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.

Illustration by Dempow Torishima

Translation by Daniel Huddleston

1

When the on-site disassembler came to the synthorgan factory carrying his packing case, he stared for a moment at a worker who had assumed an awkward attitude toward him, apparently puzzled upon seeing another of his kind for the first time. He must have been born quite recently—his hair was jet-black and glossy, and his skin was fresh and young. The cycles sure run fast here, he thought with pity. He had just started to introduce himself as a worker from the fishery, when the young worker’s face twisted into a severe expression.

“That’s my name. I won’t have you referring to yourself as ‘I.’”

Just the same as before. The old memories didn’t come back right away, so there were many cases where self-identification didn’t go very well. They probably couldn’t help latching on to a word that would provide a definition of who they were.

“I’m the on-site disassembler,” he added simply, and then got down to work.

When the disassembler had finally finished disassembling the placoderms and was covered in oil, he requested the president’s signature on the paperwork. The body tissues of presidents and directors were injected into his skull as recording media. By way of his eye socket, that swollen finger came feeling around inside his head, and he wet himself.

He had a headache as he got into the lift, the corpse of that coffin eel still wrapped around all four walls as though trying to climb up on the nearly four-meter-tall cage. The cage shuddered and slowly descended. From between gaps in the elaborate ribs surrounding him on every side, the skeleton of a subordinape who appeared to have been swallowed whole was peeking out.

The lift stopped. He stepped off onto an island of rotting flesh and was loading his packing case on the flatboat when his eyes paused upon a small, steeply ascending island located directly beneath a vertical drainage pipe. It seethed with the gases of decomposition.

“What’s the matter?” asked the pilot.

The disassembler turned his short neck and indicated it with his jaw.

“You’ve tried how many times already? It’s hopeless. It’ll just be a parrot this time too.”

“I know. You’re probably right,” the disassembler said as he started walking out into the shallows of the putrefying muck.

“That gas is dense. You watch yourself.”

He waved a hand lightly behind him and pulled his scarf up over his nose. After crossing over to a tiny island covered in bas-reliefs of bones and organs, he sank to his knees in putrid filth that teemed with cockroaches and nematodes and headed toward a figure that was buried to its chest on the side of the highest hill.

It was looking up at the underside of the faraway deck. Its face was exactly the same as that of the worker he had met just moments ago. When, breathing heavily, he made his way to its side, its eyes moved. They turned toward the disassembler and stared.

The disassembler knew full well, though, that this was nothing more than a reactionary response. The magatama was always passed on to the newborn worker, so nothing of their former intellect could remain in those who had turned into parrots. The disassembler lifted up the parrot’s half-body, and they regarded one another, face-to-scab-covered-face.

“Hey there, you remember me?” Rows of sparse teeth began to quiver. “ ’Ey…member me?”

The disassembler’s eyes grew moist. He recognized his tears as a form of self-pity.

Suddenly, he heard the sound of someone whistling with his fingers. It was the pilot urging him to head back.

“All right,” he said. It was as he was setting the parrot back down, however, that the disassembler’s fingers detected a small, hard bulge in the body’s breast pocket. He undid its button and stuck his fingers inside. What came out was a magatama that gleamed with an emerald light.

2

At first, the worker thought himself—the pregnancy being little more than a biological and existential misunderstanding— submerged in water. This was because everything appeared distorted to him. He wondered if he had perhaps finally awakened from a nightmare in which he worked at a cruel synthorgan factory. After all, the room he was in looked a lot like the rooms in which the people of his hometown had lived. However, the familiar furniture and household appliances that were lined up against the wall were far too numerous, haphazardly pushed up against one another like animals snapping at each other’s throats. The dim light was coming from a torchburr. Had there been a room like this at the base of the synthorgan company building? The terror of when he had been thrown from that structure came back to him, and he tried to get up, only to discover that he couldn’t move in the slightest. It was as though he were buried to his neck on a sandy beach.

home><away> nothing>deep>depths>·<shell <seal <yoke<sin <

Suddenly, lonely thoughts that beggared his imagination came welling up, and his eyes filled with tears. Without spilling over, they remained quivering on the surfaces of his eyes, only to be swallowed up in waves of concentric circles emanating from the midst of his field of vision. From somewhere, he could hear a sound like a backed-up sewer pipe.

sign> flow> merge> destruction> · <desperation <void <execu- tion <world—his thoughts ached as though themselves possessed of a sense of pain.

Days spent in longing for a return from that place of exile beyond the bounds of society—days enough to turn boulders into sand. He could remember them as his own. Is this somebody else’s memory again? He was thinking that it was, and the chain of thoughts that nested around the axis of that single point grew outward in every direction, forming a shell all around him, until they began both to complement and overturn one another. Only in scattered fragments could he unlock their meaning, and when consciousness returned to him in that room, he could for some reason practically taste the presence of someone standing on the other side of the wall, and of corpses sealed within the disorderly layout of a multilayered, labyrinthine housing crystal lying farther in behind him.

Someone started walking toward him. It was not a worker from his own company; he looked a lot like the disassembler from the fishery. Though hadn’t he just been wondering where he worked himself? Coaguland…number four, it was the Fourth Coaguland Reaffirmation branch. He felt a pressure near his retinas, and the wall appeared again, and the disassembler appeared from a doorless entryway, confusing the worker. “You were pretty slow to wake up. I’d just about given up on you.” The voice that came to him sounded like it was passing through water. “We are presently located inside a vintage landfill stratum. The metabolism’s slow here, though, so there’s nothing to worry about.”

Fwaa ii zii—

What is this? was what the worker had intended to say.

“It must still be hard for you to speak. Can you tell, by the way, that you’re being preserved inside a director’s body?”

Images rose up in the back of the worker’s mind of a director caught in the grip of several canvassers…of organs and multiple yoked-in brains being smashed one after another. A shudder went through the corpuscyte that covered his entire field of vision, causing the disassembler’s face to waver about.

“This director took fatal injuries in a canvasser attack. They brought him in to the synthorgan factory right away, but there was no way to restore him, so they threw him out. Yeah…no hope of helping them once they’ve had their brains destroyed.” No, that isn’t right. Those yoked-in brains are internal prisons that greatly limit the functionality of cogitosome-bearing corpuscyte. “You’d turned into a parrot and were buried in an island of rot. For some reason, you were carrying a magatama. During pregnancy, the magatama moves to the embryo, so what you were carrying most likely belonged to someone who was swallowed by a coffin eel. Magatamas govern the intellect and memory of subordinapes like us.”

They were not merely memory organs for individuals. They reminded workers in great detail of all kinds of things they had no way of learning by themselves, and in much the same way that landfill strata created counterfeit copies of things using eide from the past, they had also succeeded in making those things real.

Now he stood unmoving in a dark alleyway, staring silently as many of his kind began to come and go along a street where time had frozen over. One of the parishes that had once flourished in the inner world of the canvassers—which had long afterward remained compressed and frozen inside the magatama—was unpacking into his neural network like a tightly folded paper being opened to reveal a completed diagram.

“Since you’re using some stranger’s magatama as a foothold, it isn’t clear whether you’re the same worker as before.”

The worker started walking. He was twice as tall as everyone else, but nobody seemed to notice. He tried touching a pedestrian on the back, but his fingers merely sank into him and got tangled up in the strings of letters there. It dawned on him that a subordinape was something chosen out of the collected data of the fifty thousand people that a canvasser’s magatama contained. That data was then modified and forcibly incarnated. He realized also that while here in this parish, he was himself in a comatose state.

“If you’re wondering who it was that merged you so splendidly with the director’s body, why that would be your own newborn self. Not that he understood what it was he’d accomplished, mind you. I had originally hoped to play the role you’re playing right now myself.”

As he advanced forward, spatial distortions began to appear here and there, and the worker noticed that the space around him was dotted with gaps.

“Should’ve known I wouldn’t be brave enough to be sealed alive in corpuscyte, though.”

The reason the warps and the gaps were appearing was that in regions where the medium differed from the rest— most likely near things like the cogitosomes that were scattered throughout the director’s body—only space constructed through classical physics was being displayed.

“At the fishery, I couldn’t even try to use a parrot unless I took it apart for disassembly practice.”

The worker was headed toward a place of extreme distortion. It was a park where sunlight dappled through the trees. There a man in a white lab coat was sitting on a bench, nodding at no one in particular as he stared intently at a cliff face towering above the treetops. There was no mistaking that the cliff was made of landfill strata. Was there something special about the cogitosome handling its construction? It appeared that it was showing him space from before the end of the world.

A man in a suit appeared to his right. He held a can of coffee out to the man in the white coat and spoke: “With things having come to this point, I find it odd that you aren’t getting registered to be Translated.”

“Double-translation is an imaginary cyclical transaction. You should know that. Here even the magatama itself is nothing more than a concretion that the <World> brought into existence. Most likely, the replacement by ultimaterial that was done in order to effectively use our limited computational resources has caused some kind of—”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“—harm from deprivation?” He stood up, gripping the can tightly. “All of this has already happened.”

“Probably so. Like they say, history repeats itself.”

“Not like this.”The man in the white coat tossed an object, which at some point had transformed into a light bulb, into an ultimaterial bin, and stared firmly into the face of the worker.

“Can’t you feel a presence there behind you?” “I’m not the type to believe in ghosts.”

“After you came out of your coma, you had your share of freakouts, though. ‘It’s the man I saw in my dreams,’ you said.”

“And that’s been taken care of through cerebro-physiological means. Now I just have dreams about everybody floating in the darkness.”

“Exactly. That’s because Hanishibe is still drifting through interstellar space alone in that spaceship even as we speak. By continuing to speak, he’s protecting us. The coordinates are—” “I’m sorry, but it’s time for me to go. Work is work, even in a world like this one. I’m off to the canvasser now, so I’ll see you later.”

The man in the suit crossed over the manifestation boundary as he departed, and disappeared. Dazedly, the worker moved away from that place. He knew that the scene he had just witnessed could not exist according to the law of causality. In other words, this was not the past.

“Hey, are you listening?”

Double-translation, interstellar spaceships—as he was strolling along unable to collect his thoughts, he bumped into an invisible wall. There were limits to the scale of the space that a magatama could contain. The other side of the wall was covered in fog through which another town could be dimly seen.

“Even you must’ve sought after answers any number of times. Why are we employed by directors? When did we sign such contracts? What are we getting in compensation? Oh, we remember these things dimly. That we signed a contract, that we received a baptism. But why aren’t these things consistent even in our own memories? What were these directors and humans originally?”

Those who are forever damned…those who long to return… those who trick us into servitude.

“Why are there magatama even inside the canvassers? Does it mean that those disgusting things—I don’t even know whether they’re alive or machines—are our original forms? Why? Why? Look—you must be able to see it!”

The worker looked across the parish town, and simultaneously he was looking down at it with a bird’s‑eye view. Dimly, he could make out the ghost of the <World> constructed by the web of interconnectivity created by the canvassers’—no, the cherubim’s—Whispering. But without whisper-leaves of his own, it was only possible to comprehend as a real image the parish with which he himself was affiliated.

“Whenever a fundamental question occurs to you, the lice appear and devour your thoughts.”

The worker strained his eyes at the rows of houses and streets on the other side of the fog. Transforming his arms into Code, he pried open the invisible wall and stretched out his hand toward the mist-enshrouded town.

“So we forget the inconsistencies right away. The same questions occur to us, and we forget them again. This cycle has been repeating for generations. When the nymphs hatch from the lice egg cases—”

Those weren’t louse nymphs. They were bits of Code as well, implanted by the directors in the roots of their hairs to prevent the lice egg cases from hatching—in other words, to prevent the activation of the snowpetal bugs, which were a self-defense mechanism of the magatama.

“—they cover your head like an umbrella and suck out every last bit of your soul. Even if you’re disassembled afterward, there won’t be a magatama inside.”

That was because the snowpetal bugs would form temporary whisper-leaves and bequeath all of the magatama’s data to the canvassers’ <World> network. In the present, however, where such dramatic reaffirmation was taking place at the livable boundaries beyond which a certain sort of life support became indispensable, the cherubim—and thus their <World>—was on the brink of destruction.

“If that happens, you’ll be left a CP-type, suffering from hyperfrequent hemo-φιλíα:.”

Regardless of business conditions, many things would be needed to preserve and reunify the inner world of the cherubim: magatama to serve as its seeds, its slate-blue development medium, cogitosomes to expand it, and corpuscyte to protect the cogitosomes. Even if this were to lead to a repeat of the world’s end…

“W‑what are you doin—?”

The worker was staring at the roads and the buildings of the two towns as they began to connect one to another, and at the same time, he was staring at the corners of the disassembler’s mouth as the director’s hands tore them apart; it opened wider and wider until the sides of the disassembler’s face had split in half.

The worker grabbed hold of the magatama stored inside the disassembler’s skull, then pulled his arm back out. The disassembler collapsed like a puppet whose strings had suddenly snapped.

On the second floor of a certain hospital in the midst of the expanded city, however, the disassembler, who had been lying comatose, opened his eyes, turned toward the worker—who was watching over him through the window from above —and nodded.

As he hallucinated the ghost of a planet. Of a <World>. As he was laid bare to the directors’ hunger to return home.

Sisyphean copyright © 2013 by Dempow Torishima

The post The Disassembler Searched On 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

The Collector of Treasures

The Collector of Treasures

The Collector of Treasures has clever arms to hold you. The frozen chamber reeks of mice. At the witching hour, the Collector dons a fur-trimmed cloak. The Collector of Treasures drinks a tisane. The night is long, the Collector’s labor hard. The universe will not lie still.

FIGURE OF A COLT WITH A MAN’S FACE

FIGURE OF A WINGED MONSTER

You are inferior as a Coloured.

FIGURE OF A MONSTROUS PIG, BORN IN METZ IN LORRAINE

PICTURE OF A TRITON AND A SIREN, SEEN ON THE NILE

London, a Tube station, the year 197_. A strange Englishman grasps my father by the shoulders. He kisses my father on both cheeks. The Englishman is ecstatic. “Ah, are you Abyssinian? What a magnificent species!”

FIGURE OF A CHILD, PART DOG

TWO FIGURES, ONE OF A FURRY GIRL, AND THE OTHER OF A CHILD THAT WAS BLACK BECAUSE OF THE IMAGINATION OF THEIR PARENTS

They maintained their attractive character throughout, and under the trying conditions of the Yorkshire climate behaved in a most creditable manner.

The Collector shakes the universe and makes it lie down flat. The universe cries out like an injured child.

FIGURE OF A CHILD WHO HAD A LIVE SNAKE IN ITS BACK

FIGURE OF THE HORNED OR HOODED MONSTER

Ambroise Paré was a French barber surgeon born in 1510. He pioneered new techniques in battlefield medicine. He was especially good with wounds, which he treated in the old Roman way, using oil of roses, egg white, and turpentine. He was also a great collector. His book Des monstres et prodiges is an illustrated compendium of the monsters of his time. His goal, explains his translator, was to discover, through the accumulation of data, why the normal has failed to occur.

FIGURE OF A GIRL HAVING TWO HEADS

I think Ambroise Paré would have liked me. I am pretty good at French. I think I would have impressed him. “Why has the normal failed to occur?” is, after all, a question that has preoccupied me since childhood. I think Ambroise Paré would have served me one of his tisanes while I behaved in a most creditable manner. I think he would have asked me to have a seat on his little table. I think he would have done something awful to me with tongs.

According to the logic of collection, the monster always belongs to others.

FIGURE OF A VERY MONSTROUS ANIMAL THAT IS BORN IN AFRICA

I am afraid Ambroise Paré would have liked this book.

In the realm of language, the opposite of a monster is a catalogue.

Nameless

Nameless

In the fields of Soinoe she went slaughtering flowers. She said she could take me with her. I said yes. I explained that this is what monsters say to themselves in the mirror: yes. yes.

It’s very tender outside right now.

White fog filled the valley. She explained that it was a river of floating seeds. The seeds have been waiting to sprout for five hundred years. Several white birches stood among them, and the ruins of a little building, perhaps a shrine.

There are absolute places where time stops. Nothing is good about them. You can’t breathe. Against them we raise a defiant reverence for the body.

Hold your breath, she whispered. The night was blue and perfectly still. I realized that we were passing through a bad place. The fortune, the heavy good fortune of passing through. In a lighted window a child in goggles was giving a lecture from a podium made of crates.

When we had reached the other side I told her a story:

“Everyone was drunk. They were trying to figure out if I was métisse or chabine. Métisse is dark-skinned with European features, chabine is light-skinned with African features. Trees sighed in the night behind the bar.”

Such detailed racial cartography. Sometimes, I told her, the storms were so violent, you would have thought the whole island would sink under water.

She took me to see her favorite spot, a wall the color of artichokes. Wherever she went she glistened like fire and snow.

Holy holy holy is the Lord who preserves entire the conflicting element of my being.

And the vivid lake. And the pink butterflies of the horizon. The hills that smelled of apples and milk. The chill beneath the stone portico. The bridge. The train in the night like a necklace of tourmalines.

THIS IS MY NAME:

She had written those words and her name on the artichoke-colored wall, many years ago, when she was afraid to travel. She used to be so afraid, she could hardly stand to leave the house. A few petals dotted her flanks, bright as human blood. “Don’t you want to know what they decided to call me,” I asked, “métisse or chabine?” “No,” she laughed. In the evening she took me to meet the train. I wore net gloves to disguise my bandaged hands.

Her breathing lit up the whole street.

Light is a thing but lighting is a relationship.

The Doctor

Monsters of Compassion

It became necessary for me to visit a doctor. His office lay behind a great wooden door in a district known as the Swoon. The door was so heavily carved it took me some time to find the handle, turning my head from side to side to peer underneath the planes of light. “I have a cough,” I explained, “and these pink planes of light are following me everywhere.” I waved my hand in the light. The flesh turned red. Through the rays I could see the doctor’s face, immemorial and sad, a carapace much like the carvings on his door.

 “Pity me.” He instructed me to lie down on the carpet. While he brewed his herbs I thought about compassion. Cries on the wind for two hundred years. Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?

The grotesque confuses categories. One of the ways this can happen is through time compression. Think of a larval creature with fully developed eyes. Imagine youth crushed into age, a misshapen life story. A giant baby, or one that looks like a little old man.

In the eighties there were all those photos of starving Ethiopian children. Long fingers, heads as fragile as blown glass. Usually the grotesque creates a reaction of nausea or prurient attraction but the little-old starving children were supposed to produce compassion. I guess it worked. I always had a feeling of panic when I saw them, they were so close to me. A kind of survivor guilt. Compassion, yes, but revulsion too, and shame like a bridge between them. A feeling like a needle in my eye.

We Are the World. What an awful song. There’s grotesque for you. For some reason, we always cracked up when Willie Nelson came on. My brother could mimic his voice perfectly.

We were very joyful kids, as I recall.

The doctor approached with his bowl, rosy in the light.

“Feed me.” A child is dying. My friend protested against the deaths of Palestinian children. Someone replied: “You wish Israeli children were dying.” “That is monstrous,” she answered him, “a monstrous thing to say.” For a long time I tried to think of a word that could replace “monstrous.” Terrible? Vicious? Cruel? But only “monstrous” really expressed where he had placed himself with his words: outside the wall. By suggesting that she would not feel compassion for a child, that she would desire the death of children, he had become someone for whom we could never feel compassion.

I began to drink from the bowl. A prickling started under my skin. I understood that I was having a reaction.

The monster evokes, in equal measure, both compassion and its opposite.

I understood that I would have to drink it all.

Notes

Capitalized text comes from the list of illustrations in Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels. 1573. Translated by Janis L. Pallister, University of Chicago Press, 1982.

You are inferior as a Coloured. Bessie Head, A Question of Power. Heinemann, 1974. p. 127.

They maintained … creditable manner. Exhibition Manager’s Report. Great Bradford Exhibition, Bradford, England, 1904. Quoted in Anne Bishop, “Cartwright Memorial Hall and the Great Bradford Exhibition of 1904.” The Bradford Antiquary, third series, vol. 4, 1989, pp. 26–38. The report refers to the inhabitants of the “Somali Village,” the exhibition’s most popular display. About a hundred Somalis lived at the Bradford Exhibition from May until October, giving daily shows of dancing, archery, and spear throwing.

why the normal has failed to occur: Janis Pallister, introduction to Ambroise Paré, Of Monsters and Marvels. 1573. Translated by Janis L. Pallister, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. xxvi.

Holy holy holy … being. Eliot Weinberger attributes these words to an angel made of snow and fire in An Elemental Thing. New Directions, 2007, p. 167.

Accursed creator! … in disgust? Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. 1818. Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003, p. 144.

The post Excerpt: “Monster Portraits” by Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

— The Editors

Monster Portraits, by Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar, explores the monster as a symbol of otherness. Through haunting, evocative language and fierce, enigmatic drawings, Monster Portraits examines with sympathy those who transcend boundaries and find themselves outsiders. “Like all monsters, we don’t belong, but our problem is time and not space. We got here too early. We have always had this sense of wrongful, unseemly arrival.”

This examination takes the form of a journey through the land of monsters, “that lasted an indeterminate length of time, which, outwardly, took the shape of five years.” We meet many monsters on this journey: bitter, beautiful, powerful, fierce, fantastic, exploited, misunderstood. We are allowed to see them as they see themselves. We learn what “monstrous” actually means—because there is none more monstrous than someone who would wield the epithet “monster” to banish another.

Monster Portraits comforts the monster, confronts the monstrous. Many of us see ourselves reflected in both. Exiles from the places we used to belong, born into the wrong body or skin or shape, here too soon or perhaps too late, unable to live as we truly are. But we are also monstrous in our ways; we laugh while somewhere else, our brothers and sisters suffer. We feast while elsewhere children starve. We have all been complicit in some way with this world’s cruelty.

In some ways, Monster Portraits reminds me of Leena Krohn’s exquisite Tainaron. Like Tainaron, Monster Portraits is told through the eyes of a narrator traversing the landscape of a foreign yet familiar place. It relays conversations with creatures we might consider strange, yet their uncanniness reflects the beats of our own lives. As in Tainaron, the land of monsters is obviously a physical place, a world that exists parallel to, concurrent with, or just beyond our own—but the geography never quite resolves. To me one of the most enchanting things about Monster Portraits is the names of all these fantastical places, neighborhoods and districts and lands where monsters dwell: Swoon. Soinoe. Fanderlee. Snimron. Crezhlorn. Names that have the faint ring of somewhere you’ve been, but can’t quite recall…

Unlike Tainaron, which is built from neat tidy entries of mellifluous prose, the poetry of Monster Portraits feels sprawling, discursive, meta. It’s a conversation with history, a reckoning with past monstrosities. The text is threaded with quotations from an impressively diverse selection of texts: Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Google, Arabian Nights. These quotations are cited with an academic’s authorial precision at the back of the book, an ingenious way of placing Monster Portraits within a web of allusions, anchoring it to the weight of the history it bears. I found myself flipping back and forth, reconsidering certain passages based on my new knowledge of the context they carry.

These references accrete around the text, but Sofia Samatar’s writing is powerful and original enough to support their weight. There are sentences so truthful, beautiful, and brutal they took my breath away. “Her heart bore a pair of claws that were useful for nothing, she told me, but scratching at itself.”  “Is there any love, I wondered, with the amazing color and vibrancy of the love between siblings bearing an incommunicable secret?”  “The one who acts remains elsewhere, out of sight, preparing a horror so obscene a monster could not look on it without bleeding.”

Art and words in this book are intimately intertwined, conceived in conjunction with each other, another secret between siblings. Imagery and language are in accord, and feel as if they’ve arrived hand-in-hand, neither one grafted on to the other as illustrated poetry (or poetry inspired by art) often feels. As the book says, “We would travel separately, but on the same ground.”

Del Samatar’s black-and-white drawings are arresting. Most are heavily shaded, with areas of inky blackness that set off an interplay between positive and negative space; everything is always defined in opposition to something else. The work resonates with traditional printmaking, etching, woodcuts; in its contrast that marries crisp lines with intricate design, it also feels inspired by the aesthetics of tattoo art. The visual vernacular connects to artists like H.R. Giger or M.C. Escher—weird, uncanny. There are repeating motifs of filigree, flowers and feather. And as befits these creatures: tooth and claw, carapace and bone.

Scattered throughout the book are also a few tentative sketches, process drawings. These felt equally at home. They brought a sense of movement and transition. Like the text, these works in progress are questioning and raw.

Monster Portraits doesn’t just reveal its process, but revels in it; so the work and the process become one and the same. This meta level tantalized and intrigued me, but left me wanting more. I desired a greater glimpse into the autobiographical aspects, the story anchoring the story. It seemed I was analyzing a sliver of something much deeper, broader, titanic even, buried beneath the surface. I wanted the metaphor to slink away and reveal the real, but it never quite happened.

This isn’t necessarily a criticism. I like a story that leaves me wanting more. This is after all the human condition.

There are moments where the book moves toward the fourth wall, in a threat to break it down. For instance: “At the last minute he told me, ‘We can’t use this one, it’s too real.’” Is the entry I’m reading too real, or is it another entry altogether, excised from this book? “The book I was trying to write…” Is it this book? Or another book, not yet written?

This is a book about monsters, but it is also a book about writing a book. And that second book is a ghost. The first book, the book I’m holding, feels haunted by a shadow version of itself, a second book that exists above or beyond this one, buried in the cracks.

Monster Portraits carries a weighty emotional heft for such a slim volume. It reads easily, but is not easily forgotten. Oblique, enigmatic, often fragmented, yet deeply true; I read this book like skimming a frozen lake, while its claws embedded in my heart.

The post Review: “Monster Portraits” by Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Weird Fiction Review: What was your introduction to horror and the weird?

Priya Sharma: I was lucky to grow up in a house where books and films weren’t censored. I’d have to say Roald Dahl in both his children’s books and short stories, Daphne du Maurier, Hitchcock films, the darkness of Thomas Hardy, Twin Peaks, Ray Bradbury, then Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s alternative fairy tale collections, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Stephen King novels.

WFR: Is there such a thing as “too weird”? When your work is called weird, is that a compliment?

PS: I’m delighted for my work to be called weird. As to what is “too weird” I think that’s very subjective. Who defines what’s weird and when it crosses the line?

WFR: What inspired your story “The Nature of Bees”?

PS: I was staying with friends who used to keep bees. I went out onto their smallholding for a walk. It was early in the morning and their was a slight heat haze that hadn’t burnt off yet. I heard the swarm before I saw it. It hung in a massive ball. I remember feeling real awe in that moment. And backing away very slowly.

After that I started reading about bee society. It’s truly brutal. I also was thinking a lot at that time about attitudes towards single women who are 30+ and women who don’t have children.
 
WFR: Your work often tends to feature biological elements (bees, snakes, sunflowers, etc). Where does your interest in biology come from?

PS:  I love the science and the art of the nature. I do a fair bit of research, even for short stories, and I find that very invigorating. It makes me stop and look at the world again and it never fails to excite me. I did Medicine at university and the human body and disease processes are fascinating.

WFR: How did your collection All the Fabulous Beasts come together? How would you describe its stories?

PS: I’m very grateful to Mike Kelly, the editor, who has a real eye for putting a collection together. He stopped me from chucking in stories that would have jarred.

This is a difficult question to answer without going into specifics. The stories in ‘All the Fabulous Beasts’ concern themselves with nature and the environment, feminism, and sexuality, life, death, and rebirth. They show how the past haunts us. Place and setting are integral. We never escape where we come from. Nostalgia is powerful, but we can’t let it kill us. I don’t set out to convey a message. And hopefully the stories are entertaining, not didactic. I’m interested in people, places, mythology, and ontology. After all, we are all just fabulous beasts.”

WFR: Given that this month is Women in Horror Month, do you have any favorite women writers that have inspired your work?

PS: Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, Daphne du Maurier, Toni Morrison, Katherine Dunn, Sarah Hall, Alice Walker, Shirley Jackson, Sarah Waters, Jumpha Lahiri, Isabel Allende — to name just a few.

The post Interview: Priya Sharma and the Nature of Bees appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Vivien Avery came into her summer late. She blossomed at the age of thirty-eight, a time when most women are past ripeness, their fruit sampled and discarded.

The men buzzed around her, enthralled.

***

The bee is praised by ancient Greeks and our own captains of industry for its philosophies of order and productivity. There is no self in this honeyed utopia, each member a willing sacrifice to its machinery.

As much as we would emulate its nature, we also emasculate it. The bee is reduced to a fuzzy bumbler, nectar drunk amid the blooms. We do not heed the warning of its colours. Such sweetness always comes with a sting.

***

When Vivien stepped inside the cottage she knew her choice to be correct. Built into the walls of an estate, it contained sunshine and shade, heavy oak and threadbare rugs. The manager showed her around without embarrassment at the stained hip bath beneath the dripping shower head, the tired, Formica of the kitchen and the rattling windows. Vivien was happy to endure such deprivations. It had character.

He led her through the kitchen into the suntrap yard, the stone slabs warm. There was a washing line strung across it, wearing tea towels like a row of flags. There was a rotten door in the far wall, askew on its hinges.

“I keep meaning to fix this,” for the first time he sounded like he was apologising.

“What’s through there?”

“The orchard. The estate. It’s better that you stay out unless they invite you.” He stood and looked at her. “You will remember that, won’t you? Only if they ask you to.”

“Of course. Are you in charge of the estate?”

“Good God, no. Just this.”

She followed him up the twisting stairs. From the windows under the slanting roof, she could see the yard, then hives scattered in the orchard, a kitchen garden and finally the roof of the mansion, made of crumbling ochre stone. She could see figures moving among the trees and between the rows of vegetables.

“You’re not allergic to bee stings, are you?”

Vivien frowned.

“No, but I’m not fond of them either.”

“This used to be a beekeeper’s cottage.” He nodded towards the big house. “They produce the caviar of honey.”

He did not exaggerate. The estate’s honey was a secret, kept by those who knew and didn’t want to share. Medicinal and beautifying, it was sought by kings, media moguls and entertainment divas.

“They’re very shy people. Filthy rich, apparently. Not that you’d know to look at them.”

He stepped closer.

“The honey’s very expensive. It’s an aphrodisiac, you know.”

The man lightly grasped her wrist and she pulled away. Undeterred, he went to the bed, seemingly to demonstrate the firmness of the mattress, patting the space beside him. Not looking her in the face made it an insipid invitation. He ploughed on.

“My wife. She doesn’t understand me.”

“Then perhaps you should make a better job of explaining yourself.”

Vivien was shocked and excited, despite herself. Not by him but by the possibilities of the invitation. She had tried romance and found it fragile. This man was not offering her romance, but something entirely different.

She hid her smile behind pursed lips as she ushered the manager, who was baffled by his own audacity, out of the door.

***

Long divorced, her marriage bewildering and brief, Vivien was an anomaly in her social circle. Being without husband or child, her personal and professional successes could be overlooked by her female friends. Being true friends, they never voiced their opinions that her manlessness had made her selfish and her childlessness had made her trivial. They never talked in pitying tones about her lonely nights of splendid isolation.

She became a pale shadow of herself in the company of the husbands, sons and lovers of these friends. Her failure with men blighted her side of the conversation. She was socially uncertain, diffident and eager, where another sort of woman might have become bolshy and bitter. She put them in mind of their brothers, the one’s that were young enough to need their approval and not old enough to be a rival. Her attempts at flirtation were charming. Innocent and awkward enough to share with their wives, mothers and lovers.

It was this group of men that were the first to sense a change. They noticed her fingers lingering on the stem of her glass, that she no longer covered her mouth to stifle the laughter hidden there. There was nothing bitter in the tilt of her chin as she challenged their opinions. She teased them and it made them tingle. They did not share these exchanges with their wives, mothers or their lovers.

Vivien Avery was in flower.

***

The queen is statuesque, bigger than any of her progeny who attend her. Her monarchy is two-fold. She is the only one of her tribe to reproduce and she has the power of chemical domination. Her prodigious pheromones keep the colony in supplication. The workers are her hand maidens, who clean and feed her from their own mouths with ambrosia, a viscous yellow milk that promises her abnormal longevity. So it is that for her entire life she is utterly theirs to adore, her residence a hexagonal cell that is both her throne and her prison.

***

Later in her life, when Vivien had a surfeit of leisure to reflect, those early days at the cottage were the ones she remembered most. She had memories of basking in the yard, eating roast chicken with her fingers. The crisp skin melting between her tongue and palate. There was a square of unsullied blue above her and she wondered if it could have been as perfect or if she imagined it that way. There were afternoons with a muted radio and tatty paperback. Her life before was vague by comparison, barely tasted, lost and wasted.

Vivien also recalled when this life ended and her new one began.

The encounter with the manager had reminded her that her body had its own purpose, not just functions. Its need for satisfaction disturbed her sleep. By night she stood naked before the mirror in the bedroom, studying her tarnished image and invoking the jolt of his fist around her wrist. Her hoarding ovaries now threatened to release all her eggs at once. This rampant fecundity made her shine. Her pheromones were maddening. Vivien Avery didn’t give a fig for procreation. Her state made her pleasure hungry. She longed to be a carnal adventurer.

She turned around, peering over her shoulder to view herself. The motion made one scapula take flight. There was the hollow of her back. The ample hips and fleshy bottom. Flesh on fire, she glowed in the dark.

The faint tapping startled her. It was a hesitant request for admission. She paused. It came again. Vivien pulled on clothes. The stairs creaked under her feet. She looked left to the soft shapes of the sofa. The rapping wasn’t at the front of the cottage, but from the kitchen door. This was a backdoor caller.

The knocking came again. The trespasser had come through the estate and by the rotten door into her yard. She turned the key. The prospect of the manager didn’t threaten her even though she had not decided what to do with him yet.

Vivien gaped. It was a woman. Tall and stooped. As naked as Vivien had been only moments before. Her silver hair was twisted into a rope over one shoulder. Her skin was taunt and uncreased on her aged face.

“Help me.”

The old woman stepped inside. Her abdomen was revealed. Womanhood had ravaged her. The skin sagged as though once greatly distended and then emptied. The abdomen of a mother, many times over. Her pubic hair was sparse and childish. Her breasts were like a beast’s, damaged by the dragging suckling of a large and selfish litter. Her limbs were emaciated. Yet the skin had the same sheen as her face, cosmetic, youthful and unnatural. Bony hands snatched at Vivien as she collapsed into her arms.

Vivien lowered her to the ground, cradling her in her lap. The old woman smelt of honey. Her skin was thin satin slipping under Vivien’s hands. It was as though she had been oiled to keep it supple.

“Please, help me.” She touched Vivien’s face, her fingers butterflies.

Figures loomed up from the darkness outside.

“Mother, we’ve been so worried.”

They came as a pair, one enfolding the old lady in a blanket like she was an injured animal, pulling her from Vivien’s embrace, the jealousy plain on her face.

“Mother,” said the other, “we thought we’d lost you.

They clucked and fussed with palpable concern. They were shorter than their mother, solid country girls. Squat and square rather than curved. They were dressed in simple blouses and trousers that looked homemade.

“Do you want to bring her in? I’ll light the fire and get some clothes.”

“No, that’s all right.”

The taller one was brusque but the other one seemed more inclined to conversation.

“This is our mother,” the girl said as though it weren’t obvious. “She’s never wandered off like this before.”

“Your mother’s lucky to have such a caring family.”

“Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.” The girl beamed at her, pleased by the comment. Vivien saw that she wasn’t a girl at all, but a woman. Her lack of grooming, the unplucked eyebrows and the faint moustache, made her look younger. She lingered as her stocky sister lifted their frail parent in her arms.

“Hadn’t you better help them?”

“She’s very strong.” Her hand loitered on the door frame, as if to stop Vivien from shutting her out. “We look after her. She’s very old now. What’s your name?”

“Vivien.”

“I’m Bea.” She pointed to Vivien’s arm. A bee had landed there. Insects could be as insomniac as old ladies. Bea lifted it off with care. She held it up and it took flight. “They like you.”

“Is that good?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, nice to meet you.” Vivien started to close the door.

“You’re very kind to have helped us.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Most people wouldn’t have answered the door. How much longer are you staying?”

“Another week.”

“Are you with your husband?”

“No,” Vivien hesitated, “I’m not married.”

Bea leaned in. She seemed to be deciding something.

“Will you come to see us? I think my family will like you. We can thank you properly.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Please. It would mean so much to all of us. Through there, tomorrow afternoon then,” she pointed back to where she’d come from, “and if you don’t come, we’ll have to come and get you.”

***

It is appropriate that the workers are female, their passion not for themselves, but for the greater good. They are supple creatures, young and unfeminine, relishing their roles as cleaners, guards and builders, as hunter-gatherers and factory workers.

These workers forage among the flowers, curling tongues sucking nectar from blooms into their rosebud mouths. They hurry back to the hive with this delivery, where other workers  wait with eager, open mouths.

They show blind devotion to the queen. They smother her with mother love which is touching as they are sterile.

A life of toil, doting on their queen, sweet and incestuous honeyed kisses, mass murder and the production of a spoon of honey are the best that they can hope for. 

***

Vivien pushed open the door to the orchard. The wood was crumbling splinters against her palms. There was a sound on the air, a hum between the trees, a buzz, the Om that underlies the universe. It hung before her, sound given body.

It was a swarm.

He came through the bees as if invincible. Vivien was won over immediately, enchanted by his entrance. She admired the broadness of his chest and shoulders. The sinews of his forearms made her shudder. He wasn’t pretty, which was good, as she distrusted prettiness. She’d made altars of beautiful men only to have tear them down again. Her ex-husband was one such man. She’d become indifferent to his sculpted face. By the end she found it vacuous. They was no chemistry, no urgency between them. Give her an ugly, charismatic man any day. She imagined them to be more attentive lovers.

“You’re quite safe,” his molten voice poured right through her, “they’re not interested in you.”

The man lingered in the swarm. When he opened his mouth bees flew onto his tongue. She gasped as they crowded his mouth. She imagined kisses, full of stings. Swollen tongues and bruised lips. He blew gently, sending them on their way.

“You must be Vivien. I’m Tom.”

“Hello.” She was shy. The shyness that is loaded with expectation, that showed her thoughts were giving her cause to blush. She was determined to enjoy this game. After all, it was her summer and nothing would be as sweet again.

Tom carried an enamel pail. He dipped his fingers in and they came out coated, dripping honey. Tom offered himself to her and she took them in her mouth.

He tasted exquisite.

***

“Come and join us. There’s a picnic in you honour.”

They walked together through the orchard. The boughs leaned towards them, laden with gifts. Several women were at work, harvesting the fruit. There was singing, the sound of wassailing and cider, of garlands and maidens. They were dressed in simple homemade clothes, like the women who’d come in the night. They turned as Tom and Vivien approached, eyes full of appraisal.

The kitchen garden opened up before them. Here more women were at labour, rearing rows of brassica and pulling up potatoes. Ferny carrot stalks spilled from their trugs. One woman had her face buried in a lavender bush, grasping it like a lover’s face. She surfaced, glowing with pleasure. There was that song again.

They walked around to the front of the house whose leaded panes stretched above them, winking in the sun. The doors were treble height, unassailable and carved with bees.

The lawn spread out under the sun, blankets laid upon it and men laid out upon them. They turned their heads, they smiled at her and some even stood up but were waved back down by Tom.

“Here.” Tom directed her to an empty woollen square and handed her a glass. His spoon clinked needlessly upon the glass as though he needed this to get everyone’s attention. “I’d like to introduce Vivien.”

Glasses were raised amid murmurs of welcome.

“Thank you.” Vivien would not be flustered. Be it a coven, cult or clan, she would stand her own ground. No harm had come to her so far. It was just a plate of sandwiches and drinks.

Tom lay down, reclining like a sultan on a nest of cushions. He patted the space next to him. There was nothing insipid about this invitation.

Vivien sipped her drink, musing on the order of things before her. The women worked, the men looked on. Sunshine smiled upon them. A paradise for men and bees. The women’s arms were always full: a spade, a tray, a plate or jug. Cult indeed. Subjugated, sexless women with hairy legs and industrious hands.

No wonder I’m in such demand. Vivien shocked herself with such an unsisterly thought.

Bea’s hand fell on her shoulder.

“I’m so happy to see you.” She kissed Vivien’s cheek.

“How’s your mother?”

Vivien had been so distracted by Tom that she hadn’t asked him about the old woman and Vivien now wondered if she was his mother too.

“Not well,” Bea’s face fell. “Not well at all.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She’s not been well for a while.” There was a cropping sound as Tom ripped up grass. “Why don’t you leave us alone?”

He addressed Bea as she stood over him like a servant bearing a plate of fruit in one hand.

“Are you always so rude?”

“Don’t worry,” Bea was radiant. Vivien had taken her side. “I’ll get him back.”

“Tom,” Vivien put a hand upon his shoulder. The fabric of his shirt slipped over his skin. “Don’t be so unsociable. Bea can join us if she likes.”

“Whatever you want.” Tom shrugged and looked away.

“I can’t, but thank you. I have things to do. I’ll give you some privacy.” Bea eyed Tom, her mouth close to Vivien’s ear. “My brother likes you.”

“Are all these men your brothers?” Vivien called after her. “Surely not.”

Bea did not turn to answer, leaving Vivien to be more direct.

“Are you all related?”

“Yes, we are. This is my family.”

The occupied women and men at leisure were busy listening.

“And you all live here together?”

“Our family are direct descendants of the original beekeepers that lived in your cottage. There’s always been bees, so there’s always been us.”

“So where were you born?” Vivien asked Tom. She was determined to find them out.

“Here. Bred and reared.”

“And you grew up here?”

“I’ve never lived anywhere else.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Why would I want to live anywhere else?”

Why indeed?

“But haven’t you ever wanted to get away?”

“Not at all,” he looked troubled, “it’s a simple life but I don’t know how much longer it can last, especially now with our mother being so ill. I love how we live. It satisfies me. In most things.”

He handed her a piece of apple. It had arrived already sliced. The flesh was white beneath the skin.

“Most things?” She bit into it. Tart juices flooded her mouth.

“Nearly,” he smirked at her, “but not everything.”

Vivien stifled a giggle. A colony of inbred beekeepers living in arcadia. Tom’s sauciness appealed. A simple man, a simple life, what was there not to like?

***

The drones are hedonists. These spoilt boys exist to feed and fornicate, a golden life which culminates in mating with their monarch. They have no inkling that this will herald their demise, hence their surprise when their servant-sisters, the jealous workers, rise up in pre-ordained revolution to starve, brutalise and slaughter the consorts of their beloved queen.

***

After the picnic, Tom and Vivien retraced their steps across the man-littered lawn, through the falling dusk of the kitchen garden, past the hives and trees to the back of the cottage. There was a large, yellow moon in the darkened sky. It was low enough for Vivien to draw it down and put it in her pocket.

The rotten door was as she left it, half pushed open.

“What are these?”

Vivien saw what she’d missed earlier that day. The side of the wall facing the orchard was a series of niches. Some were empty, some containing the last glimmer of candles. It looked like a shrine.

“They used to contain bee bowls.”

“Bowls?”

“Straw baskets. An early form of the beehive.”

“Oh.”

Neither of them could be still. Their bodies, one electrified by the other, were in constant motion. She twirled from side to side on one heel; he twiddled a long stalk of grass between his fingers, put it in his mouth and took it out again.

“Bee bowls,” she arched her back, “I’ve never heard of them before.”

They had moved into the yard.

“15th century.” His eyes flickered from her eyes to her mouth and back again.

“As old as that?” She unlocked the kitchen door, eager for him to continue her education inside. They came close enough to raise the hairs upon her arms.

“There’s always been bees here. That’s how we began. Wax used to be how the estate paid their taxes.”

“A wax tax?”

“As candles for the church,” he frowned, the idea displeased him, “before we were excommunicated for heresy.”

“Really?”

“Persecuted for witchcraft. As they did with anyone with knowledge of birds and bees.”

She trailed her fingers down her neck. His frown softened and faded.

“Tom, are you trying to convert me?”

They had reached the stairs. Vivien was on the first step. Tom caressed the newel post with his palm.

“Convert you?”

“To your religion. To bees.”

He laughed. She entwined a strand of hair around her forefinger.

“It’s not a religion. A way of living, maybe.”

He leaned towards her. They had reached the top of the stairs. His clothes seemed wrong on his large frame. She wanted to take them off.

“I’ve no intention of being one of your little women, waiting on you hand and foot.”

This part jest, part test made Tom suddenly tender.

“Is that what you think I want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look at me. Tell me what it is you think I want from you. And more importantly, what do you want from me?”

Everything.

***

Sex with Tom, clothes half on, half off, left her breathless and invigorated. She didn’t imagine herself to be in love. She knew herself to be in lust. Desire was a means to its own end. Tom was vigorous and selfish, making Vivien claw back satisfaction with her teeth and nails. It left her sore and satiated. She didn’t chide herself for such recklessness. Her time of having regrets had passed, or so she thought. She lay back on the pillows, Tom beside her, close but not touching, nursing the feeling inside her, of wanting, of taking but not needing.

***

The lovers slept with the bedroom window open. A swarm of males stood among the trees in vigil, gazing up to where she lay. They could smell her. Her fertility was fragrant. It carried on the breeze.

They were in rapture.

***

“Vivien, wake up.”

There was a gentle voice and clammy hand upon her shoulder.

“Vivien, please.”

There was breath against her cheek. It smelt of honey. Her eyes snapped open. She was naked and chilled, the bed sheets twisted at her feet. Vivien’s hand roamed across the mattress. The space beside her, the place that Tom had filled, was empty.

It was Bea, her hair tied up in a yellow ribbon, a school girl’s decoration. It brushed against Vivien’s skin and she pushed it away, her other hand snatching at the sheets. For all her new powers, she wasn’t ready for such exposure yet.

“Vivien, it’s our mother.”

“What’s wrong?”

“She’s ill. Will you come?”

“Shouldn’t you call a doctor?”

“We have.” Bea blinked. “Tom asked me to come for you.”

“He sent you?”

“Yes,” Bea was too old to look so sulky, “but I wanted you to come too.”

Whatever for? Vivien nearly said but stopped herself. “Tom has taken such a shine to you.” It was a sly lure.

“All right.” Vivien swung her legs over the edge. “Turn around.”

She retrieved her discarded clothes that lay in puddles on the floor. Bea watched in the looking glass, a pale figure glowing in the mirror.

Vivien was luminous.

***

They were on the threshold. The carved doors were ajar, the innards of the house reduced to a long strip of shadow and greasy yellow light. Bea turned to Vivien.

“Not just anyone can come here.”

“I know.”

“Are you absolutely sure that you don’t mind me fetching you?”

Vivien looked at her with irritation.

“It’s just that I like you. So does Tom. We’ve all agreed how special you are. That we can trust you.”

“I’m not sure what it is you think I can do to help.”

“You’ve brought us so much comfort, just by being here. Come in now, Vivien, and be our willing guest.”

Vivien followed her into the entrance hall. She expected the same evidence of industry that she’d seen in the garden and orchard but in the gloom of the electric lights everything was shabbiness and neglect. The wooden panelling was dulled by dust and she could smell the mildew in the walls. The tiled floor was tacky underfoot. She could hear the wavering, nasal hum of air conditioning, a ridiculous thing in such a tatty old pile.

“Where’s Tom?”

His sudden presence calmed her. He came to her with outstretched hands. His face was tears.

“I knew you’d come.” He enfolded her in an embrace, which she returned. “Didn’t I say she’d come?”

“So did I.” Bea’s eyes were angry hollows. “Don’t make out that I ever doubted her.”

“Is she very ill?” Vivien looked at Tom, wanting Bea to leave them to each other.

“She’s dying.” His mouth was compressed. “It’s no surprise. She’s so old.”

“I’m sorry.”

Still enfolded in him, she rubbed his back, feeling the strength in his muscle and bone. His mother was dying and he pulsed with life.  The thought inflamed her. Inappropriate but an affirmation of life all the same. She wanted him again and could tell he wanted her too. Before she wouldn’t have known such a thing and it thrilled her that she knew with such certainty.

“It doesn’t matter,” he whispered in her ear, “you’re here now and nothing else matters.”

***

The corridor they walked along was kinder to the house. Lit only by candle, the dirt and decay was lost in their warm glow. Bea and Tom walked beside Vivien.

“We’ve been waiting such a long time for you.”

“Shut up, Bea.”

“No. Shut up yourself.”

Vivien halted. The corridor seemed very narrow suddenly. “What do you mean?”

“Once our mother’s dead we’d have to leave here. I’ve no idea what we’d do. Thank God you’re here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“None of us could ever replace her. We were so relieved when we met you.”

“Relieved?”

Tom had taken her arm. She shook him off.

“Vivian, we’ll take such good care of you. We’ll be your girls. You’ll want for nothing. Mother never had to lift a finger, we’d never let her. Let us show you how good we can be. You’ll have to stay then. You’ll see how much we love you.”

Her relief and sorrow paralysed Vivien. Tom put his arms around her. Holding her. Restraining her. She was overcome, overwhelmed by their love. It brought bile up in her throat and made her limbs like lead.

Not so heavy though that they couldn’t lift her.

***

Here in the great hall was the sound she’d mistaken for air conditioning. It was a buzz. A hum. An Om. The sound that underlies the universe. The hive was humming.

The sun was rising, spilling through the long windows. Vivien could see the room had been made fit for their purpose. The walls were lined with honeycomb, a construct of man sized hexagons. The honey within made the growing light liquid amber. Some of the chambers were darkened by the figure curled up, grub-like, foetal-style, within.

On the wall opposite was the old woman’s bower, where she was kept safe, even from herself. The honey light made her look jaundiced. She was a queen lying in state. The hive sensed her dying. She was withered, drying, desiccating, her chemicals waning.

Vivian saw that she hadn’t yet expired. Her ribcage heaved, erratic gasps as she tired of the task of respiration. Her eyes rolled and her heart threatened failure. The hive was in the act of entombing her in this state of semi life, of packing her in wax. She would be an effigy within her cell for Vivien to gaze upon. This was the old woman’s fate, her successor had come too late for her to abdicate.

Vivien had her own cell. Disrobed by a multitude of hands, her hair let loose, her rings and earrings were removed. She would be adored without the need of such adornments.

Bea patted her hair and then sniffed at it. As if invigorated by the smell, she did a little dance of celebration and kissed one of her sisters full on the mouth. These grinning, buzzing women were no longer comical. They were monstrous. They all wanted to be near her, to touch her.

The men hung back. Crooning, swaying, waiting creatures. Vivien could not see Tom. She’d heard his shouts and then his silence. The women swept him up and carried him off to where he wouldn’t be in the way.

She felt distant from the proceedings. They’d filled her up with ambrosia. They made her gorge on it. She would soon sicken of the taste and texture clogging up her throat. Sickened but she would wait for it, this addictive sedative, its arrival marking the divisions of her day.

It was getting darker instead of lighter as the morning became midday. Bees had lined the windows, crowding the panes, blocking out the light. The building crawled with them but they would not enter uninvited. They were excited. They wished to witness this rare spectacle. The coronation of the queen.

***

The mating flight is not polite. It is an orgy, during which the queen is serviced by the drones. This is no gentle love making, no prelude to a lifetime of tenderness together but the panicked ejaculation of the selfish gene. The drones will deposit a lifetime of sperm, distending their queen’s abdomen with thousands of fertilised eggs that will keep her hive bound and bearing baby bees, both workers and more drones, for the glorification of the hive.

***

Vivien Avery came into her summer late. As she blossomed, the men buzzed around her, enthralled.

The post The Nature of Bees appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

from “The White People,” by Arthur Machen

Machen and the Intrusion of the Weird

Ah! The weird as literature, the weird as genre, and the weird as…weird. Once upon a time such distinctions were not that important and literature was so inclusive as to encompass a pre-genre expanse by which fantasy and the weird could not be overtly distinguished from the mainstream. That was then, this is now. Then relates to the work of Machen, now relates to the work of VanderMeer, for whom the recent review of his novel Borne in the New Yorker suggests a more inclusive acceptance of the weird in literature, an acceptance that harkens back to a situation current over a century ago. In between, we have a simplification of literature in which genre becomes increasingly a defining and selling point, but where the concept of weird literature repeats and reinvents itself, returning after this century to a point of origin where it is invigorated and pointedly relevant to the world in which we live.

The quote from Machen with which I initiate this essay is one of the most evocative and, at the same time, defining that I have ever encountered. I first discovered Machen through his 1948 collection, Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, a gift from my father when I was in high school. “These stories are pretty weird,” my father said. “I think you’ll like them.” I still don’t know where he got that old hardcover, but he was right about my reaction. The sensation that this quote and its accompanying story engender in me is part and parcel of the joy I encounter in reading such weird fiction. I still own and treasure that collection by Machen, along with other books of his that I have collected over the years.

The quote comes from Machen’s amazing short story, “The White People,” which is initiated by a philosophical but nevertheless enthralling discussion on the nature of Sin and Evil. It is here that Machen performs an amazing sidestep around the quagmire of morality with its nebulous and ill-fitting definitions. Machen moves the concept of Evil away from human nature and into the landscape. Religions often focus on criminal actions such as theft, murder, and adultery, but these are not truly evil because, although negative, they arise from purely human failings. Rather, “There is something profoundly ‘unnatural’ about Sin, about Evil.” This statement, along with its examples, encompasses much of what I find stimulating in weird literature. Here, I explore the concept of landscape as it relates to the Weird, and as Machen describes, to Evil.

I appreciate Machen’s philosophy of the weird and its relationship to evil because it need not be dependent on religion and morality. According to Machen, Evil can be considered a poisoning, an infection that is revealed by changes in the landscape, a recognition that the landscape is ‘unnatural’ based on our experience: a weird landscape. The concept of landscape as I use it here incorporates the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral, all that we perceive as our expected reality, the quotidian encounters based on a lifetime of rising each morning to greet the sun and another day’s labor.

Even though not dependent on religion according to Machen’s definition, in his two best-known stories—“The Great God Pan” and “The White People”—the incursion of evil arises from the incompatibility of earlier pagan religions with modern-day Christianity. This, in itself, need not be interpreted as indicating that such earlier religions are innately evil but rather that they are incompatible with the modern world. This incompatibility has the same effect as an infection, with potentially lethal results. The evil arises from this incompatibility and is revealed in part through effects on our landscape.

“The Great God Pan,” first published in 1890, is probably Machen’s most influential story. A key aspect of it is the sense of the awful, or awe-full, that to look upon the face of a god is to inspire madness. In this novella, two landscapes are set in opposition to each other within the first chapter: “You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things are—yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet—I say that all these are but dreams and shadows: the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes.” There are two worlds, the one that we experience and believe to be real, but there is also another, almost Platonic in its nature.

But to perceive this other world, this weird world, is to pay a price, as the experimental subject Mary discovers. She becomes “a hopeless idiot. However, it could not be helped; after all, she has seen the Great God Pan.” What follows combines elements of the detective novel and the Decadence Movement in literature, in which the hybrid child born of that unhallowed night invites disaster on all whom she encounters. Elements of the infected landscape include a house that has “the most unpleasant physiognomy he had ever observed,” a wine that is “about a thousand years” old, and a human body that transforms and begins “to melt and dissolve” before the eyes.

In “The White People,” completed in 1899 although it did not see publication until 1904, there is no clear demarcation of an antagonist, which sets it apart from much fiction. It is not a single god but rather paganism itself and its associated ceremonies that invite evil and result in catastrophe for the protagonist, a girl. She is found dead near the statue of an ancient idol, but not before she has explored and encountered various aspects of the weird although, in her innocence, she does not recognize these as such.

Among her earliest memories are white faces, white people that differ from the norm in this memorable aspect. But the true advent of the weird occurs after she discovers a strange land by following a brook, pushing her way through bushes, low hanging trees, and thorny thickets, and clambering along a dark tunnel, to make her way to a hill that seems, “another world that nobody had ever seen or heard before.” In her journey, she finds rocks like “horrible animals, putting out their tongues, and others were like words that I could not say.” The stones spring about and dance and she learns and joins in their dance, her initial horror turning to fascination and complicity.

Her death is commemorated with the simple but telling words, “She had poisoned herself—in time.” The early pagan gods have escaped their time, being invited to enter into ours, this being the incompatible evil that infected the girl, now sixteen and post-puberty, and which ultimately resulted in her destruction. Interestingly, this sense of warped time is something that repeats itself in many a subsequent weird landscape.

“The White People” encompasses a number of ideas that can inform the weird landscape: (1) a sense of its opposition in relation to the ‘normal’ landscape, such that there is often a clear transition that occurs when moving from one to the other; (2) a sense of unnaturalness where the surreal becomes real; (3) a temporal disjunction such that the stream of time is no longer constrained; (4) a relationship to concepts of evil, sometimes although not always with religious connotations, such that the landscape can infect or poison our world; and (5) that the infection of our world can involve a deleterious effect on humans, this being perhaps its most horrific and evil aspect.

Here I explore this concept of the weird landscape in light of these ideas and how they have been translated over time into other works of fiction. By nature of this expedition I must pick and choose and, in doing so, I highlight seminal works that are also part of my personal pantheon (pun intended), most of the older works discovered when I was in my teens and ripe for discovery of the strange continents within these stories. Such an enterprise is not exhaustive, and I do not mean to imply that all weird fiction must embody similar concepts. Nor do I mean to imply that any specific work is necessarily influenced by those works that came earlier—although many of these writers freely acknowledge their indebtedness to antecedents—just that these forms of the weird landscape reoccur with such frequency that they can be considered emblematic. Each author has brought their own unique perspective to their weird landscape, and I emphasize those distinguishing aspects of their works. I finish with a look at how the use of the weird landscape has transitioned and been reinvented over time from those earlier works to now.

The Weirdness of the Plane and the Pit in Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland

First published in 1908, the initial setting of William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland suggests that we are revisiting the Gothic, with its protagonist taking charge of an ancient towered and castellated house that hangs precariously over a chasm. This supposition is further enhanced by the description of how, after midnight on the morning of January 21^st, while the narrator is reading in his study, the unnatural is announced by candle flames burning low and then shining with a “ghastly green effulgence.” The man’s dog cowers and whimpers at his feet. What follows is not a traditional Gothic fright, but the truly weird.

The light that the narrator sees does not emanate from within his study, but rather from beyond the walls of his study, which are now transparent. They reveal an alien landscape that is progressively stranger the more clearly the protagonist perceives it. We have crossed the border from our normative world and into the landscape that announces the weird. This is truly an alien landscape, for the Plane, as the narrator refers to it, is illuminated by a black-centered sun limned with radiant red, such that the entire landscape appears ruddy. Also of note is a gargantuan house that is the exact replica of the protagonist’s house but of mammoth proportions: “a stupendous structure built apparently of green jade.” The inclusion of this house makes the warped image of this landscape all the more clearly a strange reflection of our world, of surreal and impossible proportions. There is a connection between the worlds but not by any natural law we understand.

Like Machen, Hodgson evokes gods as the impetus for the weird landscape. The narrator, in his passage across the Plane, sees “hundreds of them. They seemed to grow out of the shadows. Several I recognized almost immediately as mythological deities; others were strange to me, utterly strange, beyond the power of a human mind to conceive.” This last statement is significant for Hodgson not only evokes the pagan gods of lore, but gods of whom we have no knowledge. In particular, he describes a Beast-god, a gargantuan swinish creature, one that seems to combine the elements of animal and man. Here we have the entry of a god-like creature not born of any known religion, but one that poses ill to humankind.

There then follow incursions into our world, from beyond the house but drawing ever closer in an attempt to invade its comparative normalcy. These creatures are revealed as Swine-things, diminutive reflections of the Beast-god. Although suggestive of pigs, to the narrator’s horror they exhibit an unexpected intelligence. Their horrific grunts are a form of speech, a demonic suggestion that domesticated animals have taken on the aspect of humans, or that humans have devolved into something animal-like. The Swine-things are, “something beyond human; yet in no good sense; but rather as something foul and hostile to the great and good in humanity.” Machen in his story, “The Great God Pan,” described the progeny of a woman and a god, the female offspring being preternaturally beautiful but still emulating humankind. In Hodgson’s novella, we witness the perverted evil in which the physical aspects of humans are weirded and debased.

Hodgson also allows time to invade his weird landscape. The horrific cosmic landscapes into which the narrator is thrown undergo a rapid abrasion due to accelerated time. There is much in common here with H. G. Wells’s descriptions of far-future travel in The Time Machine. But with Hodgson there is no mechanical invention and the narrator is thrown forward against his will into a decaying future, one in which the sun spirals more and more rapidly across the sky, all the time dying to a dismal red. The parallels to The Time Machine do not end there for, by analogy, the Swine-things that emerge from their dark caverns, from the Pit, harken back to Wells’s debased and subterranean Morlocks (and are also reminiscent of the man-beast hybrids found in Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau). The Borderland of Hodgson is not constrained by space or time and that is part and parcel of its weirdness.

Lovecraft and the Weird from Beyond

Lovecraft moves the concept of Evil into a demonstrably science-fictional territory. In the stories that make up the Cthulhu mythos, he posits the existence of monstrosities from the stars, beings of such great power that they might easily be mistaken for gods. Indeed, these monsters are eager to accept the mantle of god-hood for, as Lovecraft writes, “They came from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them,” these false idols then becoming the focus of worship among susceptible humans. Although Lovecraft is generally considered an agnostic or atheist, the morality in his stories is consistent with that of Christianity, and embodies a concrete sense of good and evil. The entrance of the weird, for all intents and purpose, is synonymous with evil, and Lovecraft uses the word ‘evil’ repeatedly in his stories.

Although the idea of a weird landscape clearly predates the writings of Lovecraft, his use of this motif is almost fixed in our imagination due in part to his recurrent use of the descriptor, ‘non-Euclidian geometries.’ This phrase has become something of a Lovecraftian cliché and is referenced in “The Call of Cthulhu,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” “Dreams in the Witch House,” and “The Trap.” Thankfully, Lovecraft clarifies the meaning of this mental tongue-twister in his actual descriptions of the weird landscapes that presage the incursion of his alien monsters. For example, when sailors explore Cthulhu’s citadel R’lyeh protruding above the waves, they find that “all rules of matter and perspective seemed upset,” and later in their hurried flight to escape the resurrected monster, a sailor is “swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse.”

Lovecraft’s greatest evocation of the weird landscape occurs in “The Colour Out of Space” (1927), which many, including I, consider his finest short story. Here Lovecraft eschews graphic descriptions of monsters and instead focuses on the environmental manifestation of their influence, the result being one of the most palpable evocations of a landscape in transition from our world and into the weird. Indeed, the story is almost entirely a description of the landscape in transition, a recipe for how a normal landscape can become a weird ‘blasted heath.’

As in many stories with a weird landscape there is a physical separation of the weird from the normal landscape, the weird being known as the ‘blasted heath’ and centered around the farmhouse where the landscape became corrupted, following the impact of a meteorite. The meteorite is the proximate cause of the trouble, foreshadowed in part due to its aberrant characteristics, shrinking although “stones do not shrink.” It is only later that we come to clearly understand that an alien force arrived with the meteorite, this ‘creature’ being more alien than any monstrosity from the Cthulhu mythos, being perhaps a gas, or more explicitly simply a ‘colour’ that feeds on the life force of flora and fauna.

The characters in the story are of little value except in their roles, both passive and active, as reporters of the transitioning landscape. At first the farmer and his family are excited due to the bountiful effect of the meteorite on their crops, the fruit growing to “phenomenal size.” But disappointment soon ensues when it is discovered that “for all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat.” But it is more than just a poisonous unpalatability to the crops, for all the vegetation begins to possess “hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of earth. The Dutchman’s breeches became a thing of sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion.” The final deathly transition for the vegetation is its becoming brittle and gray and crumbling into dust.

The effects on the vegetation are horrendous and weird enough, but there are also effects on the animals in the vicinity of the meteorite. This is initially suspected due to the strange arrangement of their winter prints in the snow, and is then confirmed by alterations in the actual body proportions of a trapped woodchuck. In the end we witness the ultimate horror of humans being susceptible to the same weirding process as the animals, as the vegetation, a process characterized by madness and that recapitulates the same steps observed with the rest of the landscape: “By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and before the month was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the dark.” And, knowing what has come before, the result for the human must be the same: “collapse, greying, and disintegration.” Here we witness humans that have become weirded in the same manner as the surrounding flora and fauna, the palpability and inexorable logic of this being more horrific than the suggestive relationships between human and ‘other’ found in Machen or Hodgson.

C. L. Moore and the Weird Sexuality of “The Black God’s Kiss”

Catherine Lucille Moore’s story “The Black God’s Kiss” appeared in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, a bit less than two years after Robert E. Howard’s genre-defining first Conan story. Moore was a fan favorite and through her character Jirel of Joiry, introduced in the story, provided her own spin on sword and sorcery, and this with a woman in the lead role. Moore set her Jirel stories in medieval France—unlike the mythological Hyborian-Age of Howard’s Conan stories—and this allows for the incursion of the fantastic into a real-world setting, the appearance of the weird landscape telegraphing evil. “Black God’s Kiss” is, in fact, largely devoted to the entrance into and the transit across just such a weird landscape.

Jirel’s journey is inspired by a sexual trespass, following her having been taken captive by Gauillaume the conqueror. He has her iron helmet removed and is startled to discover a woman with short red hair beneath it. Recognizing her sex, he forces a kiss on her even though that turns out to be “like kissing a sword blade.” In a later time and place, the story might contain a more substantive sexual transgression, but eighty years ago this is more than enough to suggest the excessive liberty taken. The imprisoned Jirel cannot forget or forgive, for “upon her mouth she felt the remembered weight of his, about her the strength of his arms.” She will journey “beyond all the bounds of the hells we know” to seek an unholy weapon with which to wreak her vengeance.

Almost immediately we are confronted by strange geometries. Jirel removes stones from within the lower depths of the dungeon, revealing a tunnel that twists and curves downward as if marking the passage of a gargantuan snake. “There was something queer about the angles of those curves. She was no scholar in geometry or aught else, but she felt intuitively that the bend and slant of the way she went were somehow outside any other angles or bends she had ever known…the peculiar and exact lines of the tunnel had been carefully angled to lead through poly-dimensional space as well as through the underground—perhaps through time too.”

This description might suggest Moore is paying homage to Lovecraft’s “non-Euclidian geometries,” but that is not the case. Moore did not read the “The Call of Cthulhu” until 1935, the year after “Black God’s Kiss” was published, when Lovecraft initiated a correspondence with her and sent her two packages of his tales. She comments in her May 27 letter to HPL that “you really had me reeling and dizzy with the geometry of Cthulhu’s city.” The description recalls to her the awful dreams she experienced as a perpetually sick child. Tellingly, she describes this early experience as “nothing was at all describable in terms of physical things, because I wasn’t aware through the senses at all. There was a greyness over everything that was greyness of the mind, not of the light, and nothing had size, yet there was an awful bigness outside the bounds of mere dimensions. And there was an instability of the ground underfoot—only it wasn’t ground and there was no ‘underfoot’—it was rather an instability of anything basic in which to build one’s consciousness.”

It is not too much of a stretch to extrapolate from these descriptions to the weird landscape Moore evokes in “The Black God’s Kiss,” that the landscape is inspired in part due to the dreams she experienced as a sickly child. The story is largely made up of a journey across an aberrant landscape, this strangeness of the journey accounting for part of the story’s attraction. Dreams are repeatedly referenced in terms of the landscape and her supernatural ability to traverse it. The world itself is uneven, full of quaking morasses, strange stars and falling stars, a tower composed of spurting water or tangible light, and a black lake that heaves “with a motion unlike that of any water she had ever seen before.” There is also strange life, these including blind white horses, pale monstrosities with clicking teeth, and a mirrored version of Jirel herself.

Two elements of this journey deserve specific mention. First, in order to view the new landscape, Jirel must set aside the crucifix she wears, throw aside this symbol of Christianity so she may gain access to a non-Christian world. Second, the subject of her quest, not revealed until she has reached it, is a carrier for a type of poison. This final encounter echoes the earlier strange geometries, for she enters a temple in which waits a semi-human statue with one central eye and its mouth pursed for a kiss. “Every line and curve in the dim world seemed to sweep round toward the squatting thing before her with its closed eye and expectant mouth.” The kiss of the alien statue is like a poison, one she then carries with her, the kiss itself having a transformative aspect, for “she ran with the weight from her curiously alien body, heavy with its weight of inexplicable doom.” She carries the poison of the weird environment within her, a vessel awaiting its deliverance to the object of her hatred, to the conqueror Gauillaume, the man who violated her.

Margaret St. Clair and the Weird “Child of Void”

Margaret St. Clair is receiving a recent and well-deserved ascendency in the critical assessment of her work. She began publishing her work in the 1940s, with over a hundred short stories to her credit, but it wasn’t until 1985 that a Best of collection was published, by which time she was over seventy years old. And now, another thirty years later, her work is being included in major anthologies of weird fiction and SF. This is as it should be. Simply on a technical level, St. Clair is one of the best writers to have published in the pulps. Moreover, and unusual for SF at the time, her stories exhibit a seemingly casual awareness of and willingness to explore themes of sexuality, her ability to do so in the pulp magazines no doubt assisted by the humor with which she often handled her subjects.

“Child of Void” (1949) shares some plot elements and structure with Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” although I find no documentation that this was an influence. Like that earlier tale, we have an alien intrusion that takes place on a farm. The aliens have no tangible form themselves, but are “like electricity or radio” and they draw sustenance from energy including that found in living things. They need this because they are trapped on earth in their ‘egg’ and need energy so they can escape back to their home in a parallel dimension. A key difference from Lovecraft’s story is that everything is told from the family’s perspective, in this case by one of the two sons.

The family is going to live in Hidden Valley and, three paragraphs into the story, we learn that something is amiss there, the son saying: “It was the kind of place you see articles about in the Sunday supplement—a place where water flows uphill and half the time the laws of gravity don’t work, a place where sometimes a rubber ball will weigh three or four pounds…You never could depend on things being normal and right.” We thus have the idea of the unnatural landscape forefronted in the story, serving as a signal that the family is entering weird territory, and establishing a mystery as to what is disrupting the natural order. Once the aliens are discovered, it is made clear that their presence is harmful to the family. As the narrator’s younger brother explains, “They can’t help hurting us. It’s something they put into the air, like, by just being alive. They can stop it for a while, if they try hard. But that’s the way they really are. Like poison oak or a rattlesnake.” The things in the egg aren’t consciously evil but put out “a vibration which is hostile to human life.”

St. Claire’s choosing the perspective of someone directly affected by, and living through, the alien ‘invasion’ allows her to place a greater emphasis on characterization and how the aliens mentally control the family. This stands in contrast to Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” where it is suggested that the alien may have some mental hold on the farmer and his family, but the perspective of an outside observer places this in the realm of conjecture. In St. Claire’s story the mental struggle is front and center. The most noticeable characteristic that marks Hidden Valley as strange when the family arrives is how they are emotionally affected, for they all experience a horrible depression, one that lifts suddenly, these seesawing emotions pointing to some outside agency affecting their minds. The range of powers the aliens possess, in particular their modes of mental manipulation, become increasingly evident as the story progresses.

An interesting aspect of the story is how little of the weirded landscape is actually described. The initial description, from three paragraphs in, comes before the narrator and his family move to Happy Valley, and is based on the son’s memories of having visited his uncle there when younger. Once the family moves to Hidden Valley, there is a specific reference to the bounty of the farm (‘milk so rich you could hardly drink it’), even though others in the area don’t experience this bounty. We also learn that, for some unknown reason, the narrator’s ham radio won’t work. A key to this invisible aspect of the story is the depression the family initially experience because later, after this depression lifts, the son says, “The funny things about the Hidden Valley stopped bothering us.” So we know that something had been happening but we have not been made privy to it, in part because the narrator no longer notices or is concerned about such things. This is one of the balancing acts that St. Clair performs in the story. She makes use of an unreliable narrator, not entirely in control of his mind, who can’t process everything that is happening to his family, but who still communicates enough so we know what has happened. As a result, the upbeat ending contains underlying depths of horror, for we know that the narrator, now infected by an alien, is not in control of his emotions.

The Weird Colours of Ballard’s “The Illuminated Man”/The Crystal World

Thirty-odd years separate Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” from J. G. Ballard’s short story “The Illuminated Man,” published in 1964 and then developed into a full-fledged novel two years later as The Crystal World. Those years exemplify the increasing divide between genre and literary works that accreted over this time span. Yet, although Ballard’s works are now often seen as transcending genre, I find it hard to imagine Ballard’s efforts here as existing without his having read, processed, and rejuvenated Lovecraft’s story within his own more modernistic ethos.

Ballard’s story and novel, although taking place at different locations, are initiated with the same transcendent lines: “By day fantastic birds flew through the petrified forest, and jeweled crocodiles glittered like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline river. By night the illuminated man raced among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels, his head like a spectral crown…” But it is telling in how Ballard transitions from story to novel. The story tells of a scientific expedition that intends to uncover the truth about the mysterious crystallization process occurring in Florida. In the novel, which takes place in the tropical forest of the Cameroon Republic, the focus shifts from the weird landscape and the explanation for its origins. Instead the novel explores the relationships among a Graham Greene-channeled cast of characters and how they interact with each other and with this bizarre landscape. In fact, less of an explanation is given about the crystallization process over the entire course of the novel than in the thirty-odd pages of the short story.

There is a surprising sense of similarity between the crystallization process found in Ballard’s work and the poisoning petrification found earlier in Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space.” The relationship is even more pronounced when in Ballard’s story, the Russian agriculturalist Lysenko “maintains that crop yields are increased because there’s an increase in tissue weight.” Furthermore, as the crystallization takes hold in Ballard’s world, objects glow in the dark as they amplify moon and starlight, much like the luminescent flora and fauna of Lovecraft’s world. Also, there is a strange desire shared among characters in the works of Lovecraft and Ballard, a madness that derives from the poisoning, such that the infected characters are drawn to it and refuse to leave the weirded landscape, even against their own better judgment.

Ballard, like Lovecraft, evokes a science-fictional explanation for the crystallization process that has occurred. He cites such names as the Hubble Effect, the Rostov-Lysenko Syndrome, and most suggestively, the LePage Amplification Synchronoclasmique (this litany of tongue twisters all being in the story rather than the novel). Differing from Lovecraft is the lack of a proximate cause for the crystallization process. There is no alien as such, but simply events taking place light years away that are mirrored in our world. Indeed the accepted explanation from the team at the Hubble telescope in “The Illuminated Man,” is that the effects “are a reflection of distant cosmic processes of enormous scope and dimensions, first glimpsed in the Andromeda spiral.” Ballard may have been just reaching for the stars, providing an SF-gloss on astrology, but the relationship between these distant stars and Earth is surprisingly suggestive of the modern theory of quantum entanglement (“spooky action at a distance”).

Also notable in Ballard’s world is his usage of altered time as the basis for the crystallization process, which arises due to particles of ‘anti-time’ colliding with particles of time. Creatures and plants slow as they encounter ‘anti-time,’ and their frozen images proliferate, building on each other to form petrified crystals. The body becomes so thoroughly crystalline that the removal of the crystal destroys the body. These effects of ‘anti-time’ recall Hodgson’s warping of time in The House on the Borderland, although as an inversion, slowed time becoming crystalline with Ballard, whereas Hodgson’s speeded time reduces all to ash and snow. The destructive nature of the altered time also, of course, recalls Machen’s telling quote from “The White People” about the girl who ‘poisoned herself—in time.’

The Weird Science Fiction of Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”

“And we passed through the cavern of rats.

And we passed through the path of boiling steam.

And we passed through the country of the blind.

And we passed through the slough of despond.

And we passed through the vale of tears.

And we came, finally, to the ice caverns. Horizonless thousands of miles in which the ice had formed in blue and silver flashes, where novas lived in the glass. The downdripping stalactites as thick and glorious as diamonds that had been made to run like jelly and then solidified in graceful eternities of smooth, sharp perfection.”

That was my high-school yearbook quote. It comes from Harlan Ellison’s Hugo-award-winning short story, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and, although this story had long been a favorite, it was only while assembling this essay that I realized it embodied key elements of the weird landscape. It is surely a coincidence that the crystalline is emphasized in this quote but, as with Lovecraft and Ballard, such a landscape brings out some of Ellison’s most haunting and beautiful language.

The religious allusions in this quote from Ellison are no accident. Like Machen, Hodgson, and Lovecraft, Ellison evokes a pagan god in relation to the creation of the weird landscape. But Ellison places this ‘god’ fully within the boundaries of a traditional SF trope, that of the malevolent computer. Here the computer that achieves sentience and turns against its human creators is named AM, for Allied Mastercomputer, although the name is also intended to echo Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am.” Ellison does not hide the relationship between the computer and god, the story’s protagonist even stating, “If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM.”

Ellison’s story is readily labeled as science fiction because it employs an out-of-control computer as its antagonist. The story’s sections are even separated by images of a computer punch tape, now an historical anachronism. But the scientific aspects of the story are in fact fairly minor, and it could be argued that Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic horror rely more on scientific considerations than does Ellison’s tale. The significance of AM is not necessarily that it is a computer, but rather that such an omnipotent computer allows Ellison to explore the relationship between gods and humans (“God as Daddy the Deranged”). “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” is a weird tale in the grand tradition of weird tales with their weird gods. It is also a fine example of evil as revealed through its weird landscape.

AM has taken over the entire Earth so that no part of the Earth can be considered as separate from AM. The five human protagonists live in AM, the entire story taking place within the bowels of the computer. Unlike the pagan gods evoked by Machen, the animalistic hybrid gods of Hodgson, the tentacled monstrosities of Lovecraft, Ellison’s AM is a god who has no definitive form, a god as encompassing (and therefore as invisible) as the God of Christianity. But, like the old-Testament God, AM talks directly to humanity, humanity being reduced to the single handful of humans he has chosen to keep alive, to torture.

William Blake urged us to discover God through the evidence of His wondrous creation, (“To see a World in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower”). Ellison’s AM is the world, but that world, the landscape the protagonists encounter, although wondrous, miraculous, is also unnatural. It is a marriage of machine and nature—chittering computer banks, a frozen elephant, and a Roc-sized bird whose wings beat a hurricane wind—with the machine controlling whatever originates from the natural. My yearbook quote suggests the malleability of the physical landscape. Time is also skewed in AM, this being apparent early on in the story when the narrator almost casually indicates, “It was our hundred and ninth year in the computer,” that single line evoking the computer as landscape and that there is something unnatural about the narrator’s lifespan or his understanding of time. The narrator later says, “Some hundreds of years may have passed. I don’t know. AM has been having some fun for some time, accelerating and retarding my time sense.”

AM can also manipulate the bodily form of the humans. This is also made clear right from the beginning of the story. There’s the immortality, of course. But we also learn that one of the humans has been remade into the semblance of a chimpanzee. Later, sound and beams of light are emitted from the chimp-man’s eyes. And then, lastly, AM’s revenge on the narrator is to manipulate his form into something that is no longer recognizable as human, but tortured by its mind still being intact and containing all the humanity lacking from its form. Here, the situation is made all the more horrific by the narrator NOT lapsing into a Lovecraftian madness at recognizing the horror but having his faculties fully intact and eternally aware.

The Weird of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy

A key writer I discovered as an adult, one who inspired me with his glancing sidewise vision, his reimagining and deconstruction of SF and fantasy tropes, was Jeff VanderMeer. I first discovered his work in the stand-alone novella, Dradin in Love. Set in VanderMeer’s second world of Ambergris, this story would later be incorporated into his mosaic novel, City of Saints and Madmen. Ambergris bears a tangential relationship to our world. It incorporates names and technologies, interrogates the politics of colonialism and subjugation, and also exhibits VanderMeer’s fascination with flora and fauna, evidenced here through ecstasies of fungi and squid. There are elements, as you progress through City of Saints and Madmen, that indicate the membrane separating Ambergris from our earth is permeable, suggestive of the poisoning relationships of landscapes described by Machen. But the Ambergris revealed through VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen and the subsequent novels Shriek: An Afterword and Finch fits comfortably enough within the historical concept of a second world to fulfill the popular concept of a fantasy.

This changed with VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. Published in 2014, this trilogy of novels—Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance—later collected into the single hardcover edition Area X, is clearly set on our earth and does not fit comfortably within traditional genre labels. The time is close enough to now as to be now, and the setting is inspired by VanderMeer’s hikes in the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge in Florida. An alien environment appears within this territory, shielded by a force field and referred to as Area X, the intrusion of the weird into the normal, into our world.

Such an intrusive weird landscape invites a novel-length exploration. We have a new world, an accessible world, but one in which our natural laws are called into question, a situation that establishes readerly expectations appropriate to detective and suspense novels. The novel’s characters, and the reader, are put into the position of the detective searching out clues as to what rules now apply in this unprecedented environment. The suspense arises because our hard-won experience, the years we have spent negotiating and learning the rules that govern our world, are now worth nothing and may, in fact, invite disaster. There is a relationship here to classic novels in which strange lands, typically prehistoric, are discovered inside the hollow earth or on secluded mountains (e.g. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World). But nowadays, the idea of such lands persisting undiscovered across millennia invites disbelief. In contrast, the sudden intrusion of a weird hostile landscape is more believable, and certainly more in keeping with the disconcerting realities experienced in our increasingly incomprehensible world.

I did not use the word ‘exploration’ loosely when introducing the previous paragraph. In the Southern Reach trilogy, exploration teams are sent into Area X to study the environment once an entrance is discovered. This contrasts with the passive mobility of the protagonist in The House on the Borderland, who wafts from cosmic scene to scene, from vision to vision. Ballard’s story, “The Illuminated Man,” also utilizes an exploration team to facilitate the reader’s entry into the weird landscape, although when he extended his short story to the novel-length The Crystal World, our understanding of the landscape did not increase proportionately, the novel instead emphasizing the interpersonal dynamics of the characters. VanderMeer creates a more diverse weird landscape than does Ballard, which allows him to find a more engaging balance between the interactions of characters with the environment and their interpersonal dynamics.

World building, so common to SF, indeed prized by aficionados for the abilities of the authors in this respect, is focused by VanderMeer on Area X. Elements of the weirded environment include the flora and fauna, not exempting humans. There are creatures in Area X that are unlike anything on earth: human-eyed dolphins, luminescent fungi that write script, the Crawler. There are creatures that are mistakenly assumed to be of our world but are not, their mimicry so perfect that their veracity is not interrogated by the scientific teams. There are also strange geometries, the inversion of up and down, such that the exploration team cannot recognize whether they are climbing a tower or descending into a tunnel. Furthermore, maps from earlier expeditions lack the striking feature of the tower/tunnel, suggesting that Area X is unmappable, that it may be malleable, or that it reveals itself preferentially to different teams. There is also time travel, a knowing employment of quantum entanglement…

…but most significantly, in comparing Area X to previous weird landscapes, there are clear reminders throughout the text that Area X is a more unspoiled environment than that found in our own world. For example, the biologist describes Area X as a “pristine wilderness devoid of human life.” The implication is that our world, our technology-enabled despoilment of the environment, is the true Evil. The exploration team recognizes their own limitations as humans in such an environment: “Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.” This becomes ever more apparent as the trilogy progresses, the black humor of the second book (Authority) emphasizing the Three Stooges-like capabilities and culpabilities of a government agency tasked with uncovering the secrets of Area X.

Within this structure, Area X suggests the Paradise from which Adam and Eve were cast out, never to return. It is the Eden that existed before the advent of humankind: day and night, vaults of sky and water, vegetation, sun and stars, creatures of sea and sky, of the earth, all accomplished before the evening of the fifth day, before the creation of humankind in God’s own image. Our modern world is a despoiled, contaminated version, but one that strangely mimics all that was lost in that original Paradise. Or does the poisonous Paradise of Area X mimic our expectations, our desire to return to the garden, to a harmonious interaction between humankind and the environment?

But notably, and in contrast to many of the tales described earlier, there is no overt religious relationship of Area X to our world. My suggestion of the Biblical Paradise is something I bring to the tale from my own upbringing, inculcated with the Christian mythos prevalent in Western culture. The relationship of Area X to our world could just as readily be described in terms of Rousseau’s philosophy of the natural human, an agnostic but environmentalist perspective that the more humans deviate from nature, the worse they and their world become. Rousseau wrote, “nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man.” Area X pointedly reminds us of the follies that arise from nature and humankind out of balance.

Regardless of which perspective you hold, the expeditions from our world into Area X clearly suggest a level of incompatibility between the two worlds. You cannot accept both, be congruent with both, at the same time. To become part of Area X requires a clear rejection of our world, and with it an accompanying weirding of what we have come to accept as humanity. Does one protagonist truly become a tidal wave of eyes, or is that the only way we can perceive this from our distorted and unsustainable perch?

Weirding the Weird: The Double Negative of VanderMeer’s Borne

Jeff VanderMeer followed up his Southern Reach trilogy with the novel Borne in 2017. The events of Borne take place in the near future, a dystopian future where the protagonist Rachel and her parents were refugees cast adrift like flotsam on waves roiled by wars and political turmoil. That pessimistic but realistic prognostication is already in the past by the time the events of the novel take place. The immediate locale Rachel inhabits is purely weird, the result of the global dystopia coupled to the repercussions of the Company, which through biotech has created a bestiary of strange creatures, drugs, and artifacts. There are neuro-spiders employed as weapons, gangs of morphed children with wings, claws, and fangs, and the giant flying bear, Mord, who terrorizes the city. This is the locale that Rachel now inhabits. She was thrown into this city and has had to learn new skills, acquire new knowledge, if she is to survive.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this environment is the giant flying bear, Mord, who constitutes a weird landscape in and of himself. Indeed, the concept of Mord as landscape is established at the outset of the novel. Mord is truly gigantic, able to carelessly level buildings with a shrug, essentially unknowable but also an invitation for exploration, and the novel opens with Rachel having performed a scavenging expedition on Mord. Such expeditions are worthwhile because Mord’s lair is in the hollowed-out Company building; as a result, he accumulates all sorts of strange items in his tangled fur—food, dead creatures, and biotech—each day bringing a new supply, a bounty for those brave enough to scale his flanks. The existence of Mord reminds us of Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum that a sufficiently advanced science will be indistinguishable from magic. Much of the biotech in the novel, the other creatures no matter how strange, seem possible from the vantage point of an advanced science. Mord slams us up against the impossible—how does one have a creature so vast that it should crumble under it’s own weight, and moreover that can fly without visible means—ricocheting us between the magic of a surreal fantasy and a science beyond our comprehension. This tension between possible interpretations is heightened by one of the characters, even though steeped in biotech, being called the Magician. This tension also moves us out of the comfort of science fiction, with its rationalistic worldview, into a world that is thoroughly disconcerting.

There is a clear sense of transition in Rachel’s memories for how she came to be in this world, a spatial and a temporal disjunction. She entered into the city almost as if through a magic door, leaving behind the human-made hell of war, disease, starvation, refugee camps, and betrayal to enter into the weird: “My last memories from before the city were of floods and makeshift rafts and the expanding silence of people dead or dying in the water—and a hint of land on the horizon. My last memories were of going down for a second, third time, my lungs full of mud. But when I came to, I was in the city, walking. I was walking through the city as if I had always been there.” Rachel has lost her parents and the transient homes they clung to. She has been born anew into a weirded city, an evil locale, one in which the dystopia she inhabited as a girl achieves the distinction of nostalgia. In doing so, she has also lost a chunk of time from her memory; she is now a young woman but she came to the city as a girl.

Rachel combines knowingness and innocence, characteristics in keeping but also telling about the weird environment she inhabits. She has the seasoned abilities of someone who learned hard lessons in brutal environments, both in the world she left behind and in the weirded city she now inhabits. She is an adept scavenger in the ruins of the city, of Mord, and she also knows well the dangers these hold, including the danger in trusting others, a trust she withholds even from her lover Wick. Nevertheless, her cynical caution is balanced by the desire to love, to care for others, and into this conflict of will and desire appears the strange creature Borne.

Borne weirds the weird, being stranger and less predictable than anything Rachel has encountered before in this city. It is no coincidence that Borne is discovered in a scavenging expedition into the weird landscape of Mord. The relationship between Rachel and Borne recalls other encounters between children and the alien, as found in Spielberg’s movie ET with its extraterrestrial visitor, in E. Nesbit’s novel Five Children and It with the snail-eyed Psammead, and in Barbara Euphan Todd novels featuring the animated scarecrow Worzel Gummidge, whose actions entangle his young friends in trouble. In all these cases, the protagonist encounters something outside their mundane world, and whose powers are not yet clear but are disruptive to the world they have known. But, unlike those examples, here the protagonist is older and sexually aware. Such elements were never part of traditional literature where, even if the protagonists had achieved puberty, the story elements were chaste. Furthermore, Rachel’s relationship to Borne changes dramatically throughout the novel, for Borne is itself changing both physically and mentally, her relationship with Borne transitioning from that with a houseplant, to a fish, to a dog or cat, to a child. But just as clearly, we have the sense that the existence of Borne will disrupt the world into which Rachel has been thrown, that the double-negative of weirding the weird might prove beneficial.

Of particular significance is that the weird world found in Borne does not derive from ancient gods or extraterrestrials. Both worlds found in the novel were created by humans, one with the mundane horrors that originate from humankind acting at its worst, the other due to humans having created something incompatible and poisonous to themselves. If anything this is a poisoning of the Present by the Future: “…the wrenching dislocation of trying to make two separate worlds match up, the one that was normal and the one that was grotesque, the old and the new—the struggle to make the mundane and the impossible coexist…” One might also see this as a weird echo of William Gibson’s maxim about the future being already here, but not evenly distributed.

But, as with The Southern Reach trilogy, Borne does not render a verdict on these two worlds as being a simple case of good versus evil, that the weird is innately evil and should be destroyed. The danger, the evil, is in the use of power, not simply the abuse of power, just its use, coupled to the ability and desire to use these items as weapons. As Rachel says, “All I wanted is for there to be no great power in the City at all.” Indeed, the novel suggests the possibility of a synthesis such that the two worlds can coexist without deadly effect. In this respect, one can return to the metaphor of the weird as a disease that infects or poisons our reality. Only maladapted viruses exhibit a high lethality, for such lethality is detrimental to both the host and the virus; this is why highly lethal epidemics often burn themselves out without spreading far. Co-existence, reduced lethality, can benefit both the host and the infecting agent, for our world and the weird.

Conclusion

Writing an essay is much like a journey—an essay about the weird landscape perhaps even more so than usual—in that you start off with some concept of the itinerary and destination but the joy comes in the experience itself, the details you discover along the way. Here I’ve explored fictions that embody Machen’s concept that Evil can be considered a poisoning, an infection that is manifested by changes in the landscape, his century-old story “The White People” defining some of the features we find reiterated in later stories. Fiction is not static, of course, and each author brings their own vision and concerns to this enterprise, these reflecting the cultures in which they live and resulting in the ever-shifting environments we experience as readers.

Reflecting on these stories, on this journey, I find that the most profound changes have to do with the nature of the Evil the authors find invested in the landscape. I titled this essay, “The Weird Landscape as an Avatar of Evil,” using the term avatar in its broadest sense, in which it simply refers to the manifestation of a concept. In its original use, however, avatar referred to how a Hindu deity such as Vishnu manifested himself on earth. This concept is close to how Machen and other early practitioners of the weird made use of the landscape, linking its evil to non-Christian deities. Machen explicitly explored the conflict between early paganism and modern Christianity. Hodgson and Moore also made use of supernatural deities, although they incorporated elements of their own devising, not restricting themselves to the gods of established religions.

Lovecraft’s influential contribution to the weird landscape is to shift the concept of Evil away from gods and into the realm of science fiction. The alien monstrosities of his Cthulhu mythos are a small step in this direction, they being pagan gods in all but name. Not unlike Pan in Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” Lovecraft’s creations are chimeric amalgams of animal parts, have superhuman powers, are capable of inseminating humans, and inspire madness in those who come to understand their reality. More significant from a modern perspective is his story “The Colour Out of Space,” in which the alien is truly alien and its mere existence is destructive to humans. Lovecraft’s colourful alien, like that in St. Claire’s later story “Child of Void,” is reminiscent of the Aesop fable in which a frog swims across a river ferrying a scorpion on its back; the scorpion stings the frog even though it means both their deaths, doing so simply “because it’s my nature.” Frogs and scorpions, humans and aliens: these are natural pairings, but the later may poison the former.

At its most basic level, science fiction implies a rationalistic viewpoint of the world, one in which even the strangest phenomena have an explanation. The uncertainties of the modern world suggest that such a viewpoint is overly optimistic, that satisfactory answers may never be forthcoming. Although Ballard’s The Crystal World may echo aspects of Lovecraft’s landscape, the causal agency behind the crystallization process is never fully clarified. Similarly, scientific explanations are suggested for how VanderMeer’s Area X popped into existence, but these are not highlighted in the same manner as might be expected in a traditional SF novel. VanderMeer’s Borne also contains elements that are discordant with current scientific understanding, this being part of what gives the landscape its unsettling weirdness.

Furthermore, when it comes to deciphering the ultimate source of evil, such answers are now as likely to implicate humans as malevolent aliens. Walt Kelly popularized the Earth Day slogan “We have met the enemy and he is us,” in his comic strip Pogo over forty-five years ago, a potent ecological reminder that we humans don’t need an outside agency to poison ourselves. That concern is now more relevant than ever. Ellison, in “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” explored the concept as to how our computers could assume a poisonous intelligence. VanderMeer fully embraces ecological concerns. His Southern Reach trilogy serves as a pointed reminder as to how, due to our having ravaged Earth, the appearance of an unspoiled Eden is now poisonous to us. More recently, VanderMeer considers the dangers of rampant biotech in the decimated world of Borne. If anything, a century’s worth of differing takes on the weird environment point to the varied goals for which it can be employed, its recent use in interrogating ecological and environmental themes seeming a natural but still underexplored avenue.

On any journey, there are glimpses of other locales, of alternate routes, these tempting you from your chosen path in spite of the knowledge that such indiscriminate journeying may become a maze with no exit. And so, a few final thoughts on those roads not taken, my hope being that these may inspire explorations by fellow travelers. First, although I had initiated my study of the weird landscape based on motifs suggested by Machen’s “The White People,” I was surprised at some unanticipated mechanisms by which the world could be weirded. Of particular note are strange seemingly-impossible mirrorings, best described by Einstein’s phrase “spooky action at a distance.” This refers to the concept that objects, even though far apart in space, perhaps a universe apart, can still affect each other through quantum entanglement. The crystallization of earth in Ballard’s The Crystal World is apparently due to some process occurring in the Andromeda spiral. Area X in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy exhibits qualities that suggest a similar mechanism behind its manifestation. William Hope Hodgson recognized the disconcerting effect of having a gargantuan mirroring of his protagonist’s house across space and time in The House on the Borderland, doing so long before physicists proffered a possible mechanism by which this could occur.

Second, although the tropes of the haunted house story have become so engrained as to be clichéd, many of the best harken back to the precepts outlined by Machen for how the landscape can reveal evil. Here, the landscape is the house itself, setting it off from the healthy world outside its walls. The morbid history of the house, its unquiet ghosts, are poisonings out of time, ready to infect and destroy those who take up residence within. In stories as varied and potent as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and Kelly Link’s “The Specialist’s Hat,” we find strange geometries, discontinuities between the expected and the actual structure, an increasingly confused sense of place, of time, one that grows ever more disconcerting as the tale progresses…

But, third, why halt with a single house, for what is a house but one element in a town or a city? Machen’s thoughts on the weird landscape were focused on how the natural world, its flora and fauna, was rendered unnatural so as to reveal evil. But this has only a minimal relationship to human distortions of the natural, the aberrant constructs we call houses and, in their aggregate, towns and cities. What about the urban weird? Locales that come to mind are Lovecraft’s Arkham as well as Samuel R. Delany’s Bellona from Dhalgren. Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, Neil Gaiman’s London Below, and Brigadoon might also fit the bill. As might television’s Twin Peaks, Washington and Eerie, Indiana.

Fourth, and lastly—to all those who followed this journey and who now, setting aside any warnings about inherent dangers, equipped with nothing but curiosity and a knapsack glutted with books, following their own whims and predilections, to all those who now embark on their own explorations of the weird landscape—Bon voyage!

Recommended Readings

Michel Bernanos, “The Other Side of the Mountain,” in which the French love for the surreal is married to landscape.*

Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” in which wind, sand, and willows transition from the natural to the unnatural.*

Leonora Carrington, “White Rabbits,” in which the weird takes up residence on a New York street.*

Angela Carter, “Master,” in which a hunter meets the old gods of the New World.

Ralph Adams Cram, “The Dead Valley,” in which meteorology is just as significant as the Pit.

Thomas Disch, The Genocides, in which humankind takes refuge in a garden.

Harlan Ellison, “Jeffty is Five,” in which the Present poisons the Past.

William Hope Hodgson, “The Voice in the Night” and “The Derelict,” in which sea travel leads to encounters with fungoid weirdness.

Thomas Ligotti, “The Strange Design of Master Rignolo,” in which spooky action at a distance creates a work of naturalistic art that has mortal implications.

Kelly Link, “The Hortlak,” in which the Pit is located next to a convenience store.

Yann Martel, The Life of Pi, in which a floating island in the Pacific transforms an oceanic adventure story into something more.

Mary Rickert. “The Mothers of Voorhisville,” in which the weird fauna are our children.

Clark Ashton Smith, “Genius Loci,” in which the significance of landscape is emphasized by the title,* and “The Ninth Skeleton,” in which the Boulder Ridge of Smith’s native California is transformed.

* anthologized in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, eds., Tor Books, 2011

Acknowledgements

I thank the 2017 Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird, that occurred in Atlanta, Georgia, for the inspiration and discussions that inspired this piece. I also thank Daniel Braum, Ramsey Campbell, Matthew Cheney, Barry Lee Dejasu, James Everington, Jeffrey Ford, John Glover, Blaine Stevens, and Chad Woody, who responded to an open invitation to recommend their favorite weird landscapes in literature; I have included those that most resonated with Machen’s concept about the intrusion of the weird landscape into our known world in these Recommended Readings. The quotes from C. L. Moore’s letters are from Letters of H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to C. L. Moore and Others, 2017, David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi, eds., Hippocampus Press, New York.

Images

Aubrey Beardsley, cover image for 1894 Machen collection The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light.

W. Otway Cannell, 1921 edition cover to The House on the Borderland.

Wenzel Jamnitzer, 1568, from Perspective of Regular Solids

Frantisek Kupka, 1903, The Black Idol

Joan Miró, 1922, The Farm

Gerardo Dottori, 1919, Forze ascensionali

Joseph Leidy, 1879, Amoeba proteus, from Fresh-Water Rhizopods of North America

Ernst Haeckel, 1904, Lichen lithograph.

Artist unknown, 1760, from Alchemical and Rosicrucian Compendium.

The post From Machen to VanderMeer: The Weird Landscape as the Avatar of Evil 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.

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