glenda glanced at the dashboard clock. It was almost noon; they were due to meet to start the protest at one o’clock. They would march down Union Street to the river, right down to the factory. They would stand outside that grim building and stamp their feet and shout, make some noise. Someone would have to respond; something would have to be done.

She pulled into the car park of the Do-It-Yourself store, disturbing a couple of birds, which flapped up into the air and flew away. She parked near the entrance and went inside the store. As she entered the gardening section, she recognised a neighbour who was standing looking at the lawnmowers. Glenda said hello. She could not think of her neighbour’s name. The woman continued to stare at a lawnmower, and Glenda thought that she had not heard her, but then the woman said, “I’ve been here for hours. I just can’t decide.”

“Are you coming on the protest?” asked Glenda.

“I just can’t decide,” said the woman.

Glenda turned away and picked up a spray-gun bottle of ready-to-use weedkiller. She took it over to the till, where the cashier was sharing a joke with a man who had bought paint in a shade called “Nursery”. The colour looked putrid to Glenda. The man turned away and the cashier looked at Glenda and said, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” said Glenda, lifting her free hand and touching her face. “It’s just a rash.” She handed over the weedkiller.

“Two pounds,” said the cashier.

Glenda looked at the silver and copper in her purse. She could not be bothered to count out the coins. She handed over a note and waited for her change, and then stood struggling with the zip of her purse. She took her weedkiller and moved towards the exit, aware of the cashier watching her as she walked away.

She strapped the weedkiller into the passenger seat, as if it were a child. She did not want it sliding around, busting open, weedkiller going everywhere. She drove home slowly, carefully.

It was after one o’clock when she returned to the outskirts of the village, where she found Fiona sitting on the kerb, with a placard on the pavement beside her. Glenda came to a stop and wound down her window. She said to Fiona, “Have they gone already?”

Fiona raised her eyes. “Who?”

“The other women,” said Glenda. “Have they started the march?”

“No one else has turned up,” said Fiona.

“Oh,” said Glenda. “Well, I have to take the car home, then I’m going to walk back down here and join you. Even if it’s just the two of us, we can still march down to the factory. We can still make some noise.” She drove home, passing a car that was so badly parked it looked as if it had just been abandoned mid-manoeuvre, and stopping to move a child’s bike that had been left lying across the road. She backed her car into a kerbside space and took the weedkiller inside. She put on some sunscreen and checked her appearance in the mirror. She was wearing the olive-green eyeliner that Dougie had once said brought alive her copper-coloured eyes, but now she wondered if it was just making her look a bit ill. She put down some food for the cat. By the time she got back down to the corner with her placard, Fiona was no longer there. Glenda thought about going to the factory anyway, on her own, but she did not really think she had the energy.

When Glenda got home again, she filled a glass with water from the tap, and drank it standing at the sink. It was past lunchtime, but she was not hungry, and there was still food in the cat’s bowl from before. She went through to the lounge and sat down in an armchair, next to the second-hand table with the phone on it. She had disliked that table, she thought, but now she could not really see what was wrong with it; she did not have any strong feelings about it either way. Next to the phone were her phone numbers. There was the number for the council—she would have to call them again at some point, about that letter she had sent to them. And there was Fiona’s number—she ought to call her; she ought to call everyone. The protest would have to be rescheduled. The numbers seemed to blur; she must be tired. She switched on the TV and watched the afternoon programmes. She was still sitting there when Dougie came in from the factory. He lay down on the sofa.

“Have you seen the cat?” asked Glenda.

“Uh-uh,” said Dougie.

In between TV programmes, Glenda said, “I’m going to go up to bed,” but she did not actually move for a while.

Eventually, she got to the bathroom and picked up her toothbrush. She looked at herself in the mirror. It felt like being stared at by a stranger. Her eyes were the colour of dull pennies. She left the bathroom and got into bed. She looked at her book but she felt that she just wanted to sleep. She realised that she had somehow not cleaned her teeth after all. She thought about her unbrushed teeth rotting in the night, but she did not get up again; she just left them.

***

A week and a half later, Glenda found the cat beneath the back wheel of her car, against the kerb. It must not have moved out of the way when Glenda was parking. She had not been anywhere since the previous weekend, when she went to fetch that weedkiller.

She stood at the kerb, trying to remember what she had come outside for. There was no point driving over to Fiona’s house: the group had dissolved.

Glenda’s placard was still propped against the front wall. She picked it up, looking at the faded lettering: WE WANT ANSWERS! Had she written that? It did not sound like her, like something she would say. Perhaps she had got somebody else’s placard by mistake. She stood on the pavement, near the kerb. She could see the factory chimney in the distance, down by the river, belching its mustard smoke into the sky. Dougie would be taking his lunch break soon. She could walk down there and try to see him, see if he was feeling any better. If she found, on the way, that she did not want to keep carrying the placard, which may or may not have been hers, she could just leave it somewhere.

She stepped into the road, with the sign hanging down, the message (WE WANT ANSWERS!) dangling in the gutter. She moved out into the road, slowly, as if she were stepping through the mud at the edge of the river, mud in which Dougie had seen fish lying belly up.

She did have a sense of the size and weight of the vehicle that was coming towards her. She was not oblivious to the juggernaut that was bearing down on her. But it felt more peripheral, more distant, than it was. She was moving forward, looking towards the far side of the road, but with no great sense of urgency.

The post The Voice of The People appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

What follows is an excerpt from Desirina Boskovich’s debut novella Never Now Always out June 27th from Broken Eye Books. Boskovich’s short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, F&SF, Kaleidotrope, PodCastle, Drabblecast, and anthologies such as Aliens: Recent Encounters, The Apocalypse Triptych and Tomorrow’s Cthulhu. Her nonfiction pieces on music, literature, and culture have appeared in Lightspeed, Weird Fiction Review, the Huffington Post, Wonderbook, and The Steampunk Bible. She is also the editor of It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction (Cheeky Frawg, 2013), and together with Jeff VanderMeer, co-author of The Steampunk User’s Manual (Abrams Image, 2014). Her next project is forthcoming from Abrams Image –Starships & Sorcerers: A Secret History of Science Fiction, in collaboration with Jason Heller. Find Desirina online at www.desirinaboskovich.com.

Never Now Always is the story of Lolo, who can’t remember how she came to be in a place with endless rooms and voiceless Caretakers. Her memories are fragmented and blurred, always slipping away, but at least now, she has remembered how to write — even if her only ink is her own blood. Her desperate efforts to recall her past are all she has, along with Gor, her loyal friend inside this bleak place. But perhaps her sister is here somewhere in this labyrinth, too…

(lolo)

There comes a night I cannot write. My tiredness slurps all through my bones—I feel it hard in every thought.

So weary from questions: facts I can’t recollect, days I can’t recall. My skin is filled with scars, some fresh, some scabbed. I’m losing space to cut. I hurt all times and every day. I hurt inside my chest.

I hurt with a rust-red crisscross labyrinth of the wounds across my legs, my arms, my side.

I hurt inside my heart.

This night, I’m swaddled in my bunk. There sounds the beep-booping of machines, the breathing of rapt children. The structure breathes, too, exhaling air, inhaling back. These unquiet rustlings, these songful hums.

I tell myself, Be strong. I tell myself, Be brave.

I am Lolo, and I am the child that remembered writing. I am the one that could save us all. I can’t grow tired. I can’t be afraid. Pain is just pain.

But this night, I can’t steel myself against the cuts.

“Gor?” I say.

“Lolo?”

“Can I come down?”

“Yes.”

I drop myself down this stable ladder, wincing against the pain in arms and legs, resisting urges that my groans and whimpers show. Gor cannot hear; Gor cannot know.

I crawl into his Gor-stink sheets. He wraps his arm around my shoulder. He brushes my forearm’s wound. It hurts me, but I don’t cry out.

“How do you feel?” Gor asks me. I do not remember a time before when Gor spoke these words. I didn’t know he knew such things. He must have learned in his own memory-duties what these complicated words mean.

“Tired,” I say. “I feel tired.”

“I feel tired,” Gor says. “I want to go home.”

His speech brings up such thick and awful feelings. It comes unexpected, so I can’t hold back. My throat is sore, my eyes brimming with hot tears. I feel a lurch inside my chest. I know that feeling. Such few words hold all this feel.

“Go home,” I repeat. I shape the words myself. This speech transforms me everywhere. This want becomes my heart.

The feels are everything, but I don’t know what they mean.

It’s been long since I lay tight in this bunk with Gor. Some days, some nights. I don’t know numbers. This absence is distance, getting wider. This lack is the empty feeling in my arms, but I wriggle my front to his back, hold dear. It’s been long. Does he know?

I don’t know what he knows. Our time is shot with holes.

I think of the Caretakers: it’s different for them. What one knows, all know. Their thoughts are not their own. What one sees, all see. The Voice speaks to them in ways we cannot hear. For children, the Voice is sound. For Caretakers, the Voice is something else. They have no secrets. They have no gaps. They live like one being in many parts.

What comfort, I think. If we could be like them. If we never had to feel alone again. If Gor and I were not two but one. And I knew his memories and thoughts. And he knew mine. And children would not recount their dreams because the dream would hold us all.

If we felt no need to hold our stories because they were held somewhere else. No spaces between us. No walls to separate.

This thought comes to me: one day we will be like the Caretakers. The Voice will speak in silence, and we will hear. I will be Gor, and Gor will be me. The structure will know us all. The story will be shared.

I squeeze tight against Gor’s bony shoulders, against these mournesome thoughts. In this now, our bodies hold us: my blood-marked flesh is vast and wide, my thoughts beyond a gulf that can’t be crossed. Gor squeezes my hand, draped against his own soft belly. I feel his breathing; he feels mine. There is no prick of needle nor gold syringe, but still, I feel the bliss wash over me, the lapping of the light. Gor smells like home.

“I know about before,” he says.

“Before what?”

“Before now.”

I wait in silent mirth, laughing quiet in my chest, lest he say again breakfast. But he doesn’t speak.

“What was before?” I ask finally.

“Home,” he says. “Home was before.”

Again, that feeling, like I’m struck. For a moment, I can’t breathe. The love and longing, the need and loss, all rising up. That feel like tubing in my throat.

“We’ll go,” I say. “We’ll go, Gor.”

This now is here. I’m Lolo. He’s Gor. Together in this bubble as we’ve been before. This night, we sleep soft in tangle of warm limbs and samelike smell of breath and farts.

***

In this now, there is a slope of grassy hillside. Green grass tickles rough and tender on bare legs, leaving woven mesh patterns against my skin. Undeterred, I lay content in emerald stubble, disregarding such prickles, such tickles, such itching delight. Burrowing fingertips into dirt, feeling earth embrace the whorls.

The world smells mouth-watering scrumptious. Dad tends the grill, the fire flickers with the lip-smacking savory of sizzling meats. Mom on the deck, arranging mustard and ketchup, setting out plates.

I stare up at endless sky falling toward the hush of periwinkle. The first star is Venus; the first star is another world.

The first stars twinkle splendorous against the fading light while bats swoop and dive, wheeling like fighter planes, mosquitoes their prey. The cicadas carry the song of a whir and drone and purr so loud it drowns.

Upon me flops this golden fursome beast, rough tongue aflap, wet jowls adrip, black nose all cold and snuffle. He pants and lolls and licks, and I groan and laugh beneath the doting weight.

Beside me, some giggles: just near my shoulder is Tess, sitting prim on a blanket with knees pulled up and sparkle-polished toes. “Ugh! Bentley, off,” I grumble and huff from my mutt-flattened chest.

And he’s off, my thighs the launch pad to run and pant another lap.

Tess sits statue-still with perfect gaze. Tess watches the world. Tess longs to catch a firefly, so she waits and wills the flickering aviators to come to her. I tell her I can catch one faster. She dares me. I bet her. But while she persists in her patient pose, I flail and grab at golden cosmonauts. Each wandering lightning bug escapes my grasp.

Meanwhile, Bentley has set his sights to catch a hot dog. He lingers in usual fashion around the grill, evincing innocence. “Get lost, Bentley,” Dad says and tests a beefy patty. This dog is naught but wounded dignity and sits paws forward, wholly courteous. His manner suggests he is only here to help. Dad deposits a half-dozen charred franks upon the plate and turns back to the grill.

Bentley!

He’s up like a shot, grabs one frank between his jaws, races hasty. A great hue and cry goes up from the man behind the grill. Dad chases the dog across the yard, waving his grease-charred spatula all the way while the dog gobbles it all in one choking gulp, greedy as can be. Dad yells. Bentley licks his chops, not even pretending regret. Tess and I laugh until our sides hurt, and we almost can’t contain our pee.

Bentley slinks away to nurse his paws and gloat. The rest of us take our greedy selves to the deck and fill our plates to feast on picnic fare.

Night falls. Darkness comes. The sky is star-spangled indigo. We settle upon the blanket, Tess and I beside—Bentley between us, snoring now, our fingers buried in his golden scruff.

We are like this when the first fireworks flare and spark across the sky, emerging from beyond the trees, like rage confetti being born. Bentley is alarmed by such pyrotechnics. With the second outburst, he rears up like a startled horse and whines and scratches at our hands, determined to alert us to these perils.

“Shh, Bentley,” we say.

“Put him inside,” Dad says, still tending grievance for the hot dog incident.

“But he’ll be scared,” Tess says when luminescence bursts with splitting thunderclaps once more. Bentley is quite unamused. He cowers, trembles. “I’ll go with him,” Tess volunteers, and something inside me stirs. My sister should not miss this rocket show we cherish. Such magics only happen once a year.

But Bentley quivers pitiful, clearly caught between two yearnings: the urge to run far and fast and the need to bury his trembling snout between our knees for harbor. And Tess is concerned only for this sad creature, earnest to bring him somewhere safe.

In that firecracker-dazzled instant, I see my sister unobscured, her distinct and unrepeated self. This amorphous person who has been beside me all my life sharpens into focus as a rare and peerless soul. Her innermost life unknown to me yet still a matter of fact. By this revelation, I’m stunned (as more explosions sparkle).

“I’ll go, too,” I say.

And this decides eternity. Our paths are fixed. Our destiny resolved. There is no turning back from everything to come. There is no end to how long the infinite can be. Together, with blinds closed against the racket and tumult, my sister and I cuddle and snarfle our fear-farting dog upon the couch until the pyrotechnics pass.

***

In my bunk at night, I make my sharp ink. I draw a dog. I draw a girl. I draw a lightning bug aflame. I draw explosions in the sky. I draw another girl.

These visions of a home are built on senses I’ve forgotten. The scent of grass. The smell of meat. The taste of ketchup. The feel of bare feet upon the frazzled ground. The breeze in my hair. The furry beast.

I remember the feeling of remembering. I remember thoughts about the thing.

Though I can’t recall the thing itself.

Infused with yearning, I try to draw these sensations I’ve forgotten. I hold them to myself like magic spells. I build them from broken building blocks.

I get angry with myself. It hurts so much to render these stupid symbols on this wall, and they barely even brush the truth. They are so far from the feeling they seek to hold.

My tentative scrawlings are like me: a search for words I cannot know, to ask the questions I still can’t form, for answers I do not and may never vision.

Reaching, grasping, blindfolded, and bound.

Not even close to close enough.

***

Gor and I file into the breakfast hall, surrounded on all sides by children. On the surface, all seems the same: bright lights, long tables. The walls glow yellow, their often morning hue. We line up one by one to press our fingertips to the space above each cubby and reveal our breakfast trays. The Caretakers offer their dead dull gaze. Chatter ebbs and flows as we try our voices again.

On the surface, all seems the same, but underneath, something’s changed. As I wait, I puzzle out this different feeling, handle its aspects in my mind.

Same acid glare. Same chow drowned in awful brown. Same cold and leathered meats. Same lackluster pajamas.

I press my fingertips. I take my tray.

As I walk back to my customary spot, I see it: we’ve become tight-knotted camps. The children sit in clusters. Each closed in a circle to themselves, their conversation eager yet quiet as if they hope the others do not hear.

Around Gor and I, the sitting’s sparse. It seems we are left this skimpy handful of children with no clique.

Gor is undisturbed. He scarfs down heaped forkfuls of some gloppy eats. I sit beside. I perk my ears and strain for fragments of the others’ talk.

It is, as always, talk of visions and memories and muffled dreams.

I pat Gor’s forearm. “Stay. I’ll be back.” He nods, mouth full. I grab my tray and sidle over to the closest bunch of conspiring children. They scooch to welcome me into their company and wait, expectant for my story.

But I am canny. I hold my cards. Instead, I press them with one question I’ve come to know must matter most: “How do you remember home?”

Eyes alight, they tell me of their towering world. This needle pierced from ground to sky, and them in the middle, suspended somewhere miles above the brown ground flecked with silver, the brown sky streaked with cream. How they scampered and ran in its tunnels and shafts and played amongst the humming tanks where food grew and fuel brewed. And took the elevator as far up as they dared, always climbing further toward the sky—never quite reaching. But they dreamed they’d reach the top. The ground was yesterday. The sky tomorrow. These time-meaning words they toss with certainty.

“How did it end?” I ask.

But this they cannot say. And they eye me with suspicion. Suspecting now that I am not with them, that their past is not my own. Our fragile stories cannot bear opposition. And indeed, I know this odd tale they’ve constructed—a tower vaster than any city—’tis but a dream. There’s no such edifice. There’s no such place. They are much mistaken.

But I will not disabuse rapt children of their notions. Regretful, I take my tray and move on to the next.

These kids claim to hail from a world called Moon, their home a shimmering bubble on a plane of polished rock. Above, the searing night, the diamond stars, the stretching on eternal. How quiet it must be, that dusty moonscape, undisturbed by human footstep. The kind of world where a labyrinth like our own might thrive. But they describe it lovingly.

“How did it end?”

This they know. I see it in their eyes, their heart-numb gaze, their trembling lips. The bubble pierced. The high-pitched roar as their breathings leaked away. The roar of machinery, the clang of sirens, every warning signal at once to warn at panicked volumes, to let loose bellows and wails. And this, better than silence. Silence is the worst.

They grow sober as they speak of how it feels when air runs out, the fluttering in their chests, the weak overwhelm, lips blue, blacking out. Then seeing the slick, dark orbs of the Caretakers, peering close—too close—inspecting swollen, lifeless tongues.

They are delusional, too. So I leave behind their huddle.

Other children tell of tents strung up in canopies of green. They pranced on swaying catwalks, stretched from tree to tallest tree. They dropped leaves onto the breathing, screeching green beneath. The constant chatter of birds and sweet glimmer of the dew.

But then—I’m rattled to see the girl crying as she tries to speak—the whole ground shakes, like earthquakes, as ancient trees bigger ’round than all this room are ripped and tossed like twigs. When they fall, the whole earth trembles. The forestworld turns topsy-turvy as the Harvesters destroy it all. The birds shriek in panicked fright. The sky rains blood and feathers.

I’m discouraged by their stupid thoughts. I come back around to Gor.

As I made my tours of these raving bands of lunatics around the lengthy table, Gor struck up conversation with those nearest us, or they with him. Timid but jubilant, they cite the allure of the ice cream truck, the patter of flip-flops, the feeling of sand between their toes. They remember a snowman in winter with a carrot for a nose, the mug of cocoa with melting cream, the sting of chapped and bloody lips, the fire’s bright blaze.

Such nows I have not felt myself, yet at some core level, I feel their truth. I don’t know how I know. This sense of coming home, it simply fills my bones.

With tear-choked throat, I share what memories I can.

***

In this now, a looming space with herds of frightened children, ragged breath and staring eyes, moving across the concrete floor. Shivering and much afraid.

Overhead, the roof is almost too far removed to see, where darkness gathers among the metal rafters.

We huddle close, one to another against the cold and windy drafts. It comes to me: this warehouse is larger than an airplane hangar. There are enough children in this place to populate another world.

And I am with my sister, Tess. We are together as we’ve been now all along. I hold her hand tight as can be. I am still the youngest, though only slightly smaller. I need her badly, as she needs me. We cling to each other and wait to see what days or times will come. And though my heart is beating hard and fast and my breath is coming quick, though my throat is hard and tight and shivers rattle through my trembling frame, I know we are together. This we have, at least.

I have forgotten all befores. Already, I cannot remember how we came to be inside this massive loft nor what happened to allow this circumstance. I recognize no faces among the crying, bleating children.

The Caretakers emerge into the room from some door we cannot see. So many, more than we’ve ever seen before, all congregated in one place. They stream in all directions like a horde of insects, like a nest of ants disturbed.

Tess and I cling still tighter, determined that we should not be separated. They will not pry our hands apart.

As the Caretakers approach, they bring overwhelming dread with them like a nightmare, a gross and creeping cloud. They make the edges of my sight feel dim and dark and fogged. My stomach churns, and all this story swirls along the edges. A rushing in my ears. A conviction that the world must end.

The Caretakers grip some kind of tool and press it to the forehead of each child. It whirs and grinds and emits a glare of light. With beeps and whistles, this scanner tells them something.

Tess and I watch all this with trepidation.

Until the Caretakers come to us. They scan her head, then mine, with a tickling, prickling presence just past the edges of my brain. It’s like a shadow creeping close. It doesn’t hurt. But it makes my stomach flip-flop, feel strange.

They point their pale and clammy fingers at our entwined sister hands. They do not speak. They can’t. Nonetheless, we grasp their point: let go our fingers. We refuse.

The two of them with damp and bony hands grip fast the two of us. They clamp our hands. They are stronger than they look: limp and moist but forceful. They pry apart our fingers, and though we shriek and flail, there’s little we can do. We are separated. We are two.

Grabbing fast to my right hand so tight it hurts, the Caretaker splays apart my fingers. He holds my palm to the scanning tool’s hot edge. Fast as lighting, it imprints a symbol on each fingertip. My hand stings, but it’s all too quick to badly hurt.

Soon as this code is imprinted, the Caretaker releases me. It lets go, and I almost fall. I gaze with wonder at my palm, the symbol etched upon each whorl. This blackly purple ink, suspended just beneath the skin as if always part of me.

I look for Tess, to show her, to see if they’ve done the same to her. I look for her, to take her hand in mine.

But she’s gone. In mounting panic, I scan the room. I see only lost and frightened children, so many sobbing faces.

I glimpse her back, her hair. They’re pulling her away. She’s peering over her right shoulder and trying to fight back. But the Caretakers drag her forward.

I lose sight of her amongst all the other roiling kids.

I take off in a run. I swerve and dodge, not bothering to say, Excuse me, tripping and falling more than once but pushing on. With force of sorrow, I will this crowd to part for me.

Once past this wave of children, I reach these towering glass cubes. Four walls, one roof, perfectly encased, this massive cage all made of glass.

There are six—seven—ten—twelve—too many to count. Each fills up with children as the Caretakers sort all kids into these vast transparent hulls.

I see in time, just soon enough, as Tess is herded in this glass. The crate is filled with children, all teeming, frightened, stampeding. I run as fast as I can, tripping over all and sundry, to get into this same box.

Before I’m there, the door slides shut. The edges seal.

This glass is now impermeable, as if those doors were never there at all.

I run around all sides, panting, frantic, heaving, searching for an opening. Instead, I see my sister, looking sadly through the glass. I stand on one side; she on the other.

I slap the glass with mournesome sobs and rage that I can’t break through. She does not rage. It’s not her way. She’s still and quiet as a marble statue.

She places her palm flat against the glass. On the tips of her fingers, I see her own black-purple code. Five symbols.

These letters or numbers or icons—whatever they are, these ideograms—they are emblazoned deep and pure upon my brain. This stark and graven image remains when nothing else remains. This awful vision I will not ever shake.

There’s a sort of grinding, a sound like—a steel ship hull run aground into a granite cliff? A grating sound like this. The floor opens up, becomes a tunnel or a well or a massive shaft into a cave. Her glass box drops, descends, is sucked away. And with it Tess.

But now I know: the tattoo etched into her fingertips is inscribed inside my heart. I don’t know what the symbols mean. But I know how they look.

This piece I can record. This knowledge I can keep.

***

I paint this code upon the wall above my bunk. I make it my study.

I learn this code as if it were my own.

***

The children in the memory lab, we do not leave. We have our sleeping bunks inside our pods, our room for meals, our dressing hall where cleaning happens. We have our parlor where some children talk and others play, and always, there are mystic puzzles, strange games, shifting heaps of blocks that join each other when they touch, becoming different shapes. The Caretakers prod us to the parlor, and the Voice speaks that we play, and we obey—to disobey brings pain. We go to the pedal room for exercise.

Of course, we have the fearsome spaces with chairs that bind and the Caretakers watching in each corner. In these rooms, we remember all nows that came before. And also, we forget.

There are other halls with other labs and other rooms, all filled with tools that make us tremble, shiver, weep. These, too, we can visit if we wish. All are marked with one large symbol glimmering on the walls.

Beyond, we do not go.

It’s wrong to walk in passages marked with other emblems. Why, I cannot say. I don’t recall what teachings made us know. If pressed, I could supply no reasons why the symbol looming in this concourse must be our whole entire world.

But walking in the light of other symbols is like neglecting the order of the Voice. It makes the body ache. It grips the chest with cold. It makes my fingers itch and makes my stomach churn, like heaving silver schools of fish (I know I’ve seen on tranquil screens). With every step, the pain comes worse, and I am more compelled to run.

In visions, I’ve seen the structure climb. I’ve seen this labyrinth built in the wreckage of our worldly home (sweet place of flitting fireflies and grass as green as our dwelling’s walls at lunchtime). I know how vast the maze must be. And yet, we stay in this tight space. Confined to the narrow by our own capricious feels.

Some moments I know: my sister is here. Somewhere in this tangled maze, she is. I don’t know how to get to her. Not yet. But I will.

This I know: I will.

***

It comes to me.

There are whole hours, perhaps whole days, when I forget this code carved on my fingertips. It is with me like breathing. It calls me hither and yon; it summons me to take my lunch tray in my turn, to bring myself to memory rooms like a pirate walks a plank. These things I do without quite knowing. Sleepwalking, here and there.

Then, sometimes, I turn my palm and gaze in wonderment at these characters.

One breakfast, I cup my palm and look. It’s there, of course. There all along. My breath catches quick.

I see it for what it is: my own monogram. Written on my body, which must hold all of me, all that I feel and know, however little this might be. This code my own.

And in this moment, I notice—for the first time? Nothing here is for the first time, that I’m sure—I notice the first symbol, etched into my thumb, is the same that hovers on the wall of every space in our rapt children’s lair.

I look to that hologram and back to my first stubby finger.

Hasty and ill-mannered, I grab Gor’s hand, knocking his flimsy fork away. (Ever good-natured, Gor does not reproach, just scoops his morsels with his other hand, eating lumps with fingers bare.) I turn his palm upward, compare his tattoo to my own. His thumb’s the same. This symbol, we share.

My thoughts grow quick. I run from kid to kid, grabbing hands, comparing. I do not tell them what I think. This secret is my own.

We share the same mark on our thumbs. It marks our territory, what places we can travel without rousing thoughts of buried traumas.

This now, I know. I know this map, the map that leads to her.

Before I leave, I bow beside the breakfast table and palm that fallen fork. I slip it up my sleeve. I do not need this fork. It has no urgent attributes nor skills. But I know now what it is to own something, to save one small token for myself. The feel is sweet.

I sneak back to my bunk. I pull back my mat to reveal the secret stash: things I’ve nabbed to be all my own. Syringe, first. My own first property. Then other bits and bobs: some strips of cloth from undershirts. A stolen block. A purloined spoon. A pilfered sweet, now surely stale.

My fork now joins the hoard.

Stretched out flat, I study the code etched in flaking rust upon the wall.

This is all I have. This is all I know.

Somehow, it must guide me.

***

At night, I wait to hear Gor’s steady snores below. I lay silent, eyes open, back flat and arms straight. I gaze up at my bubble’s curve and imagine I can see the before-world. When there were lawns and dogs and bikes and stars.

’Til Gor’s snuffling breaths come thick and heavy. My time is now.

I slip from bed. I tread soft upon the rails, down the ladder, past my slumbering Gor. Then tiptoe down this lengthy hallway where pods and pods stretch out for lonesome miles, rapt children fast asleep inside each one. The machine lights flicker on the walls. The glimmering arrows point to other prisons. The floor in these halls is always springy-soft, like molded bunks, so there’s not much need to tiptoe. I do it, still.

I hold my breath as children stir and murmur, as sheets rustle and breathing shifts. They are lost in dreams. They pay me no mind.

I see a clump of the Caretakers at the junction where the arrows turn to other halls. I gasp, afraid of what will happen if I’m caught: something bad, I know. I can’t remember what but feel such things will not end well.

I flatten myself against the wall as small and shadowlike as I can. And wait.

Their pale bald heads are turned away from me, so no eyes watch. I flit on past.

Into some vestibule. The door closes, and I’m in an empty room. Nothing but floors and walls, like someone commenced to build and forgot to finish. The floor glows softly, and in this dim luminescence, I see no other door.

But there are facts I know about this place: not all doors are easily seen. Some are hidden, wearing odd camouflage for reasons of their own. Some doors occur where there was no door before. Some doors are made through force of will.

I start from where I am. Pacing slow along the wall, my gentle fingers searching. Reaching high, reaching low. Exploring with my hands.

I reach a corner. I start afresh.

I go on in this fashion until my fingertips find a place they fit, five muted circles too tentative to see. I rest them there until I feel that tingling pulse. My whorls, that wall: they interface. I give command.

There is the door. I go on through.

The hard part starts.

A novel symbol hovers on these walls. Like two squiggle lines married by a slash. This symbol is not imprinted on my thumb, nor my sister’s. This place is just a place that separates. So I walk on through. But the pains begin.

It starts in my chest, this panicked feeling. This tightness, like I cannot breathe. I feel like crying out, begging for air, but I know I must not make a peep.

My stomach roils, all insides shrinking inward, clenching like a fist.

It’s like pain but also like pain’s dread.

Like something stalking me, a dread horde just beyond my shoulder but always drawing nearer.

(A Harvester, ripping children’s limbs, spraying, squirting, barfing blood.)

A coffin that encloses, buried beneath the miles of earth, the ground pressing always closer still.

(A wave of blood.)

Something that will surely hurt or kill me soon, my stubborn self as fragile as a robin’s egg.

I walk. I drag my feet along, no matter how they wish to slow. I force myself to pace through all the stomach heaves and heart tremors. I tell myself it’s not so bad.

It isn’t, though my tears come fast now, trudging down this endless hall, and my jaw aches from clenching.

I do it still.

For a moment, I think to give up, retreat. I turn around. Fall back a step or two. Away from here and back to home. And with this sudden swerve, all my body’s warning signs desist. I feel flooding relief.

But I don’t surrender. I have to find my sister before I forget again. I will forget. We all forget. Time is short.

Another word for time is short.

So I turn my face toward the future, toward the space ahead that hurts, and resolute through all that dread and angst, I go.

I am Lolo, the child who remembered writing, the child who gave her blood, the girl who remembered true the world as it was. And this pain is not too much.

But as I press on, I flash on momentary thoughts of tortures. Of being prodded through these forbidden hallways by the Caretakers wielding pointed sticks. We step, are shocked. Fall back screaming, are poked again, step forward, are shocked again. Again, again.

I will not let this vision surface. I press it down, fierce and forceful as I can. That now is past. This pain is only echoes.

I come to a new symbol: a circle within, a circle without. I see no Caretakers. This is some unending tunnel that connects many others, maybe all. These tunnel walls are dark like charcoal and blank without markings. No lighted arrows show the way. The floor’s firm and unyielding, not like the springy softness where rapt children tread.

I keep on going.

I come to a crossroads. I don’t know how to choose between two ways. One to my one hand, one to my other. I stare at my fingertips as if they hold the answer. I search my tremors.

I search my mind, but I can’t tell if I’ve been at this spot never, once, or a million times before. There is always this sense: all of this has happened before, all of this will happen again. But I’m certain on no moment but the present.

This now is all.

Unknowing if it’s memory or whim, I choose left.

And walk and walk. And take more turns. Until I know I’m lost for sure.

Those pains have quieted, but I’m sore all over. My body aches from holding back, from suffocating all I feel. I feel such hurt. I’m tired.

I thought I could find her: such silliness and such delusions. I am no better than the raving children with their tales of endless skyscrapers and bubbles on the moon and swinging ropes that link the ancient trees. I, too, tell myself stories that can’t be true. To live in this nightmare without a story would be too much to bear.

I sit down for a while, rub my hurting feet. I pick at blisters and worry at my aching toes. For the longest time—truth be told, I can’t remember quite how long—my world has been no bigger than an acorn. My body struggles with such distances.

Perhaps, this night I walked halfway across the world.

Tired, I drift briefly to sleep, sitting there against the polished emptiness of a hard black wall.

In a dream, my long-lost Bentley nudges me. His cold wet snout touches my own small nose. He puts his scruffy paw in mine. “Get up,” he woofs. “Get up.”

I open my eyes. No golden beast to love. But still I stand.

I drag myself forward. The light is ramping up, the glow inside the walls slowly growing bright.

Just ahead, I see what I seek: a triangle, inside a square.

It is a jolt. This vision I’d been holding close, now so large and real. The symbol I inscribed upon the wall, remembered from my sister’s thumb in dreams. Now here.

And something else. I remember. I remember—I can’t say what.

But pain stabs across my side, and for a moment, I catch my breath, grab hard myself. It passes.

This pain is echoes too.

I search for the door into this next place.

The post Excerpt: Never Now Always appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Suitably impressed by the dark tenor of this subversive aesthetic—the book’s “handshake” becomes a tender skin-graft, if you allow the metaphor—I was unprepared for the subtle humour that permeates these stories. In Devlin’s tales, a generous spirit busily hums under the threnody for a dying world.

Given the broad remit of weird fiction, the ten stories collected in You Will Grow Into Them exemplify diversity. They range from the short and scary to the more unsettling or darkly fantastical. I advise reading them in the order they are published, simply because—for me, anyway—it worked nicely. Some may be familiar to Interzone readers, or from elsewhere, but many are fresh to this collection.

A word about Unsung Stories, the publisher of You Will Grow Into Them. Under the “What We Do” section of their website, they list a simple mandate: “Weird stories, beautifully told.” Judging from their website, they have a small staff and a brisk catalogue of thirteen titles. You Will Grow Into Them is their most recent publication. New publishers of the weird are always a welcome sight.

***

One of Devlin’s primary occupations here is a general vision of organic decrepitude and the strange regrowth of new kinds of life. The volume’s fascination with despoliation and fungal blossomings yields a rich discourse on the mushrooming afterlife that springs up after the worst that can happen actually happens. Uncanny and deeply weird, these new lives are ambivalent at best. In this regard, it finds an unlikely fellow-traveler of these weird, resilient trails in Anna Tsing’s academic study The Mushroom at the End of the World.

As “Two Brothers” suggests, for instance, decay is possibly only the hidden face of how people are “made” in a time of increasingly technocratic modernity. The story condemns authoritarian patriarchy by way of examining the bodies and emotional states that are cast out or disallowed for its better functioning. By multiplying human bodies, “Two Brothers” edges carefully toward a vision that sees how human frailty disappears at the mark of a triumphant inhuman carapace. What is weird in this tale is not the father’s behaviour; it is fact that something skeletal and human still lives in the trees and the mud, no matter its distance from recognizable society.

Many references take up an English world. This goes far beyond the invocation of Saki’s decaying aristocracy in “Two Brothers”. In fact, if a person were interested, they could draw connections from across the canon of weird fiction. “The Last Meal He Ate Before She Killed Him” reads as a Wellsian dystopic take on a John Collier story. “Passion Play” is a deliciously religious story of failure in the vein of M.R. James. “The Bridge” miniaturizes the spiky delusion of Synecdoche, New York with an eye to Robert Aickman’s creeping mysteries, while “The End of Hope Street” extends the unplaceable dread of Julio Cortazar’s “House Taken Over” over time. Even the fictional history proposed by “Songs Like They Used to Play” settles itself in the apparently mundane world that is a bed and breakfast in contemporary York.

Of the many stories here in which human forms decompose and reform (or are transformed), the body’s new life is highly ambiguous. Unlike the visceral shudder of watching masculinity disintegrate in “Two Brothers”, “Her First Harvest” treats its subject with ephemeral delicacy. Here, the weird grounds itself in a generous posthuman ecology where “Everything that used to be alive now makes this a richer world.” Theorists of degrowth and readers of deterioration, rejoice! Elsewhere, the oddly-claustrophobic “We All Need Somewhere to Hide” similarly finds the changeability of forms to be a liberating and not entirely devastating possibility. Not incidentally, like “Two Brothers”, “Her First Harvest” is a “coming of age” narrative that demonstrates an awareness of gendered identities and of the forces at work in shaping them. This same awareness illuminates many of Devlin’s other stories.

There are peaks and valleys, naturally, and some stories yield an occasional rough edge. “Dogsbody”, for instance, is an interesting concept but largely without the conceptual richness apparent elsewhere. That said, its concerns about economic deskilling in an increasingly abstract world of financial speculation do feel quite timely. In this wolfish world, the modern economy’s gloomy “deskilling” effects are accompanied by an unexplained plague of strange transformations.

Presenting a somewhat contrary situation, “Her First Harvest” revels in a suggestive world-building imagination but does not travel very far, contenting itself with a dance of posthuman possibilities. This story cultivates a freshly imagined post-apocalyptic ecology through the stately arrangements of a pre-Darcy Elizabeth Bennett who has just been left in the dirt a little too long—not a sentence that I’d have anticipated writing before picking up this book. These are enjoyable stories, but they are not the best this collection has to offer.

In contrast to the narrative directness of many of the other stories, “Breadcrumbs” and “Passion Play” distinguish themselves through complex reflections on characters who themselves tell stories and whose activities license a sophisticated play of represented action and aesthetic richness. In “Passion Play”, the collection’s first story, the unnamed narrator retraces the steps of her friend Cathy as she thinks herself backward, into the past, even as her footsteps carry her forward. A religious element is added to this temporal juxtaposition as this progress becomes an unholy or uncanny version of the Stations of the Cross, with the difference here that reflections are organized around the disappearance of a young girl and the strange, Jamesian ghost story of the “cross-hatch man”, a figure marked by his specific elision from religious iconography. The mysteriousness of this tale is bolstered and not undercut by the simultaneous admission of a domestic situation that may or may not explain Cathy’s disappearance.

While the dense Catholic skin and mysterious climax of “Passion Play” indulge in weird fiction’s common reference points, the remarkable “Breadcrumbs” stands independently of any such comparison, although it gnaws away at fairytale commonalities with glee. A paean to the dream of ecological rebirth edged in fanged versions of fairy-tale transformations (think Disney, red in tooth and claw and hung, screaming from the ceiling), this unpredictable gem busies itself in the vivid fantasies and weirder fate of a fourteen-year-old girl, Ellie. “Breadcrumbs” draws copious from stereotypical images only to transcend them all in its final images of the courage rooted in patience and dreams that helps her to sever her past from her future. There is much here for a weird fiction reader; suitable, in fact, for a girl whose “mother once fed her worlds.”

With a name like You Will Grow Into Them, readers could confidently expect a focus on the organic processes of transformation. From the fungal dirt to the dreamy trees, these stories rehabilitate thoughts of posthuman growth, often with an eye dead-set on the mechanical inhumanity of redundancies and blind repetition.

***

Weird literature’s associations with terrifying knives in the dark or the inarticulate horror at the cosmic sublime are familiar—perhaps too much so. Deeper than these signs is weird literature’s characterization that “its interior is less repressed than unrecognized”, as China Miéville writes in his “Afterweird” to The Weird. Dodging typicality, Malcolm Devlin’s stories spin webs of hospitable darkness and thoughtful involution into the darkness of the unrecognized.

In You Will Grow Into Them, transformations are painful and strange, yet they also extend the hope of liberation. Fiction takes its readers up to the moment of vision and no further; it implies consequences and causal logics. Stories like “Dogsbody” and “The End of Hope Street” suggest that the bitter resistance to change may engineer fates that might be worse than death: to live uncharitably and ungenerously, selfishly cloistered in a shell of one’s own mundane devising. At their most extreme, Devlin’s stories glimpse the failing wills or the fractures of escape that mark the ends and beginnings of any given transformation.

In “Passion Play”, despite all her patient mimicry of a lurid type of weird fate, the unnamed protagonist remains trapped in the lurking horror of reality itself. The story ends with a common refrain on the inability of people to understand what lies directly in front of them, as the young girl sees “Faces that have witnessed everything and seen nothing at all.” At the other end of the collection, “The End of Hope Street” plays with mysteries of space and compression. In one of its many powerful images, “The End of Hope Street” leaves readers by picking out a character whose self-delusions leaves him isolated and without refuge. This almost-Nietzschean last man cleans out his house to paint everything a blinding white: “Layer after layer after layer, he painted, as though he might ward off the darkness by making the whole house shine.” Here, as elsewhere, strict moral associations between light and dark, good and bad, are traversed and interwoven. While hospitality’s invitation toward transformation is refused, isolation becomes the grim death of nihilistic purity.

On the whole, however, Devlin’s stories are characterized by their absence of fear in the face of strange changes. They oppose the grim stupidity of the horrific sublime with the quiet ironies of consciousness and the inexplicable flights of fate. It is a mark of distinction that, here as in much of the weird, visions of the world are made unstable and porous, even as they reveal how dangerous life has always been. Cracks emerge. Inevitably, bodies start to pile up. Almost worse, bodies begin to go missing. Who knows what will appear in their place? Generosity is not softness; darkness may be more comforting than any light. You Will Grow Into Them promises much, namely, a fate of incorporation into forming uncertainty. It delivers gleefully, warmly, and well—with a distressingly strange and inexorable smile.

The post Review: “You Will Grow Into Them” by Malcolm Devlin appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

I. The Detective

The rabbit was dead. Was white. Was dead. Was six feet long. Supine. A trace of red against its mouth. A pocket watch half buried in the sand. Rubbery and indistinct, a blackish waistcoat curled across its midriff. While above us the mountain rose like a threat or a throat, unexpected.

I could smell the death in its matted fur. I could feel its death in the complete, the utter stillness of the body. The eyes stared out into a great nothing, a vast nowhere.

I was supposed to solve this.

Brown eyes, flecked with green. Fur around the mouth, stained green with grass. There was no grass anywhere around here. Bitter winds. Desiccated. Husk.

I stood up, fought the urge to sigh, fought the urge to fight against the gentle pressure on the nape of my neck.

Hush. Dusk. I had spent an hour staring at this apparition, with no insight forthcoming.

What makes death solvable or soluble? What might be considered a clue? The red hissing from the mouth like a long sleek ribbon of snake? The wound to the belly, spilling out like sawdust? The ticktock of the watch on my wrist, telling me to hurry? Should I solve the crime, I’d be much praised. Should I fail, none would care but me.

Behind me somewhere lay the city of teeth and blood and exhaustion and the cries of abandoned children, back alleys with their deeper wounds and the skies full of smoke and the streets at night lighted like strands of emeralds, the towers set to rise like knives cutting the underbelly of the blank sky.

Here, in the desert, the sky was a deep blue shot through with deeper cloud, masked by the mountain rearing out of the sand.

Out here, I had my familiar. In the city, my familiar could not always manifest himself, make himself known to me. No one could manifest in the city all the time. Out here, he could stretch, uncurl, spread his wings of manta ray black to their fullest extent. The desert glinted off of them, melting into a relaxation that seemed earned.

“Rabbit,” I said. It sounded like I just wanted to hear myself talk.

“Rabbit,” my familiar agreed.

I had no name for my familiar. I felt no need for names, even for myself. How could anyone mistake him for another? His shape formed a shadow across me, his breath a black spurling of memory, cloves, desire, and cinnamon. With the desert’s red dust around us, the mountain rising, it seemed I could be his familiar. His voice like a reflection of a star in a pool of still water, his flickering appearance like a piece of gold glimmering up to meet the reflection. In a courtyard in the city. Where a hundred thousand familiars…

“It’s not from here.”

My familiar rippled and coalesced behind me, over me.

“Not from there, either.”

Where a hundred thousand familiars gathered, the motion of their obsidian passage a mighty wave across a parched land…

Helplessness and shame overtook me, the emotions I always feel at the scene of a crime. The death that cannot be catalogued except by time. The death that cannot be avenged except by the deceased, the only person who cannot avenge…anything.

What could my familiar and I do? The taste of continual failure was like ash on my tongue. Yet I could not remember any of my other cases.

***

Sunset. Reds peeling off across the reds of the corpse, the fur flush with dust and dirt and sand.

I felt the tickle in my throat caused by the umbilical that hung between me and my familiar — this cloak, this being that spread out behind me through the celestial air. My familiar was feeding me, and I did not want to be fed.

I saw a children’s book. I saw a large white rabbit. I saw a girl in a dress. I saw a talking caterpillar. The familiar was feeding me what was not familiar. But the story seemed familiar somehow. As if I had pressed my face against a fogged up pane of glass, just barely able to see inside a house of marvels. I shuddered. Stop feeding me.

“You don’t recognize it.”

If a familiar can feel disappointment, I felt that emotion course through its undulating body and into mine. The itchiness in my throat became severe.

“This is not a real murder,” my familiar told me. “This is a dream of murder. It will fade, if you do not recognize it.”

I began to panic. I began to have memories from before the city. I really was a detective once. I knew this; it had not been fed to me. My blood crawled with the knowledge.

What I cannot solve may kill me.

The red desert dust, the clot of dust in the air, like a stroke about to claim me. I could feel the tube from its body to mine in the back of my head, my neck. I could feel it there, coiled like a question mark. The taste of lime on my tongue.

He should have had a real waistcoat. He should have been somewhere else, this rabbit. Not here.

“You will see,” my familiar said. And then said again, in another way: You will see. And you will be amazed.

For that was when the white rabbit shuddered. That’s when the white rabbit shivered. Shook, coughed, wiggled its ears. Sat up. Wiped the blood from its mouth.

“I thought you were broken,” I said to it. “I thought you were dead. I thought you did not know what you were.”

The creature turned to me, its eyes brown and deep: as deep as hazelnut in winter, by a fireplace, in a city, but not the city, except I should not have that memory. Was it fed to me? Was it me?

It turned to me, this creature, and said, “You are the broken one. I’ve been sent to solve you.”

“Solve me? But I’m not dead?”

“How do you know?”

II. The Accounts of Others

“Get out of my brain!” the man shouted while at some far-flung trading post. Dirty shantytown without enough water. Faded grass. A couple of horses looking close to gone. This place would not be here much longer. I had passed through selling knives, but no one needed knives.

“Get out of my brain!” he shouted again.

I didn’t know if he meant the city, or the familiar rising half invisible above him.

The familiar was dead white‚ just drifting in the breeze, in the pale sunlight. The umbilical was like a dry reed. The man could have pulled himself free at any time.

Was I the only one among them who could see it?

I met his wild stare.

“I’ve come to take you back to the city,” I said.

He ignored me. He was already there.

***

There was nothing to stop me from getting there. I had been walking for a long time, but there was still nothing to stop me. Why should there be? I could either walk or stop walking. There’s no real decision in that, is there?

The desert spread out ahead, the city where it had always been: in front of me. It never changed. It always seemed to be in the same place: a dark glitter, a black speck in the corner of my eye. A hint of a scent, taken by the wind. I never made any progress toward it. It never made any progress toward me. You could say we were equals in a way.

Sometimes I passed other people, most of them dead, their flesh flapping off of them like little flags. Sometimes I passed no one but the ever-wheeling hawks against the blue disease that was the sky.  It did not matter. Walking mattered. Finding water mattered. Finding food mattered. Eventually reaching the city mattered. Not minding the mirages mattered.

The mirages could become intense. A mirage could kill you if you let it. You had to want to let it. You had to want to let it inhabit you. It could take any shape, any form.

Like a familiar. I had heard tales about the familiars. The city blossomed with them, all manifesting in different ways. Manta rays. White rabbits. I heard about a detective once. Just once. But never again.

People in the city had lost the thread of living without familiars. People there had just lost the thread, period. Deep wired into the spinal cord. Sucking into them. Sucking out of them. A city of spines. A city of familiars. A city of people. A city of not-people. Had it created them or had they created it?

Sometimes, as I walked, I didn’t think I ever wanted to reach it, though the blisters on my feet yearned for it. Sometimes, it seemed the promise of bliss.

Walking is good, but walking can get to you. Endless walking. When it first occurred to me that the city wasn’t getting closer, I wondered if perhaps I didn’t deserve the city. Sometimes, I thought it didn’t deserve me. Perhaps both were true. But, regardless, there was nothing else to see on the horizon. Nowhere else to head for. It really was the last there. The only there.

And sometimes I would scream at the city. I would drop to my knees and scream in wordless rage. How could it keep evading me? How could it make me keep on walking?

And it’s true. I admit it. Eventually, I begged the city to accept me. I stood there and begged for this dot at the corner of my vision to let me get close.

But by then it was too late. By then it had become a little bit too…familiar.

***

The tube of flesh is quite prophetic. The tube of flesh, the umbilical, is inserted at the base of the neck, although sometimes inserted by mistake toward the top of the head, which can result in unexpected visions. Anyway, the umbilical feeds into the central nervous system. The nerves of the familiar’s umbilical wind around the nerves in the person’s neck. Above the recipient, the manta ray, the familiar, rises and grows full with the knowledge of the host. It makes itself larger. It elongates. The subject goes into shock, convulses, and becomes limp. Motor control passes over to the familiar, creating a moving yet utilitarian symbiosis. The neck becomes numb. A tingling forms on the tongue, and a taste of lime. There is no release from this. There should be no release from this. Broken out from their slumber, hundreds are initiated at a time, the tubes glistening and churling in the lesion of the steam, the communal need. Thus fitted, all go forth in their splendid ranks. Thus filled, all go forth in their splendid ranks. The eye of the city opens and continues to open, wider and wider, until the eye is the world.

This is what I have been told. I have never witnessed it myself. I heard it from a walker.  A man who told me that the city is a mote in his eye. I suppose it might not be true. I cannot verify it. I cannot deny it.

***

A city in her head that could not be true made her wince. A city that she had been searching for her entire life, all across the wastelands that often revealed more of their past than made her comfortable. A city that pulled her out of herself. Something that was more than a Thought but less than an Idea. A city that became so real to her, in its scraps and tatters, that her own life became the abstraction. She saw glistening spires and sudden terror, and an illumination that nearly blinded her. She saw great black shapes passing through the sky, attaching themselves to more mundane shapes. She saw causeways made of air that yet bore weight. A thousand images that could not be real, that would never be enough to sustain her in that vision, that delectation, forever on the tip of her tongue, the word she could not say: the name of the city.

***

I left my lover in the city because I found it too intense. Now all I had of her was memories. Rosebuds. Rose petals. Dried roses. Flowers found in parks and more dangerous places. The thought of the forests in the south of the city where you could always find the blood-soaked remains of a person for whom the familiar had become strange. The visitations in the north. The long palatial glide down the ramp above which gather the blindly searching umbilicals. The music of the city that permeates the air, reaches into the stones, the trees, the rich dirt. The fragrance as of a thousand perfumes, the air jagged with the musk of familiars. The clean, strong lines of buildings. The way everything is planned, so perfectly. One can hardly contain it in one’s mind. It’s like sunlight shining on marble that turns to water that ripples with light as seen through a mirror.

I had broken from the city as she could not. I had proved stronger than my familiar, and feasted on its memories. Now, exiled, I lie in her arms every night and make love to her. Although she is not here, in these tiny rooms in forgotten towns, she stares at me from the bed. This comforts me; she has become my familiar.

The city? I remember little of it now. It is like a long caravan disappearing into distance and time. Day by day, my lover conquers more and more of my memory. Perhaps, one day, it will seem as if I never lived in the city at all.

***

A joke, passed along in the wastelands:

Two men are fighting in the dust, in the sand, in the shadow of a mountain. One says the city exists. The other denies this truth. Neither has ever been there. They fight until they both die of exhaustion and thirst. Their bodies decay. Their bones reveal themselves. These bones fall in on each other until each man is the other. One day, the city rises over them like a new sun. But it is too late.

III. The Detective

“You are the broken one. I’ve been sent to solve you.”

It’s dusk now, when the rabbit tells me this. It’s dusk and there’s no light except the lights of the city at our back. An unimaginable sorrow comes over me. I cannot help it, even with my familiar pumping good thoughts, good images, into me through the umbilical, the cord, the chord, the knot, the fence, the gate, the conduit that reaches him into me.

“No, you’re not dead,” the rabbit says. “And there lies part of the problem. Who can love that which is not dead?”

“Familiar?” I query. Familiar?

But there is no answer. Just the rabbit. Staring me in the eyes. Trying to tell me something.

“Do you want to return to the city?” he asks me.

I turn away to look back at the city. It is as a mote in the corner of my eye.

I tell him, “No. Not really.”

“Then leave this behind.”

The rabbit stands over me. His fur is rough, his scent thick. He brings his arms around my head as if in an embrace. There is a slight sound, indescribable, as he detaches my familiar. My familiar detaches. The weight lifts. The tickle in my throat is gone. I cough, cough again.

Above me, in the dark, with no moon, just the afterglow of sunset, my familiar floats, his voice no longer in my head, my mouth, my guts, my guilt. He is taken on the breeze. He is taken from me. Away. Toward the city. I crane my neck to watch him go. I watch him go: a black manta ray drawn to the lights.

I am alone with the rabbit. I am alone. I was sure the rabbit had been created by my familiar, but now I am not so sure. I am frantically searching my memory for some prior experience, some glimmer, some fragment that will help me.

The rabbit takes my hand, his surprisingly human, and he whispers in my ear. The black waistcoat unwraps itself from his torso and rises until it exists, whole and glistening, above his head, plugged into his neck. His familiar’s tube is bifurcated. As he whispers, part of it coils around my own head. It connects. And there is no city. And there is no sand, no thirst. And I am weeping. I can see the girl and the rabbit and the caterpillar and the rest of it. It is no comfort. I am nowhere again, like the first time, walking with the rabbit into the desert, the familiar’s familiar.

By what right should I have achieved this state? By what right should I never solve my case, only to have it solve me?

Save me. Please.

The post The City appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.