I wish it was me who had found her and not my husband. I kept wondering what she looked like in her natural state, so to speak. What if Gerald had moved her around?

Gerald didn’t notice me when I got there. He was walking around in a semicircle as if he wanted to get closer, but her body was letting off a magnetic force that kept him away.

“Who does she belong to?” I said. I was out of breath and leaned against a tree.

“What?” Gerald said, turning around. There were a few cows nearby. They were looking at the three of us with large eyes.

“I mean, she’s half on our land and half on the Smiths’ pasture.”

“Ah,” he said. “I’m not sure it matters.”

“The head is on our half,” I said. “I think that should count for something.”

I had been folding laundry when Gerald called. I liked doing it right when it came out, when it was so hot it almost burned my hands. I could feel his excitement through the little speaker beside my ear. Gerald told me he had been walking near the edge of our property and found our cat, Mitzy, chewing on a dead woman’s face.

We’d lived on this backwoods land for two years, Gerald and I. It was a twenty-minute drive from town. If you walked through the woods, you’d come across a cow pasture cut out from the forest with rusty barbed wire. When we first moved in, we used to drink a bottle of wine and go and stick our hands through the fence so the cows would lick our palms for salt.

Gerald had already placed his bandanna over the woman’s head. He said it was the Christian thing to do.

“Oh, Gerald,” I said, and threw my arms around him. “Who would do something like this?”

“It’s deer season,” Gerald said. “She was probably shot by a hunter who realized his mistake and fled.” He was looking past me. He had a large beard at that time, and his face seemed to be shrinking into it as he talked. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s probably what happened.”

The woman was on her belly beneath the barbed wire, legs jutting into the cow pasture. You could tell by the color of the dirt that there had been a lot of blood, yet her jeans and green button-up looked untouched from the back. They could have been pulled fresh out of the dryer.

“I think I have that exact same shirt,” I said. “I bought it on sale at Gap.”

I squatted close to the body. I thought she would look peaceful, and that I would feel a spiritual calm spread through my veins, but it didn’t happen. With her head hidden under the bandanna, she looked more like a mannequin. I wanted to reach out and bend her limbs into a livelier pose.

Gerald squeezed my collarbone with his hands. He bent down and put his dry lips against my cheek. “The cops said they’d be here soon.” He said it so matter-of-factly. She was already passing out of our hands. “We should go back to the house.”

“No,” I said. “We need to be with her till they come.”

My husband sighed and sat on a stump with his hands on his knees. I stayed in the damp grass near the body. The woman was laying belly down, with her arms curled in front of her head. I could imagine sleeping like that, with a pillow under my head instead of mud. I kept hoping the wind would blow the bandanna off her head. There were a few bugs crawling over her body. One flew onto my foot, and I flicked it away.

“I’m getting kind of hungry,” Gerald said after a bit.

Not much normally interrupted our eating out here. We inherited the house from Gerald’s parents after his father died of a stroke and his mother gave up and moved to Florida. It was a quiet place, but close enough to town that we weren’t hillbilly hermits.

Gerald and I had met in high school. He had been on the state champion football team, although I always forgot which position. We’d been together for long enough it felt like nothing at all.

It was already getting dark when the police arrived. They turned the forest upside down with lamps and walkie-talkies. They took Gerald aside, and I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He seemed to be giving a description of our cat.

I watched the police dump out the woman’s backpack. There was a bag of trail mix, three tubes of beauty product, a bottle of red wine, and a digital camera. All objects I own and use myself. They put these in plastic bags that they zipped shut. At one point I thought I saw Mitzy, her eyes bouncing beneath a bush like glow-in-the-dark balls.

The police only asked me if I’d heard any unusual noises. I said no, and they said they might need to talk to me down the road.

After that we had to leave the area.

***

When we got home, I went to the bathroom. I flushed the toilet and then looked in the mirror and tried to cry. I walked around the house, calling for Mitzy. She kept darting under different pieces of furniture.

Gerald was snacking in front of the TV. I sat down next to him and took a handful of chips.

“Was she beautiful?” I asked.

“What? I didn’t know her,” he said quickly.

“But you saw her face before you covered it up,” I said. “What did she look like?”

“Christ, Carol. I dunno. Normal?”

“That’s it?” I said. “You don’t remember her eye color or anything?”

Gerald stood up and walked over to the trash can and spat out a plum pit, then walked back and sat down.

“She had brown hair,” he said. “About your length. I dunno if you’d call her pretty. Pretty enough I guess. Her face was wide open and stuck in the mud. I didn’t want to keep looking at her eyes.”

“For some reason I want her to be beautiful,” I said.

I could have been doing anything when it happened. Slicing an apple, napping on the porch, wrapping my fingers around Gerald’s privates. And out there, she was breathing her last breaths. The police had taken the body away in a dark bag, but I kept wondering about her. I would try to imagine her face, and it would be the face of a sister of mine. A twin sister I never knew I had, a mirror reflection I had failed to protect.

I didn’t dream about her, or didn’t remember the dreams, but I also didn’t sleep much. I rolled onto my side and watched a small pool of saliva leak out of Gerald’s red mouth.

At breakfast, I couldn’t help myself. “Would you say she was older or younger than me?”

Gerald was dipping pieces of bread into his runny eggs. He took the piece that was halfway in his mouth and placed it down on the rim of the plate.

“It’s in the past,” he said. “Death is just a part of life. I think we should let it go and move on.” He put the toast back into his mouth. I got up to refill my coffee.

It was a bright day outside. A ladybug flew into the window. I thought I heard gunshots in the distance.

“Hey, maybe we could go in and see a movie later tonight,” Gerald said. He scraped a large chunk of butter across his toast. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“Her skin was pale. It seemed like she might have a lot of freckles, like me,” I said. “Do you remember her freckles?”

“Christ,” Gerald said. “Sometimes I wish we’d never even found that thing.”

Since the economy had gone sour, Gerald hadn’t had much work. He got a call every now and then to fix up a rotted porch or help build a new staircase, but most days he sat around. That day, he put on his coat and gloves and drove off like it was any other Tuesday. He’d finished up his breakfast while I was in the shower.

“Gonna go put in some applications,” he said. “You never know when things will pick up.”

Mitzy came out from behind the stove and jumped on my lap. I ran my fingers over her head a few times. “You weren’t really chewing her face, were you? You were just licking it clean to get a good look.”

I listened to Gerald’s pickup sputter off, then walked over to my jacket and pulled out the policeman’s card. I told the lady who answered my name and said I wanted to know what they had learned. “Did the autopsy reveal anything? Has anyone identified the body? Do they have to do that before the autopsy?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said. “That’s privileged information. We can’t give out information on ongoing investigations to anyone who isn’t a relative of the victim.”

“How do I know if I’m family or not if you can’t tell me her name?”

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait for the public announcements same as everyone else.”

Mitzy yawned and hopped off my lap to find her bowl of water.

“The secret to a good red sauce is brown sugar,” Margaret said. “You might not think it, but that’s what all the restaurants do. Mix it in until it’s muddy and mix in the noodles.”

We were drinking vodka cranberries on her porch. I’d decided to get off the property, sit somewhere where I didn’t feel the presence of the spot by the fence.

“I used to use powdered sugar, but it always tasted like some trash from Olive Garden.” She gave a laugh. Margaret liked to repeat the tricks she’d learned on cooking shows. I waited for a lull to release my secret.

“Margaret, we found a dead woman on our land,” I said, taking her hand as if to protect her. “She was by herself and bleeding all over the ground. The killer is still out there.”

I waited for her shock.

“I know, isn’t it awful? You poor darling.”

I pulled back. “How did you know?” I’d been watching the local news every night and hadn’t heard a peep.

“Gerald told me. Raj and I ran into him at the store.” Margaret took a sip from her drink. The cranberry juice left a thin red sheen above her lips. “What can you do, though? Last week Asha’s goldfish went belly up, and she woke us up screaming. She was in our bedroom doorway with the sad, slimy thing in her hands. Just have to put it out of your mind, I guess.”

There were a lot of paths in the woods. I kept thinking someone would spring out from behind a hill or oak and twist a knife into my stomach. I picked up a large stick to walk with. There was a chunk of wetness around the top, some fungus or mold, and I dropped it back down.

When it was Gerald’s turn to pick our movies, he always chose detective films. His favorites were the French ones that were filmed in such dark shadows that you’d think the sun never flew over Paris. I never quite understood them, but Gerald would squeeze the popcorn in his fists into tight wads of excitement. And yet here I was scouting the woods alone.

The spot seemed all wrong without the body. Even though I had visited that corner of the pasture dozens of times, noth- ing looked right. The barbed wire was spaced too far apart, and the trees had been moved a few inches to the left. I stepped on a small plant with foreign-looking leaves.

I walked around stooped over until my back hurt. I didn’t find any clues. Even the bloodstain seemed to have been soaked up by the dirt.

There was something peaceful about the spot though. I went home and packed a small lunch and came back with a blanket and a book. After a time, Mitzy came by and jumped on my lap. Together we dozed off and woke only when Gerald’s truck pulled into the driveway.

Gerald peeled off his undershirt and approached me in bed. His beard glistened with flecks of water from the sink. We had the window open, and the wind moved over my face and shoulders. Mitzy watched us from the foot of the bed. When Gerald’s fingers landed on my neck, I rolled myself onto him. Gerald was silent as I grunted. Something had been welling up inside me, and I let it out until we returned to our sides of the bed covered in a sheen of sweat.

“Well sure, I could be over there in an hour,” Gerald said. “What’s happening?” I said. “Was that the police?” It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and we’d been playing cards on the living room table.

“It was Wallace Smith.”

“Oh my god, Wallace? He did it?” Wallace was our neighbor who owned the farm the body was half on.

“What?” Gerald said. “Wallace wants me to help reshingle his barn roof.” He smiled and got his measuring tape out of the top drawer. He pulled it out a few inches and let it snap back. “I guess he heard about my employment status. ‘Neighbors help neighbors; that’s what we do’ was how he put it. Funny guy.”

It didn’t sound right. Wallace Smith had never called Gerald for any help before. In fact, when we’d first moved in, we had a big dispute over the land boundary. For a while we thought we were going to have to hire a lawyer.

“What if he thinks you know something?” I said.

“I know a lot about roofing. That’s why he’s hiring me.”

“No, Gerald, about the murder.”

“Murder?” he said. “Are you still on about that? Wallace is just a nice old man who needs a hand. I think he got an arm twisted under a tractor or something. But don’t worry, I’ll be careful.” He winked and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “It’ll be nice to have a little extra cash flowing in, eh? Maybe we can see that movie.”

***

Margaret was insisting I try a new Thai restaurant with her in town. She said I needed to breathe some city air. I was afraid something would happen, and I would miss it.

“Gerald,” I said, “do you know where my shirt is?”

“What shirt?” He was shouting but standing only in the other room.

“My green blouse. The button-up one with the pockets from Gap.”

Gerald walked around the corner. He had Mitzy in his arms and was pulling back her ears. He shrugged. “If it was stained, I probably threw it in the wash.”

On one path, I found a candy bar still in its shiny wrapper. On another, three crumpled beer cans and a full pack of cigarettes, which looked like hunter trash. It was almost cold in the shade of the woods. All the bugs and animals were hiding from me.

I went back to the spot. I placed my hands carefully between the barbs of the fence and maneuvered into the cow pasture. A barb caught my thigh and ripped a hole on the way down. I could feel a trickle of blood dampening the denim. There were a few footprints in the mud and cow pies. They led in different directions. A cow wandered over and licked my hand with a rough, pink tongue.

The pasture was a few hundred feet long. At the end of it I could see the Smiths’ barn. The only thing on the roof was a rusty weathervane. Had Gerald lied to me? What was he doing instead of roofing?

I thought I could follow the line of trees on the far side along the barbed wire without being seen. When I got close, I crouched behind a row of hedges and listened to Gerald and Wallace Smith laughing. Gerald had something in a blue tarp about the size of a body draped over his shoulder.

“Just hurry with it if you want to get paid,” Wallace was say- ing. I was trying to breathe as quietly as possible, and it was hurting my lungs.

Gerald and Wallace went around to the door of the barn, and I squeezed my way between the fence slats. “Fuck, this shit is heavy,” Gerald said.

I thought about all the little moments in my life that had brought me to this moment and how pointless they all seemed. A brown chicken walked around the side of the barn, and I tried to shoo it off. It moved closer, bobbing its head. It seemed to be staring me right in the face.

“Carol?”

I looked up. Gerald had materialized on the roof. The rolled-up tarp was at his feet. He held a hand over his eyes to gaze down at me, making his face pitch black.

“What are you doing down there?” he said. He had a big smile sliced into the center of his beard. The sun was shining hard on him.

“Who’s there?” someone said. Then Wallace hobbled around the side of the barn. “Why if it isn’t a pretty lady,” he said. He reached out with his good hand. The other was limp in a sling. “How are you, Carol? I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

“I was just out for a walk,” I said. I could feel my heart thumping impotently against my chest. “How’s the roofing?”

“Coming along,” Gerald shouted down. “Hot day, though. If you’re walking back through, could you bring me a glass of lemonade?”

I found it harder and harder to talk to Gerald. He would come home sore and hungry and ready for the TV. We would eat dinner, make love or not make love, then go to sleep. I stopped asking him about Wallace or the body. The roofing job went on and on.

When his snores started, I slid out of bed and searched through his clothes. There was nothing unusual, only some movie ticket stubs. I didn’t know what clues I was supposed to be putting together.

The corner of the fence was still a quiet place for me. I would go there to read and think. I rubbed the dark veins creeping up my calves. I could calculate only a year or two before we’d probably want to add a child. Life settled into its mold no matter what you did.

____

“Things Left Outside” is reprinted by permission from Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press, 2015). Copyright © 2015 by Lincoln Michel.

The post Things Left Outside appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Sie warnen vor Giftigkeit^[1]

Looking through the threshold of the front room, his wife’s bedroom now, he caught a glimpse of her gigantic silhouette. The swollen pregnant belly seemed about to explode. The mountain of flesh, hidden under a knitted bedspread, lifted and sank, lifted and sank, to the faltering rhythm of her breathing.

He put the kettle on and ran upstairs. He took his time shaving, allowing the blade to flick water at the mirror with a dull spatter. He rinsed it and towelled his face dry before heading downstairs; the kettle was whistling. In the kitchen, the stagnant air of last night’s work met him, heavy and sickly-sweet. On the counter sat the fruits of his labours: six jars of shining golden marmalade. He held one of them up to the light. It did not move. The liquid had set. He allowed himself a slight smile of relief.

After cutting two slices of bread and rubbing them with tarragon he breakfasted standing up, sipping at his hot tea. It was the day of the barter market, or rather the day the militia turned a blind eye to non-official transactions, which was the same thing. He looked at the marmalade and ate hurriedly, worrying that he’d miss the best offers.

He liked getting to the market when they were still setting up the stalls, putting together planks and wooden boxes protected by rusty metal frames and oilcloth. He would look at everything. Only then would he decide where to trade, and with whom.

The map on the kitchen wall was a stain of purples and reds, drawn on top of the furrows of the canal system and the river. The river was a curve that surrounded the city from the north, squeezed it, hugged it like a drowning lover. The river was the danger. The purple patches showed the areas that had been flooded in the last two years; the red dots marked possible danger zones. He felt a stab of pain in his chest, but this was now a more diffuse hurt, not like the sharp needle of months back.

It was with a mixture of apprehension and defiance that he had started to study the river. Grief for what had happened with his wife’s last pregnancy, alongside a furious certainty that he would not let it happen again. He forced himself to take another sip of tea, which burnt his tongue and tasted mouldy. The most important thing was to continue with those small gestures, the little familiar things. Shave every morning. Sip a comforting cup of something resembling tea.

The noise from the back garden took him to the window. He allowed himself to imagine fox cubs, leverets. He hadn’t seen any for ages. But neither had he lost hope that they would reappear, and he continued greasing and recalibrating the traps which he had set several months ago.

The garden was a muddy square, abandoned and haggard. Guilt squeezed his chest again. He couldn’t do anything about this, not yet. His wife had looked after the garden. That’s how it had always been.

What he saw was a woman bent over a sort of gigantic bramble of aromatic herbs, grown up all by itself after the garden had been left to rot. She was wearing a brown cotton tunic, army boots, and her hair was dyed blue. Several amulets were clinking round her neck, little jars of cures for almost all illnesses. The woman stood up slowly, sniffed at the herbs she had just gathered, and turned to walk towards the back door. She entered the kitchen, and directed her steps to where the kettle still was steaming.

‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning.’

The woman moved round the room as if she were walking round her own house. Without hesitating, she opened the little cupboard where the cups and saucers and teapots were kept, washed the herbs at the sink, smashed them into a one-person teapot, and poured hot water on top of them.

He watched her without saying anything.

The doula had been with them for almost four months, during which time he had been able to go to work every morning feeling the pain in his chest relax a little.

‘It’s the barter market today,’ the doula said.

‘That’s right. And I need to pay you for the week.’

He held a jar of marmalade out to the woman. She frowned.

‘Is that real marmalade?’

‘Yes.’

‘From real oranges?’

The man nodded.

‘It’s not synthetic?’

‘Can’t you smell it?’ he said, waving vaguely at the air in the kitchen. The doula shrugged.

‘I don’t remember how anything smells any more.’

He couldn’t stop his lips curling up a little. The doula was still young, childbearing age. He felt the guilty pang all of a sudden and composed his face. The woman accepted the jar, still disbelieving.

‘This would be enough for the whole month.’

‘It’s for a week.’

‘But…’

‘I insist.’

The woman stroked the jar.

‘In the black market…’

‘I’m going to be late,’ he said.

Before he left the house, he went through into the front bedroom.

***

It took ten minutes by bicycle to reach the market square. He had to add in five more for the morning river inspection. He decided to push himself, to get this time down to thirteen or even twelve minutes. He took Ferry Path at full speed and came up onto the Fort St George, stopping in the middle of the small bridge. The bicycle halted with a slight jingle from the jars of marmalade in the wooden box on the back.

What came down the river was a vague brown stain of liquid mud, which brought to mind the thick blood of an enormous animal. The opaque water led to only one conclusion: the river was rising. He took a deep breath, considering the dark current that pushed the river onwards.

It would be impossible to imagine another outcome than the eventual flooding; he knew the signs. The mud-lie water was punctuated by rubbish, stems and stalks, branches, trash, clothes, cardboard—all from who knows where—that floated on the bright oily surface, showing where the accursed water was flowing, and how fast.

If he shut his eyes he could still see the bundle of stained towels falling from that same railing a year ago; he could even hear the phantom cry of a newborn baby. He forced his mind to compose a different image: at the last moment the child had taken flight, had headed up to a clean blue sky.

The cold snapped him back to reality: a sky filled with storm clouds, eternally tainted as a blackboard, bruised and sick, hanging over them like a stone, and an air so thin and cruel that it had turned everything into a lifeless swamp.

***

After leaving his bicycle in the patch that served as a parking lot he crossed the deserted street in the direction of the market. The proceedings were only just coming to life. He went past the stalls, looking at the goods still packed in their boxes, the pedal-powered carts, the eel-baskets. He rummaged among the bicycle spare parts, and the woollens, all in that characteristic indeterminate drab colour that years of use had given them. He noticed sadly that there was hardly any food. Almost no one traded the food from their own gardens any more.

A group at one of the corner posts excited his curiosity. The larger the number of customers, the more likely it was that there would be something to eat. His instinct was right. They were selling eatables. At a distance he could see ducks and coots hanging from a rope, covered in tar to preserve them. As best he could he made his way through the crush, until he got to the side of an old man who was staring open-mouthed at the goods on offer. He stood stock still, and almost dropped the box with the jars of marmalade.

In a large metal washtub, the stallholder had five or six giant swallowtail butterflies, huge and tarnished yellow-brown, each with a blue eye on its wing, unusual spots for this species, or at least that’s how it appeared to his expert gaze. He calculated that each butterfly must measure more than twenty inches across. And they were fresh, no doubt about that. Fresh but frayed. The bottom of the washtub was a muddy pit of water and earth and the remains of those bright wings, ruined by death and by the hunt. Those broken wings were beautiful: the deep blue eyespots, which seemed to be staring straight at him, were nothing more than a chance discrepancy, but they almost provoked the old familiar pain in the pit of his stomach, mixed with some other emotion he could not recognise.

‘Orange dogs! Orange dogs! Ducks, coots!’ cried the stallholder.

‘Where did you get them?’ he found himself asking. There had not been butterflies like these for several years: he had only seen dissected specimens.

‘They’re not mine, I didn’t catch them. I’m only selling.’

‘It’s very important that you tell me, I need to know,’ he insisted. The man lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender.

‘Mate… I only sell them. I don’t know anything else.’

He managed to convince himself that his interest had been purely professional, and he walked away from the stall, from time to time turning back to look at it, as if he still couldn’t quite believe what he had just seen. The old man he had been standing next to was following him with his eyes.

***

The morning went by much as expected. In exchange for his jars he got supplies and parts to fix the door of the wood-burning stove in his kitchen. But the biggest prize was the medical supplies that the preserves had managed to win him. When he only had one jar left, the old man came up to him.

‘Excuse me… Is that real marmalade?’

‘Yes,’ he muttered. He was exhausted, and only wanted to leave. His eyes kept on wandering to the insect stall. ‘Do you want to make a trade?’

‘I haven’t seen marmalade since I was a kid… Much less eaten it. May I ask how…?’

‘I work in the Old University Natural History Museum. We have a pass to go to London twice a year, to the National Museum.’ He didn’t normally explain so much about his life, but he only wanted the old man to shut up. ‘Do you want to trade or don’t you?’

The man’s face clouded over. His little eyes were the only things that still shone, reflecting this liquid gold.

‘I don’t have anything.’

‘Goodbye, then.’

But as he was turning to go, the old man said: ‘The only thing I can offer you is information, perhaps something you want to hear.’

Had he heard right? Information? Who was this man, and what did he know about him? What did he know about his wife and his dead son?

‘What the hell are you trying to say’’

‘The butterflies…’

Everything clicked.

‘I know where they’ve got a nest.’

The old man was trying to string him along, for sure.

‘Listen, my job is studying the Papilionidae… I know they don’t live in nests. So you can get lost.’

‘These ones do,’ the old man said.

He realised that he was in fact intrigued.

‘All right. Okay. I’ll give you my last jar in exchange for whatever it is you want to tell me.’

The old man smiled like a child.

‘But I must warn you that if you’re lying to me then I’ll denounce you to the militia. I am a third rank specialist worker, and they will listen to me.’

This was just a bluff. His rank had been no use at all when she needed medical assistance. They hadn’t even deigned to come and pick up his son’s body after the child had been stillborn in the sixth month, so he didn’t know if what he was saying was true or not. But the old man seemed to believe him. They walked off to an alleyway, and made their exchange, a fairly common exchange, all in all: information for food.

***

He cycled furiously. In the early dusk, the water was as dark as the sky, and shone with spectral glints.

After a time he realised the impossibility. The disused lock the old man had spoken of was several miles away, and night was falling. He would have to try again tomorrow.

He turned round and went home, following the river, which kept twisting and twisting, and he was incapable of making himself look to see if the water had covered the greenish marks of its last high point.

***

After his careful additions, the map looked the next morning like a grotesque purple and red stain.

If his predictions were correct, then the floods could be worse than in previous years. He wondered if anyone else had spent the last few months watching the water, making calculations on a plan of the town. It was clear that the authorities had not foreseen the consequences of a possible new rise in the water level. There had been no official announcements, or advice about what to do in that case; the people were once again abandoned to their fate.

He spent the first part of the morning examining the map. Bates Lock was quite a long way for him to go and come back after work. It was not uncommon for night to come upon him while he was in the museum, cataloguing specimens or inspecting exhibits.

Just as he was about to leave, the doula asked to speak to him.

‘You have to be ready,’ she said. ‘It could be any day now.’

He looked straight at her for a few seconds; he wanted to thank her. To tell her that they wouldn’t be where they were without her. But he froze. His tongue felt dry and scratchy inside his mouth.

‘Thank you,’ he managed after the woman had already left the kitchen.

He left the house and got onto his bicycle, but he did not start pedalling. Something stopped him. His mind was a blank, he couldn’t think about anything, couldn’t decide anything.

Bates Lock floated in his head.

Then he had an idea. He would ask one of his neighbours’ children to come over the bridge into the centre of town to find him if anything happened, if she went into labour, he forced himself to think, strangely aware of the meaning of the words. Only then was he ready to go.

***

While crossing the Fort St George Bridge he went over in his mind the route to the lock that he had memorised. He did so compulsively, trying to push aside his fear of that thing, the other thing, that was about to happen. In the leaden sky a flock of geese circled, a ragged “V” with no apparent direction, stunted and lost, spiralling in its vague escape to nowhere.

***

He reached the museum in less than twenty minutes, his best time yet. Thanks to his job there he had not lost his house, and had even managed to garner certain privileges: some food, warmth during the winter, access to certain books. The biannual trips to the capital. Who knew how, but it was a place where strange food managed to appear, memories of a memory, things whose taste and smell no one remembered clearly.

The group he was working for was trying to throw a little light on the reasons why, after their appearance on the island formerly known as England, the papilio cresphontes had developed certain unusual habits, some of them violent, for example the males eating the females, and occasionally even the larvae. This had been a key to the early disappearance of the insects. Some of them had developed a strange venom, and it was believed that the unusual colours in the eyespots was a warning of its presence. Shortly after their appearance they had given themselves over to hunting smaller creatures, such as field mice and even on occasion baby hares, flying away with their prey immobilised. It was believed that the venom the group he was working for was trying to track down served this purpose.

These were no more than hypotheses. After the irreplaceable loss of most of the books, of the computer communication system, of the telephones, of almost everything that had provided information and facilitated scientific exchange, they knew almost nothing, and that was the truth. They had to start again from the beginning, to examine this new world. This was his obligation, the important job that survivors like him had to carry out.

His access to books was very limited, but he knew German, and most surviving treatises on butterflies were by mere chance in this language. He only knew how to operate a small number of the heavy brass instruments, to turn the crank and adjust the microscope lenses, to fill the little stoves with coal and wood, to filter the water for the distillations. His job was important but not irreplaceable. But he felt it as his duty to find the lock. It was vitally important, if a small population of Papilionidae had established itself in the county, that they had access to it.

What he didn’t stop to consider was why he felt disinclined to share the knowledge of the nest with anyone in the museum.

The papilio cresphontes—commonly called ‘orange dogs’—had disappeared in the same sudden fashion that they had appeared in the records. The annals recorded their arrival as being after the first great flood. A large part of the town had been submerged. The canals where the students had punted, with their straw hats and their picnic baskets, their books of poetry or mathematics, had overflowed. The colleges of the university bore the brunt of the furious water which finished off the destruction of all their treasures, a destruction that had been started by the months-long freeze, unexpected and murderous, which had preceded the waters. The world’s most expensive wines were drowned in the college cellars, and the large kitchens and dining rooms and studies lost their impressive beauty under the force of the silt. Whole libraries of incunabulae were lost. The whole town was flooded, Jesus Green, Mill Lane, the Backs, like a less luminous Venice in its death throes.

But the water was not exactly hell, that was still to come. For after the flood had come the summer, the long-awaited summer. The first of the hottest summers ever recorded. Fifteen fateful years of suffocating heat, damp, mosquitoes, monstrous and terrifying greenery. The flood had surpassed all expectations, but in the end the water had been sucked up in some form by the earth, risen in order to fall back down again, drop by drop, only to be spat out and multiplied in the form of a swampish miasma under the survivors’ feet, after which the ground had exploded into an impossible jungle where all kinds of unknown flora had sprung into life, bringing the strange fauna along with it. The town had transformed itself into the unexpected home of parrots and parakeets, the river the cradle for swarms of mosquitoes so dense that they sometimes covered whole houses.

And then came the giant insects, like dark angels who had climbed up from hell by mistake. The centipedes, the caterpillars, and the moths and the butterflies, huge and ugly, brightly coloured, pot-bellied. The forms and shapes of the eyespots on their wings were not recognisable as those of any catalogued species.

That late and lengthy summer had not been a period of truce for the exhausted human race. Even after the waters went down there was less to eat. The unexpected heat led to old diseases, which had been cured generations ago, and returned now to decimate the population.

And then came the eternal autumn, in which he had been born. They ploughed the fields once more, they reverted to the old wisdoms. But it was too late, many people thought.

The butterflies disappeared then almost entirely, the caterpillars buried themselves in the earth so as never to come out again.

***

He had been bluffing with the old man. The sanitation patrols never came round now, not even to register a death. They only let themselves be seen, descending from their bumblebee helicopters in masks and white jumpsuits, when there was a suspicion of cannibalism. This was something that they were determined to stamp out root and branch, vanishing suspects with them up into the sky. No one came when his wife went into early labour, not even the doula could cross the river to help them, because that year it had risen more than ever.

It had been his fault as well, he knew that much.

He had not paid attention to the signs.

The sunflower field, the one he could see in the distance from his office at the museum, completely submerged, the heads of the flowers the only visible things above the grey water. The coots walking into the middle of Jesus Green, leaving their watery nests, making themselves easy to catch.

He did not want to think about his guilt. But she had not abandoned the garden, had carried potatoes and parsnips, her belly sticking out, proud of the activity she could still perform. That’s how she had been until almost the sixth month, until the day she started to bleed.

He had to help with the birth himself, had to carry out that horrendous task. The river had broken its banks as well, had flooded Jesus Green, had flooded Midsummer Common, had almost reached his house. His wife had not stopped bleeding until the doula arrived, but she had survived, a miracle. If he had helped stop her haemorrhage then he had no recollection of how he had done so. The baby had not been so lucky. He remembered it as a liquid mass of unmoving flesh and blood. The doula had told him that it would not survive, that he should bury the bundle before the mother woke up. Had she said he was dead? He simply was not sure.

***

Recently he had started to remember those horrid hours differently, seeing the child’s eyes in his mind; a cruel joke of his exhausted brain, for the little thing never opened them. He could still feel the little chilled body, and the doula insisting that he bury it in the garden, almost opening the back door and pushing him into the inhospitable outside. He stood there for a while, a bundle of bloody towels in his hands, and started to walk somewhere.

***

Those memories might have been invented, tainted by the shadowy twilight that hung above them, or by the thick fog that rolled up often from the river, conquering the world. It was easy to call up strange memories when the fog came upon you at the riverside, it was easy to get disoriented. Everything, his memories and his daily life, seemed changed by that shadowy unreality.

***

He decided to go home. He could not allow it to happen again, it would not happen again. By now he understood the signs better, and realised that the city would flood again in a few hours. He could see lightning far away, a vast electrical storm, oddly silent in the distance, and realised that this was the last warning, that soon after the storm reached them and burnt itself out, everything would once again be covered under the stain of black water.

***

The birth happened that afternoon, and it was much quicker than the first time. A few hours of pain, and then everything seemed to take place in ten minutes: a few pushes, the doula shouting instructions and cheering her along, and soon he was holding in his arms a boy, purple with the effort of the labour, long and apparently perfect, and, most importantly, alive. His wife rested under the doula’s close watch, and the baby slept alongside her.

That night he stole a couple of hours of sleep away from his constant fear. His dreams were troubled, filled with water. The baby had little electric blue eyes. It’s too soon to tell, the dream-doula said, but he looks like he’ll have his mother’s eyes.

In the dream his wife died, and he sat up for her wake, feeling lost and alone.

He woke up with his heart filled with grief, into the comfort of the real world, realising that everything was fine, that they both were fine.

His dream had been very different. He had been aware that she was dead because of the way her face had changed, becoming dry and powdery as parchment. People who died only needed a few hours to gain this uncertain texture of fragility in their skin, falling back against their bones so that the dead person resembled a human skeleton, like the ones they had in the museum.

There was a moment when he felt a new tremor run through his soul.

He went to the front room and entered without making any noise, to lean over his wife. Her skin was glowing, and the child’s was as well, and both of them were moving slowly to the deliberate rhythm of their breathing.

***

It was then that he knew. The bundle that was his son a year ago had not dried out either, his skin had not become the parchment-like texture.

This was a fact; at last he had found one.

He sat at the foot of the bed for a few moments, and cried in silence.

***

It took him all his strength of will to go out without making any noise, shutting the front door carefully. The sky was an endless black stain. He got on his bike and rode down the street.

***

If it is difficult to measure distances in the dark, then in the unreal eternal twilight it is almost impossible. The canals spread out before him, apparently endless. When he reached the lock he would not have been able to say how long he had been riding for, or how long it had been since he left his wife and son in the distant town.

The light after the storm spilled ghostly onto the canal. Maybe it was the tiredness he felt, the tiredness that weighed in his eyes and swelled his brain, but he could not say if it was day or night.

The lock was closed, abandoned. The sign that said ‘No Bathing Allowed’ still hung on one of the walls of the lockkeeper’s hut, its red letters bleeding rust and mould. On the horizon a late bolt of lightning shone out. A few distant groans, and the unexpected howl of some living creature broke through to reality.

He would not have been able to bury the bundle that afternoon, just a year ago, a brief dozen months, which he remembered as distant as if it had taken place a decade back.

What had happened was different: night had fallen when he found that his footsteps had taken him to the Fort St George Bridge. He watched the river for a while as it nearly rubbed against the bridge, even after going down for a day. The water seemed as dark to him as the sky. He balanced the bundle against the rails, and just when he decided that he was going to go home to bury it, the bundle slipped from his trembling hands. And then he thought he heard the child make some kind of sound, no doubt another sick joke on the part of his mind; this was too cruel to be true. Whatever had happened, it was now too late, as the bundle sank with a dull noise.

Looking down he saw nothing. He went to the other side, following the current, but didn’t see the bundle pass under the bridge. It must have gone into the deepest part of the water.

Just then he saw that winged creature flying up, carrying something whitish and stained. What the creature then let drop from the sky were his towels, and in the uncertain twilight he could have sworn that it was a gigantic butterfly, one that had not been seen for years, flying ochre and leaden into the dusk, carrying his dead unshrouded son like the spoil of a monstrous bird of prey. This, and no other, was the memory that had followed him all that year.

***

He considered the lock —a rectangle filled up almost halfway with stagnant water, with all kinds of natural and artificial rubbish floating on top.

He thought it must be deceptively easy to drown in a lock.

There was no doubt that he was in the right place. He could hear clearly a papilio’s wings moving. But he couldn’t see where the creature was. He cranked his lantern’s handle, which would maintain the light for the time being. That’s when he saw it, a square hole, artificially made to repair some of the lock’s mechanism, in the side. He threw himself into the water.

It was only then that he understood how dirty the water was. His arms and his head got instantly covered in a dark oily liquid, whatever it was that the water had transformed itself into over the decades, stock still like a dead sea. He did not waste much time in thinking. As well as he could he pushed his way through the tins and the beams and the branches, and reached the spot where the square hole was; he held on with both hands and lifted himself up. He managed to get half his body in, only his legs still hanging out.

He heard the murmur—birds, bats? Butterflies. Papilios. Orange dogs. All of them with the same unusual electric blue stains in the wings, so similar to his wife’s wide open eyes as she pushed and pushed to let their child into the world.

Nothing there of course. He thought he could hear a child whimpering at the end of a large tunnel, and tried to crawl towards the sound. But he could not move. Then the butterfly came out in his direction.

The largest one he had ever seen.

Obviously not a child. Nothing human could moan like that. This made him relax a little. What exactly was he looking for there? What had he hoped to find? His overwrought mind could only hint at the reply to that question.

Another noise broke upon him — the unmistakeable and deafening racket of furious water. The lock would soon flood, killing off those creatures. Killing him as well, if he did not get moving. He chose life, surprising even himself.

Once again he came out to the stagnant water. He looked for the steps cut into the stone, intended to help anyone climb up the canal’s artificial bank, but he slipped and sank. Water filled his lungs. He tasted it avidly as the water soaked into him. This was the end. With a superhuman effort, he moved his arms and found himself beating against the wall. This time he climbed the steps on fingertips, clawing the life out of the stone itself. Without knowing how, he managed to give himself a push and got a foot onto the bottom step. Climbing up was easier than he had thought. He found himself next to the canal, sprawled on the ground, covered in dark mud and spitting out that black water which he had found so sweet a minute ago. He tried to sit up then, but something pushed him back, making him bite the earth. He turned over.

Then he saw them. Spat out of the hole. A swarm of papilios that went following their queen, escaping from whatever it was that had made them grow in such a supernatural way, escaping from the rising waters that would soon have drowned them.

He got on his bicycle and pedalled away as quickly as he could, more quickly than he had ever pedalled before in his life, in the opposite direction, against the current, back to his wife, back to his newborn son, back home.

____

[1] They warn that they are poisonous, from a German treatise on butterflies.

The post Orange Dogs appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Instructor Carniero was holding class once again.

I discovered this fact on my return from a movie theater. It was late and I thought, “Why not take a short cut across the grounds of the school?” This thought led to a whole train of thoughts that I often pondered, especially when I was out walking at night. Mainly these thoughts were about my desire to know something that I was sure was real about my existence, something that could help me in my existence before it was my time to die and be put into the earth to rot, or perhaps have my cremated remains drift out of a chimney stack and sully the sky. Of course, this desire was by no means unique to me. Nonetheless, I had spent quite a few years, my whole life it seemed, seeking to satisfy it in various ways. Most recently, I had sought some kind of satisfaction by attending the classes of Instructor Carniero. Though I had not attended his classes for very long, he seemed to be someone who could reveal what was at the bottom of things. Lost in my thoughts, then, I left the street I was walking along and proceeded across the grounds of the school, which were vast and dark. It was quite cold that night, and when I looked down the front of my overcoat I saw that the single remaining button holding it together had become loose and possibly would not last much longer. So a short cut on my return from that movie theater appeared to be the wise move.

I entered the school grounds as if they were only a great park located in the midst of surrounding streets. The trees were set close and from the perimeter of that parcel of land I could not see the school hidden within them. Look up here, I thought I heard someone say to me. When I did look up, I saw that the branches overhead were without leaves, and through their intertwining mesh the sky was fully visible. How bright and dark it was at the same time. Bright with a high, full moon shining among the spreading clouds, and dark with the shadows mingling within those clouds—a slowly flowing mass of mottled shapes, a kind of unclean outpouring from the black sewers of space.

I noticed that in one place these clouds were leaking down into the trees, trickling in a narrow rivulet across the wall of the night. But it was really smoke, dense and dirty, rising up to the sky. A short distance ahead, and well into the thickly wooded grounds of the school, I saw the spastic flames of a small fire among the trees. By the smell, I guessed that someone was burning refuse. Then I could see the misshapen metal drum spewing smoke, and the figures standing behind the firelight became visible to me, as I was to them.

“Class has resumed,” one of them called out. “He’s come back after all.”

I knew these were others from the school, but their faces would not hold steady in the flickering light of the fire that warmed them. They seemed to be smudged by the smoke, greased by the odorous garbage burning in that dark metal drum, its outer surface almost glowing from the heat and flaking off in places.

“Look there,” said another member of the group, pointing deeper into the school grounds. The massive outline of a building occupied the distance, a few of its windows sending a dim light through the trees. From the roof of the building a number of smokestacks stood out against the pale sky.

A wind rose up. It droned noisily around us and breathed a crackling life into the fire in the decayed metal drum. I tried to shout above the confusion of sounds. “Was there an assignment?” I cried out. But they appeared not to hear me, or perhaps were ignoring my words. When I repeated the question they briefly glanced my way, as if I had said something improper. I left them hunched around the fire, assuming they would be along. The wind died, and I could hear someone say the word “maniac,” which was not spoken, I realized, either to me or about me.

Instructor Carniero, in his person, was rather vague to my mind. I had not been in his class very long before some disease—a terribly serious affliction, one of my fellow students hinted—had caused his absence. So what remained, for me, was no more than the image of a slender gentleman in a dark suit, a gentleman with a darkish complexion and a voice thick with a foreign accent. “He’s a Portuguese,” someone told me. “But he’s lived almost everywhere.” And I recalled a particular phrase of reproof he used to single out those of us who had not been attending to the diagrams he was incessantly creating on the blackboard. “Look up here,” he would say. “If you do not look, you will learn nothing—you will be nothing.” A few members of the class never needed to be called to attention in this manner, a certain small group who had been longtime students of the instructor and without distraction scrutinized the unceasing series of diagrams he would design upon the blackboard and then erase, only to construct again, with slight variation, a moment later.

Although I cannot claim that these often complex diagrams were not directly related to our studies, there were always extraneous elements within them which I never bothered to transcribe into my own notes for the class. They were a strange array of abstract symbols, frequently geometric figures altered in some way: various polygons with asymmetrical sides, trapezoids whose sides did not meet, semicircles with double or triple slashes across them, and many other examples of a deformed or corrupted scientific notation. These signs appeared to be primitive in essence, more relevant to magic than mathematics. The in structor marked them in an extremely rapid hand upon the blackboard, as if they were the words of his natural language. In most cases they formed a border around a familiar diagram allied to chemistry or physics, enclosing it and sometimes, it seemed, transforming its sense. Once a student questioned him regarding what seemed his apparently superfluous embellishment of these diagrams. Why did Instructor Carniero subject us to these bewildering symbols? “Because,” he answered, “a true instructor must share everything, no matter how terrible or lurid it might be.”

As I proceeded across the grounds of the school, I noticed certain changes in my surroundings. The trees nearer to the school looked different from those in the encompassing area. These were so much thinner, emaciated and twisted like broken bones that had never healed properly. And their bark seemed to be peeling away in soft layers, because it was not only fallen leaves I trudged through on my way to the school building, but also something like dark rags, strips of decomposed material. Even the clouds upon which the moon cast its glow were thin or rotted, unraveled by some process of degeneration in the highest atmosphere of the school grounds. There was also a scent of corruption, an enchanting fragrance really— like the mulchy rot of autumn or early spring—that I thought was emerging from the earth as I disturbed the strange litter strewn over it. This odor became more pungent as I approached the yellowish light of the school, and strongest as I finally reached the old building itself.

It was a four-story structure of dark scabby bricks that had been patched together in another era, a time so different that it might be imagined as belonging to an entirely alien history, one composed solely of nights well advanced, an after-hours history. How difficult it was to think of this place as if it had been constructed in the usual manner. Far easier to credit some fantastic legend that it had been erected by a consort of demons during the perpetual night of its past, and that its materials were pilfered from other architectures, all of them defunct: ruined factories, ravaged mausoleums, abandoned orphanages, penitentiaries long out of use. The school was indeed a kind of freakish growth in a dumping ground, a blossom of the cemetery or the cesspool. Here it was that Instructor Carniero, who had been everywhere, held his class.

On the lower floors of the building a number of lights were in use, weak as guttering candles. The highest story was blacked out, and many of the windows were broken. Nevertheless, there was sufficient light to guide me into the school, even if the main hallway could hardly be seen to its end. And its walls appeared to be tarred over with something which exuded the same smell that filled the night outside the school. Without touching these walls, I used them to navigate my way into the school, following several of the greater and lesser hallways that burrowed throughout the building. Room after room passed on either side of me, their doorways filled with darkness or sealed by wide wooden doors whose coarse surfaces were pocked and peeling. Eventually I found a classroom where a light was on, though it was no brighter than the swarthy illumination of the hallway.

When I entered the room I saw that only some of the lamps were functioning, leaving certain areas in darkness while others were smeared with the kind of greasy glow peculiar to old paintings in oil. A few students were seated at desks here and there, isolated from one another and silent. By no means was there a full class, and no instructor stood at the lectern. The blackboard displayed no new diagrams but only the blurred remnants of past lessons. I took a desk near the door, looking at none of the others as they did not look at me. In one of the pockets of my overcoat I turned up a little stub of a pencil but could find nothing on which to take notes. Without any dramatic gestures, I scanned the room for some kind of paper. The visible areas of the room featured various items of debris without offering anything that would allow me to transcribe the complex instructions and diagrams demanded by the class. I was reluctant to make a physical search of the shelves set into the wall beside me because they were very deep and from them drifted that heady fragrance of decay.

Two rows to my left sat a man with several thick notebooks stacked on his desk. His hands were resting lightly on these notebooks, and his spectacled eyes were fixed on the empty lectern, or perhaps on the blackboard beyond. The space between the rows of desks was very narrow, so I was able to lean across the unoccupied desk that separated us and speak to this man who seemed to have a surplus of paper on which one could take notes, transcribe diagrams, and, in short, do whatever scribbling was demanded by the instructor of the class.

“Pardon me,” I whispered to the staring figure. In a single, sudden movement, his head turned to face me. I remembered his pitted complexion, which had obviously grown worse since our class last met, and the eyes that squinted behind heavy lenses. “Do you have any paper you could share with me?” I asked, and was somehow surprised when he shifted his head toward his notebooks and began leafing through the pages of the topmost one. As he performed this action, I explained that I was unprepared for the class, that only a short time before did I learn it had resumed. This happened entirely by chance, I said. I was coming home from a movie theater and decided to take a short cut across the school grounds.

By the time I was finished illuminating my situation, the other student was searching through his last notebook, the pages of which were as solidly covered with jottings and diagrams as the previous ones. I observed that his notes were different from those I had been taking for Instructor Carniero’s course. They were far more detailed and scrupulous in their transcriptions of those strange geometric figures which I considered only as decorative intrusions in the instructor’s diagrams. Some of the other students’ notebook pages were wholly given over to rendering these figures and symbols to the exclusion of the diagrams themselves.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t seem to have any paper I could share with you.”

“Well, could you tell me if there was an assignment?”

“That’s very possible. You can never tell with this instructor. He’s a Portuguese, you know. But he’s been all over and knows everything. I think he’s out of his mind. The kind of thing he’s been teaching should have gotten him into trouble somewhere, and probably did. Not that he ever cared what happened to him, or to anyone else. That is, those that he could influence, and some more than others. The things he said to us. The lessons in measurement of cloacal forces. Time as a flow of sewage. The excrement of space, scatology of creation. The voiding of the self. The whole filthy integration of things and the nocturnal product, as he called it, drowning in the pools of night.”

“I’m afraid I don’t recall those concepts,” I confessed.

“You’re new to the class. To tell the truth, you don’t seem to understand what the instructor is teaching. But soon enough he will get through to you, if he hasn’t already. You can never know. He’s very captivating, the instructor. And always ready for anything.”

“I was told that he recovered from the sickness that caused his absence, and that he was back teaching.”

“Oh, he’s back. He was always ready. Did you know that the class is now being held in another part of the school? I couldn’t tell you where, since even I haven’t been with Instructor Carniero as long as some of the others. To tell the truth, I don’t care where it’s being held. Isn’t it enough that we’re here, in this room?”

I had little idea how to answer this question and understood almost nothing of what the man had been trying to explain to me. It did seem clear, or at least very possible, that the class had moved to a different part of the school. But I had no reason to think that the other students seated elsewhere in the room would be any more helpful on this point than the one who had now turned his spectacled face away from me. Wherever the class was being held, I was still in need of paper on which to take notes, transcribe diagrams, and so forth. This could not be accomplished by staying in that room where everyone and everything was degenerating into the surrounding darkness.

For a time I wandered about the hallways on the main floor of the school, keeping clear of the walls which certainly were thickening with a dark substance, an odorous sap with the intoxicating potency of a thousand molting autumns or the melting soil of spring. The stuff was running from top to bottom down the walls, leaking from above and dulling the already dim light in the hallways.

I began to hear echoing voices coming from a distant part of the school I had never visited before. No words were decipherable, but it sounded as if the same ones were being repeated in a more or less constant succession of cries that rang hollow in the halls. I followed them and along the way met up with someone walking slowly from the opposite direction. He was dressed in dirty work clothes and almost blended in with the shadows which were so abundant in the school that night. I stopped him as he was about to shuffle straight past me. Turning an indifferent gaze in my direction was a pair of yellowish eyes set in a thin face with a coarse, patchy complexion. The man scratched at the left side of his forehead and some dry flakes of skin fell away. I asked him:

“Could you tell me where Instructor Carniero is holding class tonight?”

He looked at me for some moments, and then pointed a finger at the ceiling. “Up there,” he said. “Look up there.”

“On which floor?”

“The top one,” he answered, as if a little amazed at my ignorance.

“There are a lot of rooms on that floor,” I said.

“And every one of them is his. Nothing to be done about that. But I have to keep the rest of this place in some kind of condition. I don’t see how I can do that with him up there.” The man glanced around at the stained walls and let out a single, wheezing laugh. “It only gets worse. Starts to get to you if you go up any further. Listen. Hear the rest of them?” Then he groaned with disgust and went on his way.

But by that point I felt that any knowledge I had amassed— whether or not it concerned Instructor Carniero and his night classes—was being taken away from me piece by piece. The man in dirty work clothes had directed me to the top floor of the school. Yet I remembered seeing no light on that floor when I first approached the building. The only thing that seemed to occupy that floor was an undiluted darkness, a darkness far greater than the night itself, a consolidated darkness, something clotted with its own density. “The nocturnal product,” I could hear the spectacled student reminding me in a hollow voice. “Drowning in the pools of night.”

What could I know about the ways of the school? I had not been in attendance very long, not nearly long enough, it seemed. I felt myself a stranger to my fellow students, especially since they revealed themselves to be divided in their ranks, as though among the degrees of a secret society. I did not know the coursework in the way some of the others seemed to know it and in the spirit that the instructor intended it to be known. My turn had not yet come to be commanded by Instructor Carniero to look up at the hieroglyphs on the blackboard and comprehend them fully. So I did not understand the doctrines of a truly septic curriculum, the science of a spectral pathology, philosophy of absolute disease, the metaphysics of things sinking into a common disintegration or rising together, flowing together, in their dark rottenness. Above all, I did not know the instructor himself: the places he had been… the things he had seen and done… the experiences he had embraced… the laws he had ignored… the troubles he had caused… the fate that he had incurred, gladly, upon himself and others.

I was now close to a shaft of stairways leading to the upper floors of the school. The voices became louder, though not more distinct, as I approached the stairwell. The first flight of stairs seemed very long and steep, not to mention badly defined in the dim light of the hallway. The landing at the top of the stairs was barely visible for the poor light and unreflecting effluvia that here moved even more thickly down the walls. But it did not appear to possess any real substance, no sticky surface or viscous texture as one might have supposed, only a kind of density like heavy smoke, filthy smoke from some smoldering source of expansive corruption. And it carried the scent of corruption as well as the sight, only now it was more potent with the nostalgic perfume of autumn decay or the feculent muskiness of a spring thaw.

I climbed another flight of stairs, which ascended in the opposite direction from the first, and reached the second floor. Each of the four stories of the school had two flights of stairs going in opposite directions between them, with a narrow landing that intervened before one could complete the ascent to a new floor. The second floor was not as well-lighted as the one below, and the walls there were even worse: their surface had been wholly obscured by that smoky blackness which seeped down from above, the blackness so richly odorous with the offal of worlds in decline or perhaps with the dark compost of those about to be born, the primeval impurity in which all things are founded, the native putridity.

On the stairs that led up to the third floor I saw the first of them—a young man who was seated on the lower steps of this flight and who had been one of the instructor’s most assiduous students. He was absorbed in his own thoughts and did not acknowledge me until I spoke to him.

“The class?” I said, stressing the words into a question.

He gazed at me calmly. “The instructor suffered a terrible disease, a monumental disease.” This was all he said. Then he returned within himself and would not respond. There were others similarly positioned higher on the stairs or squatting on the landing. The voices were still echoing in the stairwell, chanting a blurred phrase in unison. But the voices did not belong to any of these students, who sat silent and entranced amid the scattered pages torn from their voluminous notebooks. Pieces of paper with strange symbols on them lay scattered everywhere like fallen leaves. They rustled as I walked through them toward the stairs leading to the highest story of the school.

The walls in the stairwell were now swollen with a blackness that was the very face of a plague—pustulant, scabbed, and stinking terribly. It was reaching to the edges of the floor, where it drifted and churned like a black fog. Only in the moonlight that shone through a hallway window could I see anything of the third floor. I stopped there, for the stairs to the fourth were deep in blackness. Only a few faces rose above it and were visible in the moonlight. One of them was staring at me, and, without prompting, spoke.

“The instructor is holding class again despite his terrible disease. Can you imagine? He is able to suffer anything and has been everywhere. Now he is in a new place, somewhere he has not been.” The voice paused and the interval was filled by the many voices calling and crying from the total blackness that prevailed over the heights of the stairwell and buried everything beneath it like tightly packed earth in a grave. Then the single voice said: “The instructor died in the night. You see? He is with the night. You hear the voices? They are with him. And he is with the night. The night has spread itself within him. He who has been everywhere may go anywhere with the disease of the night. Listen. The Portuguese is calling to us.”

I listened and finally the voices became clear. Look up here, they said. Look up here.

The fog of blackness had now unfurled down to me and lay about my feet, gathering there and rising. For a time I could not move or speak or form any thoughts. Inside me everything was becoming black. The blackness was quivering in my bones, eating away at them, making everything black within my body. It was holding me, and the voices were saying, “Look up here, look up here.” And I began to look. But I aborted my gesture before it was completed. I was already too close to something I could not endure, that I was not prepared to endure. Even the blackness quivering inside me could not go on to its end. I could not remain where I was nor look up to the place where the voices called out to me.

Then the blackness seemed to exude from my being, washing itself out of me, and I was no longer inside the school but outside it, almost as if I had suddenly awakened there. Without looking back, I retraced my steps across the grounds of the school, forgetting about the short cut I had meant to take that night. I passed those students who were still standing around the fire burning in an old metal drum. They were feeding the bright flames with pages from their notebooks, pages scribbled to blackness with all those diagrams and freakish signs. Some of those among the group called out to me. “Did you see the Portuguese?” one of them shouted above the noise of the fire and the wind. “Did you hear anything about an assignment?” another voice cried out. And then I heard them all laughing among themselves as I made my way back to the streets I had left before entering the school grounds. I moved with such haste that the loose button on my overcoat finally came off by the time I reached the street outside the grounds of the school.

As I walked beneath the streetlights, I held the front of my overcoat together and tried to keep my eyes on the sidewalk before me. But I might have heard a voice bid me, “Look up here,” because I did look, if only for a moment. Then I saw the sky was clear of all clouds, and the full moon was shining in the black spaces above. It was shining bright and blurry, as if coated with a luminous mold, floating like a lamp in the great sewers of the night. The nocturnal product, I thought, drowning in the pools of night. But these were only words I repeated without understanding. My desire to know something that I was sure was real about my existence, something that could help me in my existence before it was my time to die and be put into the earth to rot, or perhaps have my cremated remains drift out of a chimney stack and sully the sky—that would never be fulfilled. I had learned nothing, and I was nothing. Yet instead of disappointment at my failure to fulfill my most intense desire, I felt a tremendous relief. The urge to know the fundament of things was now emptied from me, and I was more than content to be rid of it. The following night I went to the movie theater again. But I did not take a short cut home.

____

“The Night School” by Thomas Ligotti. From Grimscribe. Copyright © 2015 by Thomas Ligotti. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with The McIntyre Agency.

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My grand-nephew Danila — smug and slippery, like all young people nowadays, convinced they know the score even though they don’t know shit, and I always get an urge to take off my belt and wail some humility on their asses — called and asked if I needed a job. Tunisian Embassy, he said, easy enough. Night watchman duty only, since for business hours they had their own guards, tall and square-chested, shining and black like well-polished boots, their teeth like piano keys. You get to guard at night, old man, old husk, when no one would see you.

Now, I needed a job; of course I did, who didn’t? After the horrible and hungry 1990, even years later, I was just one blind drunken stagger of the inflation away from picking empty bottles in the streets or playing my accordion by the subway station. So of course I said yes, even though Danila’s combination of ignorance and smarm irritated me deeply, just like many things did — and it wasn’t my age, it was these stupid times.

The Embassy was located in Malaya Nikitskaya, in a large mansion surrounded by a park with nice shady trees and flowerbeds, all tucked away behind a thirty-foot brick fence. I saw it often enough. The fence, I mean. I had never been inside before the day of my interview. All I knew about Tunisia was that they used to be Carthage at some point, very long ago, and that they used to have Hannibal and his elephants — I thought of elephants in the zoo when I paused by the flowerbeds to straighten my jacket and adjust the bar ribbons on my lapel. There used to be a time when war was good and sensible, or at the very least there were elephants involved.

There were no lines snaking around the building, like you would see at the American embassy — not surprising really, because no one wanted to immigrate to Tunisia and everyone was gagging for Brooklyn. I’ve been, I traveled — and I don’t know why anyone would voluntarily live in Brighton Beach, that sad and gray throwback to the provincial towns of the USSR in the seventies, fringed by the dirty hem of a particularly desperate ocean. The irony is of course that every time you’re running from something, it follows you around, like a tin can tied to dog’s shaggy tail. Those Brooklyn inhabitants, they brought everything they hated with them.

That was the only reason I stayed here, in this cursed country, in this cursed house, and now stood at the threshold, staring at the blue uniforms and shining buttons of two strapping Tunisians — guards or attachés, I wasn’t sure — and I wasn’t running anywhere, not to Brooklyn, nor to distant and bright Tunisia with its ochre sands and suffocating nights. Instead, I said, “I heard you’re hiring night watchmen.”

They showed me in and let me fill out the application. There were no pens, and I filled it out with the stubby pencil I usually carried with me, wetting its blunt soapy tip on my tongue every few letters — this way, my words came out bright and convincing. As much as it chafed me, I put Danila’s name as a reference.

They called me the next day to offer me the job, and told me to come by after hours two days later.

It was May then. May with its late sunsets and long inky shadows, pooling darkness underneath the blooming lilac bushes, and clanging of trams reaching into the courtyard of the house in Malaya Nikitskaya from the cruel and dirty world beyond its walls. I entered in a shuffling slow walk — not the walk of old age, but of experience.

And yet, soon enough there I was. As soon as the wrought iron gates slammed shut behind my back, I felt cut off from everything, as if I had really escaped into glorious Carthage squeezed into a five-storied mansion and the small garden surrounding it. A tall diplomat and his wife, her head wrapped in a colorful scarf, strolled arm in arm, as out of place in Moscow as I would be in Tunisia. They did not notice me, of course — after you reach a certain age, people’s eyes slide right off of you, afraid that the sight of you will corrupt and age their vision, and who wants that?

So I started at the embassy– guarding empty corridors, strolling with my flashlight along the short but convoluted paths in the garden, ascending and descending stairs in no particular order. Sometimes I saw one diplomat or another walking down the hall to the bathroom, their eyes half-closed and filled with sleep. They moved right past me, and I knew better than to say anything — because who wants to be acknowledged while hurrying to the john in the middle of the night. So I pretended that I was invisible, until the day I saw the naked girl.

***

Of course I knew whose house it was — whose house it used to be. I remembered Lavrentiy Beria’s arrest, back in the fifties, his fat sausage fingers on the buttonless fly, holding up his pants. Khrushchev was so afraid of him, he instructed Marshal Zhukov and his men who made the arrest to cut off the buttons so that his terrible hands would be occupied. It should’ve been comical, but it was terrible instead, those small ridiculous motions of the man whose name no one said aloud, for fear of summoning him. Worse than Stalin, they said, and after Stalin was dead they dared to arrest Beria, his right hand, citing some ridiculous excuses like British espionage and imaginary plots. The man who murdered Russians, Georgians, Polacks with equal and indiscriminating efficiency when he was the head of NKVD, before it softened up into the KGB. And there he was then, being led out of the Presidium session, unclean and repulsive like a carrion fly.

He was shot soon after, they said, but it was still murder; at least, I thought so, seeking to if not justify, then comprehend, thinking around and around and hastening my step involuntarily.

Sometimes the attachés, while rushing for the bathrooms, left their doors ajar, illuminated by the brass sconces on the walls, their semicircles of light snatching the buttery gloss of mahogany furniture and the slightly indecent spillage of stiff linen, the burden of excess. But mostly I walked the hallways, thinking of everything that happened in this house, so I wasn’t all that surprised or shocked when I first saw the naked girl.

She must’ve been barely thirteen — her breasts uncomfortable little hillocks, her hips narrow and long. She ran down the hall, and I guessed that she did not belong — she did not seem Tunisian, or alive, for that matter. She just ran, her mouth a black distorted silent hole in her face, her eyes bruised. Her hair, shoulder-length, wheat-colored, streamed behind her, and I remember the hollow on the side of her smooth lean hip, the way it reflected light from my flashlight, the working of ropy muscles under her smooth skin. Oh, she really ran, her heels digging into the hardwood floors as if they were soft dirt, her fists pumping.

I followed her with the beam of my flashlight. I stopped dead in my tracks, did not dare to think about it yet, just watched and felt my breathing grow lighter. She reached the end of the hallway and I expected her to disappear or take off up or down the stairs, or turn around; instead, she stopped just before the stairwell, and started striking the air in front of her with both fists, as if there was a door.

She turned once, her face half-melting in the deluge of ghost tears, her fists still pummeling against the invisible door, but without conviction, her heart ready to give out. Then an invisible but rough hand jerked her away from the door — I could not see who was doing it, but I saw her feet leave the ground, and then she was dragged along the hardwood floors through the nearest closed door.

I stood in the hallway for a while, letting it all sink in. Of course I knew who she was — not her name or anything, but what happened to her. I stared at the locked door; I knew that behind it the consul and his wife slept in a four-postered bed. And yet, in the very same bed, there was that ghost girl, hairs on her thin arms standing on end and her mouth still torn by a scream, invisible hands pressing her face into a pillow, her legs jerking and kicking at the invisible assailant… I was almost relieved that I could not see him, even though the moment I turned and started down the hallway again, his bespectacled face slowly materialized, like a photo being developed, on the inside of my eyelids, and I could not shake the sense of his presence until the sun rose.

***

I soon found a routine with my new job: all night I walked through the stairwells and the corridors, sometimes dodging the ghosts of girls — there were so many, so many, all of them between twelve and eighteen, all of them terrible in their nudity — and living diplomats who stayed at the Embassy stumbling past the soft shine of their gold-plated fixtures on their way to the bathrooms. In the mornings, I went to a small coffee house to have a cup of very hot and sweet and black coffee with a thick layer of sludge in the bottom. I drank it in deliberate sips and thought of the heavy doors with iron bolts and the basement with too many chambers and lopsided cement walls no one dared to disturb because of what they were afraid to find buried under and inside of them. And then I hurried home, in case my son decided to call from his time zone eight hours behind, before he went to bed.

You know that you’re old when your children are old, when they have heart trouble and sciatica, when their hearing is going too so that both of you yell into the shell of the phone receiver. But most often, he doesn’t call — and I do not blame him, I wouldn’t call me either. He hadn’t forgiven and he never fully will, except maybe on his deathbed — and it saddens me to think that he might be arriving there before me, like it saddens me that my grandchildren cannot read Cyrillic.

I come home and wait for the phone to speak to me in its low sentimental treble, and then I go to bed. I close my eyes and I watch the images from the previous night. I watch seven girls, none of whom can be older than fourteen, all on their hands and knees in a circle, their heads pressed together, their naked bottoms raised high, I watch them flinch away from the invisible presence that circles and circles them, endlessly. I think that I can feel the gust of Beria’s stroll on my face, but that too passes.

I only turn away when one of them jerks as her leg rises high in the air — and from the depressions on the ghostly flesh I know that there’s a hand seizing her by the ankle. He drags her away from the circle as she tries to kick with her free foot, grabbing at the long nap of the rug, as her elbows and breasts leave troughs in it, as her fingers tangle in the Persian luxury and then let go with the breaking of already short nails. I turn away because I know what happens next, and even though I cannot see him, I cannot watch.

Morning comes eventually, and always at the time when I lose hope that the sun will ever rise again. I swear to myself that I will not come back here, Never again, I whisper — the same oath I gave to myself back before the war, and just like back then I know that I will break it over and over, every night.

On my way out of the light blue embassy house, I occasionally run into the cook, a Pakistani who has been working there for a few years. We sometimes stop for a smoke and he tells me about a bag of bones he found in the wall behind the stove some years back. He offers to show it to me but I refuse politely, scared of the stupid urban legend about a man who buys a hotdog and inside finds his wife’s finger bone with her wedding ring still on. The ghosts are bad enough.

During this time, my son only called once. He complained at length, speaking hastily, as if trying to prevent me from talking back. I waited. I did not really expect him to talk about things we did not talk about — why he left or why he never told his wife where I was working. In turn, I made sympathetic noises and never mentioned how angry I was that his emigration back in the 70s fucked me over. What was the point? I did not blame him for his mother’s death, and he didn’t blame me for anything. He just complained that his grandkids don’t understand Russian. I don’t even remember what they, or their parents, my own grandchildren, look like.

When he was done talking, I went to bed and even slept until the voices of children outside woke me in the early afternoon. They always carried so far in this weather, those first warm days of not-quite summer, and I lay awake on my back listening to the high-pitched squealing outside, too warm in my long underwear. And if your life is like mine — if it’s as long as mine, that is — then you find yourself thinking about a lot of shit. You start remembering the terrible sludge of life at the bottom of your memory, and if you stir it by too much thinking, too much listening to the shouts and bicycle bells outside, then woe is you, and the ghosts of teenage girls will keep you up all night and all day.

***

The cars NKVD drove were called black ravens, named for both color and the ominous nature of their arrival in one’s neighborhood. Narodniy Komissariat Vnutrennih Del – it’s a habit, to sound out the entire name in my head. Abbreviations just don’t terrify me. The modern yellow canaries of the police seemed harmless in comparison, quaint even. But those black ravens… I remembered the sinister yellow beams of the headlights like I remembered the squeaking of leather against leather, uniform against the seats, like I remembered the roundness of the hard wheel under my gloved hands.

Being a chauffer was never a prestigious job, but driving him — driving Beria — filled one with quiet dread. I remember the blue dusk and the snowdrifts of late February, the bright pinpricks of the streetlamps as they lit up ahead of my car, one by one, as if running from us — from him, I think.  I have never done anything wrong, but my neck prickles with freshly cut hairs, and my head sweats under my leather cap. I can feel his gaze on me, like a touch of greasy fingers. Funny, that: one can live ninety years, such a long life, and still shiver in the warm May afternoon just thinking about that one February night.

It started to snow soon after the streetlights all flickered on, lining along the facades of the houses — all old mansions, being in the center of the city and all, painted pale blues and yellows and greens. The flight of the lights reminded me of a poem I read some years ago; only I could not remember it but tried nonetheless–anything to avoid the sensation of the sticky unclean stare on the back of my head, at the base of my skull, and I felt cold, as if a gun barrel rested there.

“Slow down,” he tells me in a soft voice. There’s no one but him in the car, and I am grateful for small mercies, I am grateful that except for directions he does not talk to me.

I slow down. The wind is kicking up the snow and it writhes, serpentine, close to the ground, barely reaching up high enough to get snagged in the lights of the car beams.

“Turn off the lights.”

I do, and then I see her — bundled up in an old, moth-eaten fur coat, her head swaddled in a thick kerchief. I recognize her — Ninochka, a neighbor who is rumored to be a bit addled in the head, but she always says hello to me and she is always friendly. The coat and kerchief disfigure and bloat her as she trundles through the snow, her walk waddling in her thick felt boots that look like they used to belong to her grandfather. I hope that this misshapen, ugly disguise would be enough to save her.

I pick up the speed slightly, to save her, to drive past her and perhaps find another girl walking home from work late, find another one — someone I do not know, and it is unfair that I am so willing to trade one for another but here we are — just God please, let us pass her. In my head, I make deals with God, promises I would never be able to keep. I do not know why it’s so important, but it feels that if I could just save her, just this one, then things would be all right again, the world would be revealed as a little bit just and at least somewhat sensible. Just this one, please god.

“Slow down,” he says again, and I feel the leather on the back of my seat shift as he grips the top of it. “Stop right there.” He points just ahead, at the pool of darkness between two cones of light, where the snow changes color from white to blue. The wind is swirling around his shoes as he steps out, and the girl, Ninochka, looks up for the first time. She does not recognize him — not at first, not later when she is sobbing quietly in the back seat of the car, her arms twisted behind her so that she cannot even wipe her face and her tears drip off the reddened tip off her nose, like a melting icicle. I still cannot remember the poem — something about the running streetlights, and I concentrate on the elusive rhythm and stare straight ahead, until I stop by the wrought iron gates of his house and let him and Ninochka out. I am not allowed beyond that point, being just a chauffer and not an NKVD man. I am grateful.

***

So I thought that my presence in the sky-blue house was not coincidental, and the fact that I kept seeing the dead naked girls everywhere I looked meant something. I tried to not look into their faces, not when they were clumped, heads together, in a circle. I did not need to see their faces to know that Ninochka was somewhere among them, a transparent long-limbed apparition being hauled off into some secret dungeon to undergo things best not thought about — and I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head, just not to think about that, not to think.

My son was a dissident, and to him there was no poison more bitter than the knowledge that his father used to work for NKVD, used to turn people in, used to sit on people’s tribunals that condemned enemies of the state. His shame for my sins forced his pointless flight into the place that offered none of the freedoms it had previously promised, the illusory comforts of the familiar language and the same conversations, of the slowly corrupting English words and the joys of capitalism as small and trivial as the cockroaches in a Brighton Beach kitchen. He still does not see the irony in that.

But he does manage to feel superior to me; he feels like he is better because he’s not the one with naked dead girls chasing him through dreams and working hours, crowding in his head during the precious few minutes of leisure. The bar ribbons of all my medals and orders are of no consequence, as if there had been no war after the slow stealthy drives through the streets.  Seasons changed but not the girls, forever trapped in the precarious land between adolescence and maturity, and if there were no victories and marching through mud all the way to Germany and back, as if there was nothing else after these girls. Time stopped in 1938, I suspect, and now it just keeps replaying in the house in Malaya Nikitskaya. And I cannot look away and I cannot quit the job in the embassy — not until I either figure out why this is happening or decide that I do not care enough to find out.

***

I remember the last week I worked in the Tunisian Embassy. The dead girls infected everything, and even the diplomats and the security saw them out of the corners of their eyes — I saw them tossing up their heads on the way to the bathroom, their eyes wide and awake like those of spooked horses. The girls — long-limbed, bruised-pale — ran down every hallway, their faces looming up from every stairwell, every corner, every glass of sweet dark tea the Pakistani cook brewed for me in the mornings.

The diplomats whispered in their strange tongue, the tongue, I imagined, that remained unchanged since Hannibal and his elephants. I guessed that the girls were getting to them too, and for a brief while I was relating to these foreign dignitaries. Then they decided to deal with the problem, something I had not really considered, content in my unrelenting terror. They decided to take apart the fake partitions in the basement.

I was told to not come to work for a few days, and that damn near killed me. I could not sleep at night, thinking of the pale wraiths streaming in the dark paneled hallways of the sky-blue house. But the heart, the heart of it were all these dead girls, and I worried about them — I feared that they would exorcise them, would chase them away, leaving me no reason to ever go back, no reason to wake up every day, shave, leave the house. I could not know whether the semblance of life granted to them was torturous, and yet I hoped that they would survive.

They did not. When I came back, I found the basement devoid of its fake cement partitions, and the bricks in the basement walls were held together with fresh mortar. The corridors and the rooms were empty too — I often turned, having imagined a flick of movement on the periphery of my vision. I looked into the empty rooms, hoping to catch a glimpse of long legs shredding the air into long, sickle-shaped slivers.

I found them after morning came and the cook offered me the usual glass of tea, dark and sweet and fragrant.

“They found all these bones,” he told me, his voice regretful. “Even more than my bag, the one I told you about before.”

“Where did they take them?”

He shrugged and shook his head, opening his arms palms-out in a pantomime of sincere puzzlement. I already knew that they were not in the house, because of course I already looked everywhere I could look without disturbing any of the diplomats’ sleep.

Before I left for the day, I looked in the yard. It was so quiet there, so separate from the world outside. So peaceful. I found the skulls lined under the trees behind the building, where the graveled path traveled between the house and the wall.

I looked at the row of skulls, all of them with one hole through the base, and I regretted that I had never seen Ninochka’s face among the silent wraiths. I did not know which one of these skulls was hers; all of them looked at me with black holes of their sockets, and I thought I heard the faint rattling of the bullets inside them, the cluttering that grew louder like that of the tin cans dragging behind a running dog.

I turned away and walked toward the gates, trying to keep my steps slow and calm, trying to ignore the rattling of the skulls that had been dragging behind me for the last sixty years.

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