The Weird Part 127

Her voice ebbed out. I waited a minute for her to resume, but she did not do so. Eventually I knocked nervously on the door and called her name. There was no answer. I put my ear to the door. I could hear her crying, quietly.

I went home without the bowl. My mother pursed her lips a little but said nothing. I didn't tell her any of what Mrs. Miller had said. I was troubled and totally confused.

The next time I delivered Mrs. Miller's food, in a new container, she whispered harshly to me: 'It preys on my eyes, all the white. Nothing to see. Can't look out the window, can't read, can't gaze at my nails. Preys on my mind.

'Not even my memories are left,' she said in misery. 'It's colonizing them. I remember things...happy times...and the thing's waiting in the texture of my dress, or in the crumbs of my birthday cake. I didn't notice it then. But I can see it now. My memories aren't mine anymore. Not even my imaginings. Last night I thought about going to the seaside, and then the thing was there in the foam on the waves.'

She spoke very little the next few times I visited her. I read the chapters she demanded and she grunted curtly in her response. She ate quickly.

Her other visitors were there more often now, as the spring came in. I saw them in new combinations and situations: the glamorous young woman arguing with the friendly drunk; the old man sobbing at the far end of the hall. The aggressive man was often there, cajoling and moaning, and occasionally talking conversationally through the door, being answered like an equal. Other times he screamed at her as usual.

I arrived on a chilly day to find the drunken c.o.c.kney man sleeping a few feet from the door, snoring gutturally. I gave Mrs. Miller her food and then sat on my coat and read to her from a women's magazine as she ate.

When she had finished her food I waited with my arms outstretched, ready to s.n.a.t.c.h the bowl from her. I remember that I was very uneasy, that I sensed something wrong. I was looking around me anxiously, but everything seemed normal. I looked down at my coat and the crumpled magazine, at the man who still sprawled comatose in the hall.

As I heard Mrs. Miller's hands on the door, I realized what had changed. The drunken man was not snoring. He was holding his breath.

For a tiny moment I thought he had died, but I could see his body trembling, and my eyes began to open wide and I stretched my mouth to scream a warning, but the door had already begun to swing in its tight, quick arc, and before I could even exhale the stinking man pushed himself up faster than I would have thought him capable and bore down on me with bloodshot eyes.

I managed to keen as he reached me, and the door faltered for an instant, as Mrs. Miller heard my voice. But the man grabbed hold of me in a terrifying, heavy fug of alcohol. He reached down and s.n.a.t.c.hed my coat from the floor, tugged at the jumper I had tied around my waist with his other hand, and hurled me hard at the door.

It flew open, smacking Mrs. Miller aside. I was screaming and crying. My eyes hurt at the sudden burst of cold white light from all the walls. I saw Mrs. Miller rubbing her head in the corner, struggling to her senses. The staggering, drunken man hurled my checked coat and my patterned jumper in front of her, reached down and s.n.a.t.c.hed my feet, tugged me out of the room in an agony of splinters. I wailed snottily with fear.

Behind me, Mrs. Miller began to scream and curse, but I could not hear her well because the man had clutched me to him and pulled my head to his chest. I fought and cried and felt myself lurch as he leaned forward and slammed the door closed.

He held it shut.

When I fought myself free of him I heard him shouting.

'I told you, you slapper,' he wailed unhappily. 'I b.l.o.o.d.y told you, you silly old wh.o.r.e. I warned you it was time...' Behind his voice I could hear shrieks of misery and terror from the room. Both of them kept shouting and crying and screaming, and the floorboards pounded, and the door shook, and I heard something else as well.

As if the notes of all the different noises in the house fell into a chance meeting, and sounded like more than dissonance. The shouts and bangs and cries of fear combined in a sudden audible illusion like another presence.

Like a snarling voice. A lingering, hungry exhalation.

I ran then, screaming and terrified, my skin freezing in my T-shirt. I was sobbing and retching with fear, little bleats bursting from me. I stumbled home and was sick in my mother's room, and kept crying and crying as she grabbed hold of me and I tried to tell her what had happened, until I was drowsy and confused and I fell into silence.

My mother said nothing about Mrs. Miller. The next Wednesday we got up early and went to the zoo, the two of us, and at the time I would usually be knocking on Mrs. Miller's door I was laughing at camels. The Wednesday after that I was taken to see a film, and the one after that my mother stayed in bed and sent me to fetch cigarettes and bread from the local shop, and I made our breakfast and ate it in her room.

My friends could tell that something had changed in the yellow house, but they did not speak to me about it, and it quickly became uninteresting to them.

I saw the Asian woman once more, smoking with her friends in the park several weeks later, and to my amazement she nodded to me and came over, interrupted her companions' conversation.

'Are you alright?' she asked me peremptorily. 'How are you doing?'

I nodded shyly back and told her that I was fine, thank you, and how was she?

She nodded and walked away.

I never saw the drunken, violent man again.

There were people I could probably have gone to to understand more about what had happened to Mrs. Miller. There was a story that I could chase, if I wanted to. People I had never seen before came to my house and spoke quietly to my mother, and looked at me with what I suppose was pity or concern. I could have asked them. But I was thinking more and more about my own life. I didn't want to know Mrs. Miller's details.

I went back to the yellow house once, nearly a year after that awful morning. It was winter. I remembered the last time I spoke to Mrs. Miller and I felt so much older it was almost giddying. It seemed such a vastly long time ago.

I crept up to the house one evening, trying the keys I still had, which to my surprise worked. The hallway was freezing, dark, and stinking more strongly than ever. I hesitated, then pushed open Mrs. Miller's door.

It opened easily, without a sound. The occasional m.u.f.fled noise from the street seemed so distant it was like a memory. I entered.

She had covered the windows very carefully, and still no light made its way through from outside. It was extremely dark. I waited until I could see better in the ambient glow from the outside hallway.

I was alone.

My old coat and jumper lay spread-eagled in the corner of the room. I shivered to see them, went over, and fingered them softly. They were damp and mildewing, covered in wet dust.

The white paint was crumbling off the wall in scabs. It looked as if it had been left untended for several years. I could not believe the extent of the decay.

I turned slowly around and gazed at each wall in turn. I took in the chaotic, intricate patterns of crumbling paint and damp plaster. They looked like maps, like a rocky landscape.

I looked for a long time at the wall farthest from my jacket. I was very cold. After a long time I saw a shape in the ruined paint. I moved closer with a dumb curiosity far stronger than any fear.

In the crumbling texture of the wall was a spreading anatomy of cracks that seen from a certain angle, caught just right in the sc.r.a.ps of light looked in outline something like a woman. As I stared at it, it took shape, and I stopped noticing the extraneous lines, and focused without effort or decision on the relevant ones. I saw a woman looking out at me.

I could make out the suggestion of her face. The patch of rot that const.i.tuted it made it look as if she was screaming.

One of her arms was flung back away from her body, which seemed to strain against it, as if she was being pulled away by her hand, and was fighting to escape, and was failing. At the end of her crack-arm, in the s.p.a.ce where her captor would be, the paint had fallen away in a great slab, uncovering a huge patch of wet, stained, textured cement.

And in that dark infinity of markings, I could make out any shape I wanted.

The Genius of a.s.sa.s.sins: Three Dreams of Murder in the First Person.

Michael Cisco.

Michael Cisco (1970) is an American writer best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student (1999), which was published by Ann VanderMeer's Buzzcity Press and won the International Horror Guild Award in 1999. Since then, Cisco has published The Tyrant (2003), The San Veneficio Canon (2005), The Traitor (2007), The Narrator (2010), and The Great Lover (2011). Taken together, these books represent the greatest oeuvre of any late-twentieth/early-twenty-first century writer of weird fiction all the more remarkable because of the difficulty of sustaining the visionary quality of such narratives over the novel length. 'The Genius of a.s.sa.s.sins' (2002) is a harrowing and hallucinogenic story that ventures far beyond most writers' comfort zone but is typical of Cisco's work.

Foreword.

From the brambles of a murderer's eyes the gaze of the genius of a.s.sa.s.sins falls on you: a sooty-winged owl with a blanched, dead mask of livid unfeathered skin. The eyes are sacs of blood that glow with a cold red flame, with a dagger in between it wants to share its savage idiocy with you. It's small; it hides itself easily in those brambles, and stares. Small though it is, when it draws near, the shade of its outspread wings, shedding their heavy dust, is broad enough to blot out a mind completely, and all too briefly. Wide-eyed unblinking it descends out of darkness on silent pinions, and s.n.a.t.c.hes away its quarry with a movement too swift to follow. A face turns into a livid mask and a body is galvanically transformed. With an inconsequential-looking gesture the knife makes a little opening somewhere and the appalled life gushes out; the mask shifts from the murderer's softening features to the victim's stiffening face. The victim's body undergoes its own transformation: it cools, darkens, sours, stinks, by turns slack and rigid. The murderer is gone; the genius is hidden; a raw new person flees in panic, flees his gory hands.

The genius of a.s.sa.s.sins has no words, but it will address you in a gust of fright. You will know that you are not alone, in a park, or on a subway platform, or at home. Its cry is your mute astonishment at the miracle of violence. Its wings are the murderer's hands outspread; the hands are organs with the fundamental power to stop organs forever. The killer's hands will conduct orchestral, organized life through a brief lapse, and into lasting stillness. The same hands that flap on the obscure walls of caves, and whose fingertips are inked in the glare of police stations, mark time by erasing life; flutter and shed soot around the icy, fanatic mask of their genius.

The Paradise of Murderers I'm a lonely so-and-so without much in his day to do, I don't enjoy reading, I don't even like standing still when I eat. Boring or not the streets want to feel the tramp of my foot up and down; I like to be obliging. I step out of doors in the morning when all the bells are ringing, and I stop in at my door as best I can when my head is heavy. Now and then I will stop sing dance and drink with this or that so-and-so, but I come and go and it makes no difference. I can sit up with statues or pigeons and trees in the park, headstones and piles of fruit and zoo animals and newspaper bundles and cops.

Now I take the tram across the Plague Bridge to the Old Island where the streets are lean and full of matted trash smelly houses, children scatter like pigeons as I come up with a stone head full of matted newspaper fruits zoo cops and piles of animal bundles; drifting past my face the white branches, a park filled with statues of trees. Under the boughs, in the lanes, gutters cough and drains chatter, under the eaves, in the shade of the front porch a woman offers me a drink, shapeless grey dress sweat-patched in the chest hanging off her skinny frame. She's friendly because I am a neat-looking clean pressed young man. We drink together happily like two old failures. The ice rings the sides of the gla.s.ses like cowbell clappers and when I go I am sober but tired, my head droops in waves of crows and cobbled rows warped where the streets have been disrupted.

Here's a stoop, and a front door to lean against that falls in as I lean here's me, on the floor looking up at yellow-brown water stains on a plaster ceiling. Someone is behind me, behind the crown of my head, lying on voluminous mattresses; fat, sad face slick with perspiration peers curiously at me.

'You startled me!'

Piercingly sad voice, thin and high.

I apologize as I pull myself up and right my head; my tumble has shocked me awake. The curtains are all drawn, thin material covered in big brown and yellow blossoms. Bed, table beside the bed, filmy wallpaper. Thin sweet smell like a candy mist 'You all right mister?'

'I'm very ill are you hurt? Perhaps you would like to sit a moment?'

I sit by the bed 'Do you want the door closed?'

'No, I think the air feels good.'

He looks wanly out the door. I don't suppose he's been through it lately. He pours himself a gla.s.s of water from the pitcher on the bedside table 'There's a gla.s.s for you if you like,' he points to the kitchen counter across the room.

'No thank you.'

He leans his head back on a soaking pillow and gazes at the rectangle of sunset in the door, the children flashing by 'You think about death much?'

'All the time.'

'Ever kill anything?'

There are certain times when I just need to be alone I've always been like that. I'm not unreasonable about it, but I hate being spied on. When I was a boy, I was pacing up and down once in my room, thinking I was alone, talking to myself and acting out a little scene then I see our cat is there, watching me from beneath the bed. Incensed by his eyes I went after him, eventually I caught him I put his head on the windowsill and crushed his throat with the window. His feet flapped a few times against the wall and the sill; then he died.

A few weeks later, I was lying in bed trying to sleep, when I heard a voice in the hall, speaking m.u.f.fled words. I opened my door just a crack. I could see the cat sitting in the shadows by the attic door. It was glaring fixedly off into the distance, and this sight, and the nearly inaudible words that sounded from its red regularly throbbing mouth, comforted me against my will, so that everything dark in me drained away, and I went to bed calmly, like a zombie.

'That's really something,' he says, and dabs his throat with a napkin. 'I never heard about anything like that before.'

He adjusts himself in the bed uncomfortably, and whimpers as he moves. For a moment he lies still, breathing fast because he's in pain, and he looks up at the stained ceiling still in pain, his eyes look out from pain. When he catches his breath, he asks or tells me, 'That house you don't live in that house anymore, do you?'

'No.' I look at him for a while. 'I have a place on the mainland.'

'What do you do?' He asks distracted, his eyes ticking in their sockets, as though there was some escape for them. When I don't say anything he turns his head to me a moment. 'I didn't mean to pry.'

'I don't care. I don't do anything, I'm a zero.'

'I don't think anyone is really a zero,' he says softly, looks at me with concern.

'Well, that's all right, I'm a zero, and I don't even care anymore. I don't care about me, and I don't think about tomorrow, or anything. I know tomorrow isn't thinking about me.'

'No family or anything, huh?'

'No, no, not that care, n.o.body here. I go wherever, I do whatever what do they care nothing.' I just smile, shrug. 'I'm one of those people, when I die they're going to find out that I'm dead because some neighbor was investigating a smell.'

'I wish I could die.'

'Well, I suppose you could.'

'No,' his eyes are ocean-indigo, dark and bright at once. They hold on to me, as though he were clutching my lapels. 'That's part of my sickness.'

'I never heard of it,' I say, blank.

He looks down at his pudgy hands, toys with the dingy quilt. 'I wasn't born here, either I miss my family. They're unable to visit me here, unfortunately...How did you end up here?'

'I had to go somewhere. I grew up, I stopped dreaming, I went out into the world, I tried work, I tried women, and well, well, well...' I'm just smiling, talking in a quiet voice. 'And now it's just me and the drinks...I can't even make it as a drunk, I drink, I puke, but I don't get drunk.'

He leans forward, suddenly avid, and touches my knee, looking up through his thin eyebrows at me. 'I see now you're not a doer, you're an un-doer. That's what you are, see? Everybody is something everybody has to be something.' He speaks it vicious as the curse it is, glancing bitterly away for a moment. Then, leaning back, he holds me with his gaze. 'I know something you can un-do.'

When he doesn't go on, I shrug.

'Someone like you, you could do me a big favor. I mean you could really help me a lot.' He holds out his hands, indicating himself. 'I'm all knotted up, see? That's my sickness. I'm bound up in a knot I am the knot,' he adds vehemently, ' and it's torture for me.'

'You want me to un-do you?'

His eyes glistening, he nods, his head resting on the backboard.

'How?'

'If you kill a man would you do that?'

'Sure, sure, yeah I mean, I could do that.'

'Really? You could, really?'

'Sure.'

'Any man at all, it doesn't matter. If you go outside the city here, there are a lot of farms and roadside places, people do all kinds of things alone out there I'm sure you could find somebody.'

'OK, sure.'

He opens a carved wooden case on the nightstand and pulls out a shining stylus, long and thin. 'When he's dead, write the circle on the ground with his blood use this.' He hands me the stylus. It's cool, it's actually cold, with a film of condensation on it. 'You'll have to find a flat spot.'

'Thanks.' I put the stylus in my breast pocket.

'Please hurry do it today, please.'

'Yeah, I'll do it today. I mean, I'll try I'll go now.'

'Do you want any water?'

'No, thanks I'll just get going.'