The Weird Part 130

She took his arm and looked up into his eyes, and they walked away out of the cafe's light for all the world like a couple of teenagers who were just beginning to realize that they were in love.

I went back up to the counter and bought another cup of tea and a couple of packets of crisps to see me through until the morning, and I sat and thought about the expression on his face when he'd looked at me that last time.

On the milk train back to the big city I sat opposite a woman carrying a baby. It was floating in formaldehyde, in a heavy gla.s.s container. She needed to sell it, rather urgently, and although I was extremely tired we talked about her reasons for selling it, and about other things, for the rest of the journey.

The Cage.

Jeff VanderMeer.

Jeff VanderMeer (1968) is an American writer and editor sometimes a.s.sociated with the New Weird because of his surreal, grotesque fictions set in fantasy city of Ambergris. A World Fantasy Award-winner, VanderMeer has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and Philip K. d.i.c.k awards. Spanning a period of five hundred years, the Ambergris Cycle consists of City of Saints & Madmen (2001), Shriek: An Afterword (2006), and Finch (2009). Short story collections include Secret Life (2004) and The Third Bear (2010). His major influences include Vladimir Nabokov and Angela Carter. The creepy and luminous 'The Cage', reprinted from City of Saints, chronicles the dangerous impulse to deliberately seek out the weird.

The hall contained the following items, some of which were later catalogued on faded yellow sheets constrained by blue lines and anointed with mildew: 24 moving boxes, stacked three high. Atop the boxes stood 1 stuffed black swan with banded blood-red legs, its marble eyes plucked, the empty sockets a shock of outrushing cotton (or was it fungus?), the bird merely a scout for the 5,325 specimens from far-off lands placed on shelves that ran along the four walls and into the adjoining corridors, lit with what he could later only describe as a dark light: it illuminated but did not lift the gloom. Iridescent thrush corpses, the exhausted remains of tattered jellyfish floating in amber bottles, tiny mammals with bright eyes that hinted at the memory of catastrophe, their bodies frozen in brittle poses. The stink of chemicals, a whiff of blood, and 1 phonograph, in perfect condition, wedged beside the jagged black teeth of 11 broken records and 8 framed daguerreotypes of the family that had lived in the mansion. On vacation in the Southern Isles. Posed in front of a hedge. Blissful on the front porch. His favorite picture showed a boy of seven or eight sticking his tongue out, face animated by indecipherable delight. The frame was cracked, a smudge of blood in the lower left corner. Phonograph, records, and daguerreotypes stood atop 1 long oak table covered by a dark green cloth that could not conceal the upward thrust that had splintered the surface of the wood. Around the table stood 8 oak chairs, silver lion paws sheathing their legs. The chairs dated to back before the reign of Trillian the Great Banker, the first true ruler of Ambergris. He could not help but wince noting the abuse to which the chairs had been subjected, or fail to notice 1 grandfather clock, its blood-spattered gla.s.s face cracked, the hands frozen at a point just before midnight, a faint repressed ticking coming from somewhere within its gears, as if the hands sought to move once again, and beneath the clock 1 embroidered rug, clearly woven in the north, near the city of Morrow, perhaps even by one of his own ancestors. It depicted the arrival of Morrow cavalry in Ambergris at the time of the ma.s.s disappearances known as the Silence, the horses and riders bathed in a halo of blood that might, in another light, be seen as part of the tapestry. Although no light could conceal 1 bookcase, lacquered, stacks with books wounded, ravaged, as if something had torn through the spines. Beside the bookcase 1 solicitor, dressed all in black. The solicitor wore a cloth mask over his nose and mouth. It was a popular fashion, for those who believed in the dangers of the 'Invisible World' newly mapped by the Kalif's scientists. Nervous and fatigued, the solicitor, eyes blinking rapidly over the top of the mask, stood next to 1 pale, slender woman in a white dress. Her hooded eyes never blinked, the ethereal quality of her gaze weaving cobwebs into the distance. Her hands had recently been hacked off, the end of the b.l.o.o.d.y bandage that hid her left nub held by 1 pale gaunt boy with wide, twitchy eyes. At the end of his other arm dangled a small blue-green suitcase, his grasp as fragile as his mother's gaze. His legs trembled in his ashgrey trousers. He stared at 1 metal cage, three feet tall and in shape similar to the squat mortar sh.e.l.ls that the Kalif's troops had only the year before rained down upon Ambergris during the ill-fated Occupation. An emerald green cover hid its bars from view. The boy's gaze, which required him to twist neck and shoulder to the right while also raising his head to look up and behind, drew the attention of 1 exporter-importer, Robert Hoegbotton, 35 years old: neither thin nor fat, neither handsome nor ugly. He wore a drab grey suit he hoped displayed neither imagination nor lack of it. He too wore a cloth mask over his (small) nose and (wide, sardonic) mouth, although not for the same reasons as the solicitor. Hoegbotton considered the mask a weakness, an inconvenience, a superst.i.tion. His gaze followed that of the boy up to the high perch, an alcove set halfway up the wall where the cage sat on a window ledge. Rivulets of rain seethed against the window's thick green gla.s.s. It was the season of downpours in Ambergris. The rain would not let up for days on end, the skies blue-green-grey with moisture. Fruiting bodies would rise in all the hidden corners of the city. Nothing in the bruised sky would reveal whether it was morning, noon, or dusk. It was an atmosphere well suited to the city's subterranean inhabitants, the gray caps, who in recent years came and went like the ebb and flow of a tide now underground, now above ground, as if in a perpetual migration between light and dark appearing suddenly and unwanted, only to disappear just as quickly. As they had here.

Nothing could make one safe. Witnessing the great spasm among the rich of buying houses without bas.e.m.e.nts, or with stone floors, Hoegbotton had been tempted to branch out into real estate, but who knew how long the frenzy would last? No one had yet proven that such a measure, or any measure, helped. The random nature of the events had instilled a certain fatalism. Most of the city's inhabitants had no choice but to go about their business, hoping they would not be next.

The solicitor was talking and had been for what seemed to Hoegbotton like a rather long time.

'That black swan, for example, is in bad condition,' Hoegbotton said, just to slow the solicitor's relentless chatter.

The solicitor wiped his beaded forehead with a handkerchief tinged a pale green.

'The bird? The bird,' the solicitor said, 'is in superb condition. Missing eyes, yes. Yes, this is true. But,' he gestured at the walls, 'surely you see the richness of Daffed's collection.'

Thomas Daffed. The last in a long line of driven zoologists. Daffed's wife and son stood beside the solicitor, the remnants of a family of six.

Hoegbotton frowned. 'It's a fine collection, very fine' and he meant it; he admired a man who could so single-mindedly, perhaps obsessively, acquire such a diverse yet unified a.s.sortment of things 'but my average customer needs a pot or an umbrella or a stove. I stock the odd curio from time to time, but a collection of this size?' Hoegbotton shrugged the famous shrug of indifference, perfected over years of haggling, that disguised a more predatory sentiment.

The solicitor stared at Hoegbotton as if he did not believe him. 'What's your offer? What will you take?'

'I'm still calculating that figure.'

The solicitor stood uncomfortably close to Hoegbotton, his breath sour and thick, a great smudge of a man. He was sweating profusely. A greenish pallor had begun to infiltrate his skin. 'You might consider a little haste. Should I call Slattery or Ungdom instead?' As if in the grip of a new, perhaps deadly emotion, his voice seemed more distorted than the mask, which puffed in and out from the violence of his speech.

Hoegbotton took a step back from the ferocity of the solicitor's distress. The names of his chief rivals had made a little vein in his left eyelid pulse in and out. Especially Ungdom towering John Ungdom, he of the wide belly, steeped in alcohol and pork lard.

'Call for them, then,' he said, staring the solicitor down.

Neither Slattery nor Ungdom would come. Despite being ruthless, their devotion to their job was incomplete, insufficient, inadequate. Hoegbotton imagined them both taken up into the rain and torn to pieces by the wind. As they deserved, for the simple d.a.m.ning fact of their fear.

The solicitor's gaze bored into his cheek for a long moment. Then with a sigh of defeat the foul presence was gone. The solicitor slumped into one of the chairs, loosening his collar with all the urgency of a suffocating man.

'I'm sorry for your loss all of your losses,' Hoegbotton said, turning to the mother and child who stood in mute acceptance of their fate. 'I promise I won't keep you much longer.' He meant the words sincerely, but knew his intent was meaningless to them in that moment.

The solicitor made a noise between a groan and a choke that Hoegbotton did not bother to catalog. His thoughts had returned to the merchandise: rug, clock, bookcase, phonograph, table, desk. What price might they accept?

Even then, Hoegbotton might not have included the cage in his calculations if the boy's stare had not kept flickering wildly toward it and back down again, stuttering like Hoegbotton's own over the remnants of a success that had become utter failure. For of all the outlandish things in the room the boy's own mother to be counted among them the boy seemed most agitated by the cage, an object that had no more been created to harm him than the green suitcase that hung from his arm.

'Tell me about the cage,' Hoegbotton said suddenly, surprising himself. 'The cage up there' he pointed 'is it for sale, too?'

The boy stiffened, stared at the floor. Outside, his father, brother, and two sisters were being burned as a precaution, the bodies too mutilated to have withstood a viewing anyway.

A reflexive sadness ran through Hoegbotton, even as he noted the delicacy of the silver engravings on the legs of a nearby chair and the authentic maker's mark st.i.tched onto the cushioned seat.

He smiled at the boy, whose gaze remained directed at the floor. 'Don't you know you're safe now?' The words sounded ludicrous.

The woman turned to look at Hoegbotton. Her eyes were black as an abyss; they did not blink and reflected nothing. He felt for a moment balanced precariously between the son's alarm and the mother's regard.

'The cage was always open,' the woman said, her voice gravelly, something stuck in her throat. 'We had a bird. We always let it fly around. It was a pretty bird. It flew high through the rooms. It No one could find the bird. After.' The terrible pressure of the word after appeared to be too much for her and she fell back into her silence.

'We've never had a cage,' the boy said, the dark green suitcase swaying. 'We've never had a bird. They left it here. They left it.'

A kind of rapturous chill ran through Hoegbotton. The sleepy gaze of a pig embryo floating in a jar caught his eye. Opportunity or disaster? The value of an artifact they had left behind might be considerable. The risks, however, might be more than considerable. This was the third time in the last nine months that he had been called to a house visited by the gray caps. Each of the previous times, he had escaped unharmed. In fact, he had come to believe that late arrivals like himself, who took precautions and knew their history, were impervious to any side effects.

Yet even he had experienced moments of discomfort, as when, at the last house, he had walked down a white hallway to the room where the merchandise awaited him and found a series of dark smudges and trails and tracks of blood. Halfway there, he had spied a dark object, shaped like a piece of dried fruit, glistening from the floor. Puzzled, he had stood there for a moment, only to recoil when he realized it was a human ear.

This time, according to the messenger Hoegbotton paid to keep him apprised of potential opportunities, the solicitor had arrived in the early afternoon to find the bodies and survivors. Arms and legs had been stuck into the walls between specimen jars, arranged in intricate poses that displayed a perverse sense of humor.

A tingling sensation crept into Hoegbotton's fingertips. A price had materialized in his mind. The silence became more absolute. All around, dead things watched one another, saw everything but remembered nothing.

'Two thousand for everything.'

The solicitor sighed, almost crumpled in on himself. The woman blinked rapidly, as if puzzled, and then stared at Hoegbotton with a hatred more real for being so distant. All the former protests of the solicitor, even the boy's fear, were nothing next to that look. The red at the end of her arms had become paler, as if the white bandages had begun to heal her.

He heard himself say, 'Three thousand. If you include the cage.' And it was true, he realized he wanted the cage.

The solicitor, trying to mask some small personal distress now, giggled and said, 'Done. But you must retrieve it yourself. I'm not well.'

A sour smell had entered the room.

On the ladder, Hoegbotton experienced a moment of vertigo. The world spun, then righted itself as he continued to the top. He peered onto the windowsill.

Something stared at him from beside the cage.

A horrible 'uhh!' sound came from his mouth, and he recoiled, almost lost his balance as he flailed at empty air, managed to fall back against the ladder...and only then realized that what he had seen were just the missing marble eyes of the swan. Placed there by some prankster, or...? He caught his breath, tried to swallow the unease that pressed down on his shoulders, his tongue, his eyelids.

The cage stood to the right of the ladder and he was acutely conscious of having to lock his legs onto the ladder's sides as he slowly leaned toward the cage.

Below, the solicitor and the boy were speaking, but their voices seemed dulled and distant. He hesitated. What might be in the cage? What horrible thing far worse than a human ear? The odd idea struck him that he would pull the cord to reveal Thomas Daffed's severed head. He could see the bars beneath the cloth, though. Whatever lived inside the cage would remain inside the cage. Now that it was his property, his acquisition, he refused to suffer the same failure of nerve as a Slattery or an Ungdom.

The cover of the cage, which in the dim light appeared to be sprinkled with a luminous green dust, opened like a curtain. With a sharp yank on the drawstring, Hoegbotton drew aside the cover and flinched, again nearly fell, a sensation of displaced air flowing across his face, as if something moved within.

But the cage was empty. He stood there for an instant, breathing heavily, staring into the cage. Nothing. It contained nothing. Relief came burrowing out of his bones, followed by disappointment. Empty. Except for some straw lining the bottom of the cage and, dangling near the back, almost as an afterthought, a perch that swayed back and forth, the movement no doubt caused by the speed with which he had drawn back the cover. A latched door extended the full three feet from the base to the top of the cage and could be slid back on special grooves. Stained green, the metal bars featured detail-work as fine as he had ever seen intricate flowers and vines with sinister little figures peering out of a background rich with mushrooms. He could sell it for four or five thousand with the right sales pitch.

Hoegbotton looked down through a murk somehow encouraged by the few lamps.

'It's empty,' he shouted down. 'The cage is empty. But I'll take it.'

An unintelligible answer floated up. As his sight adjusted to the scene below, the distant solicitor in his chair, the other two still standing, he thought for a horrible second that they were melting. The boy seemed melded to his suitcase, the green of it inseparable from the white of the attached arm. The woman's nubs were impossibly white, as if she had grown new bones. The solicitor was just a splash of green.

When he stood on solid ground again, facing them, he could not control his shaking.

All around, on the arms of the chairs, on the table, atop the bookcase, white mushrooms had risen on slender stalks, their gills tinged red.

'I'll have the papers to you tomorrow, after I've catalogued all of the items,' he said. No, he wouldn't. He knew that now.

The solicitor just sat in his chair and giggled uncontrollably.

'It was nice to meet you,' Hoegbotton said, unwilling to let any of them out of his sight as he backed slowly across the room to the door that led to the next room and the room after that and then, hopefully, the outside, by which time he would be running.

'Yes, yes, yes, yes,' the solicitor said, and giggled again, his face as green and wrinkly as lizard skin.

The woman's stubs had sprouted white tendrils of fungus that lazily wound their way around the dried blood and obscured it. Her eyes were slowly filling with white.

Hoegbotton b.u.mped into the damaged table and almost fell. He edged toward the door, groping behind him for the k.n.o.b. 'I will see you again, soon, and under better...under better...' He could not finish his sentence.

The boy's arms were dark green, fuzzy and indistinct, as if he were a still-life made of points of paint on a canvas. His suitcase, once blue, had turned a blackish green, for the fungi had engulfed it much as ivy had engulfed the eastern wall of the mansion. All the terrible knowledge of his condition shone through the boy's eyes and yet still he held his mother's arm as the white tendrils wound round both their limbs in an ever more permanent embrace.

Hoegbotton later believed he would have stood at the door forever, hand on the k.n.o.b, the solicitor's giggle a low whine in the background, if not for what happened next.

The broken clock groaned and finally struck midnight. The shuddering stroke reverberated through the thousands of jars of preserved animals. The solicitor looked up in sudden terror and, with a soft popping sound, exploded into a lightly falling rain of emerald spores that drifted to the floor with as slow and tranquil a grace as the seeds of a dandelion.

Outside, Hoegbotton tore off his mask, knelt, and threw up beside the fountain that guarded the path back to Alb.u.muth Boulevard. Behind him, across a square of dark green gra.s.s, watched over by the current ruler's grim-looking soldiers: the bodies of Daffed, his daughters, his other son, smoldering grey and black. The charred smell mixed with mildew and the rain that stippled his back. His arms and legs trembled with an enervating weakness. His mouth felt hot and dry. For a long time, he sat in the same position, watching pinp.r.i.c.ks break his reflection in the fountain. He shivered as the water shivered.

He had never come this close before. Either they had died long before he arrived or long after he left. The solicitor's liquid giggle trickled through his ears, along with the soft pop of the spores. He shuddered, relaxed, shuddered again.

When his a.s.sistant Alan Bristlewing questioned, as he often did, the wisdom of taking on such hazardous work, Hoegbotton would smile and change the subject. He could not choose between two conflicting impulses: the upwelling of excitement at pursuit of a mystery and the desire to flee Ambergris and return to Morrow, the city of his birth. As each new episode receded into memory, his nerve returned, somehow stronger.

The boy's arm, fused to his suitcase.

Holding onto the lichen-flecked stone lip of the pool, Hoegbotton plunged his head into the smooth water. The chill shocked him. It p.r.i.c.kled his skin, cut through the numbness to burn the inside of his nose. He reared up, and a sob escaped him, and another, and then a third that bent him over the water again. The back of his neck was suddenly cool. When he pulled away, he looked down at his reflection and the mask he had made to hide his emotions was gone. He was himself again.

The cage stood beside him, slick with rain. Hoegbotton had gripped its handle so hard during his escape from every corner, Daffed's infernal collection of dead things staring innocently at him that he had been branded where the skin had not been rubbed off his palm. He bore the mark of the handle: a filigree of unfamiliar symbols from behind which strange eyes peered out. In the fading light, with the rain falling harder, the fungi appeared to have been washed off the cover of the cage. Perversely, this fact disappointed him. With each new encounter, he had come to expect further revelations.

Hoegbotton stood up. Across the courtyard, the unfortunate soldiers a.s.signed to the bodies had begun to nail boards across the doors and windows of the mansion. One look at his face as he had staggered to safety had told them everything. No doubt they would have boarded him in too, if not for his continual bribes and uncanny ability (in their view) to avoid contamination.

No one pulled the shades open to protest being trapped inside. No one banged on the door, begging to be let out. They had already begun their journey.

Hoegbotton wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. In truth, all he had done was steal a cage. Depending on what hysteria-induced rules the city's leaders had adopted this fortnight, the mansion grounds might be cordoned off or the mansion itself put to the torch and the merchandise he had 'acquired' go unnoted except in his ledger of 'Potential Acquisitions Lost.'

The woman's blank gaze.

Blinking away the rain, Hoegbotton let out a deep breath, stuffed his mask in a pocket, wrapped the cloth around his injured hand, and picked up the cage. He would have to hurry to beat the curfew, a measure he did approve of. Ambergris at night the past few weeks, made difficult by the constant rain, had played host to an unnerving amount of debauchery. Days of wholesome trade and other industrious activity became the mirror opposite after dusk, as if the gray caps' presence had had other effects. Orgies had been reported in abandoned churches. Grotesque and lewd water puppet shows were staged down by the docks. Weekly, the merchant quarter held midnight auctions of paintings that could only be termed obscene.

The clock struck midnight.

The cage made him list to the side as he started walking up the path to the main road. Whenever he stopped to switch the cage from his left to his right hand and back again, the weight never seemed the same, at first heavier than he remembered it, and then lighter.

Hoegbotton's wife Rebecca was already asleep when he walked up the seven flights of stairs and entered their apartment. She had turned off the lamps because it gave her the advantage in case of an intruder. The faint scent of lilacs and honeysuckle told him the flower vendor from the floor above them had been by.

A dim half-light shone through from the living room to his left as he set down the cage, took off his shoes and socks, and hung his raincoat on the coat rack. Directly ahead lay the dining room, with its mold-encrusted window, the purple sheen burning darkly as the rain fed it. He had checked the fungal guard just a week ago and found no leakage, but he made a mental note to check it again in the morning.

Hoegbotton found a towel in the hall closet and used it to dry his face, his hair, and then the outside of the cage. Again picking up its uncomfortable weight, he tiptoed into the living room, the rug beneath his feet thick but cold. A series of dark shapes greeted him, most of them items from his store: Lamps and side tables, a couch, a long low coffee table, a bookcase, a grandfather clock. Beyond them lay the balcony, long lost to fungi and locked up as a result.

The fey light almost transformed the living room's contents into the priceless artifacts he had told her they were. He had chosen them not for their value but for their texture, their smell, and for the sounds they made when moved or sat upon or opened. Little of it appealed visually, but she delighted in what he had chosen and it meant he could store the most important merchandise at the shop, where it was more secure.

Hoegbotton set the cage down on the living room table. The palms of his hands were hot and raw from carrying it. He took off the rest of his clothes and laid them on the arm of the couch.

The light came from the bedroom, which lay beyond the living room. He walked into the bedroom and turned to the left, the closed window above the bed reflecting back the iridescent light that came from her and her alone. Rebecca lay on her back, the sheets draped across her body, exposing the long, black, vaguely tear-shaped scar on her left thigh. He ran his gaze over it l.u.s.tfully.

Hoegbotton walked around to the right side and eased himself into the bed. He moved up beside her and pressed himself against the darkness of the scar. An image of the woman from the mansion flashed through his mind.

Rebecca turned in her sleep and put an arm across his chest as he moved onto his back. Her hand, warm and soft, was as delicate as the starfish that glided through the shallows down by the docks. It looked so small against his chest.

The light came from her open eyes, although he could tell she was asleep. It was a silvery glow awash with faint phosph.o.r.escent sparks of blue, green, and red: shivers and hiccups of splintered light, as if a half-dozen tiny lightning storms had welled up in her gaze. What rich worlds did she dream of? And, for the thousandth time: What did the light mean? He had met her on a business trip to Stockton, after the fungal infection that had resulted in the blindness, the odd light, the scar. He had never known her whole.

A joyful sorrow rose within him as he watched the light emanating from her. They had argued about having children just the day before. Every word he had thrown at her in anger had hurt him so deeply that finally he had been wordless, and all he could do was stare at her. Looking at her now, her face unguarded, her body next to his, he could not help loving her for the scar, the eyes, even if it meant he wished her to be this way.

2.

The next morning, Hoegbotton woke to the fading image of the woman's b.l.o.o.d.y bandages and the sounds of Rebecca making breakfast. She knew the apartment better than he did knew its surfaces, its edges, the exact number of steps from table to chair to doorway and she liked to make meals in a kitchen that had become more familiar to her than it could ever be to him. Yet she also asked him to bring back more furniture for the living room and bedroom or rearrange existing furniture. She became bored otherwise. 'I want an unexplored country. I want a hint of the unknown,' she said once, and Hoegbotton agreed with that sentiment up to a point.

There were things Hoegbotton wished would stay unknown. On the mantel opposite the bed, for example, lay those of his grandmother's possessions that his relatives in Morrow had sent to him: a pin, a series of portraits of family members, a set of spoons, a poorly copied family history. A letter from his sister Emily had accompanied the heirlooms, describing his grandmother's last days, which had not been without pain, perhaps deservedly so. But even Hoegbotton had recoiled from the ghoulishness with which Emily had described her wasting away. He had not gone to the funeral. He had not even brought himself to tell Rebecca about the death, six weeks before. All she knew of it was the crinkling of the envelope as he had smoothed out the letter to read it, that he'd brought a pin and spoon home from the store. Telling her would have meant explaining why he hadn't gone to the funeral.

The smell of bacon and eggs spurred him into a bathrobe, and a bleary-eyed stumble through the living room to the kitchen. A dead sort of almost-sunlight pale and lukewarm suffused the kitchen window through the purple mold and thin veins of green. A watermark of the city appeared on the gla.s.s: wavery spires, forlorn flags, the indistinct shapes of other apartment buildings.

Rebecca stood in the kitchen, spatula in hand, framed by the dour light. Her black hair was brightly dark. Her dress, a green-and-blue sweep of fabric, fit her loosely. She was intent on the skillet in front of her, gaze unblinking, mouth pursed.

As he wrapped his arms around Rebecca, a sense of guilt made him frown. He had come so close last night, almost as close as the boy, the woman. Was that as close as he could get without...? The question had haunted him throughout his quest. A sudden depth of emotion arose from nowhere, and he found that his eyes were wet.

Rebecca snuggled into his embrace and turned toward him. Her eyes looked almost normal during the day. Flecks of phosph.o.r.escence shot lazily across the pupils.

'Did you sleep well?' she asked. 'You came home so late.'

'I slept. I'm sorry I was late. It was a difficult job this time.' When he had to lie to her, even his thoughts became very still.

'Profitable?' Her elbow nudged him as she turned the eggs over with the spatula.