The Weird Part 78

Something in him yearned for a confrontation. He reached his table, but found himself unable to sit down. He turned, took a deep breath, and walked woodenly toward the bar. He wanted to tap her on her smooth shoulder and ask who she was, and exactly what she was, and point out the cold irony of the fact that it was he, Coretti, the Martian dresser, the eavesdropper, the outsider, the one whose clothes and conversation never fit, who had at last guessed their secret.

But his nerve broke and he merely took a seat beside her and ordered bourbon.

'But don't you think,' she asked her companion, 'that it's all relative?'

The two seats beyond her companion were quickly taken by a couple who were talking politics. Antoinette and Golf Shirt took up the political theme seamlessly. Recycling, speaking just loudly enough to be overheard. Her face, as she spoke, was expressionless. A bird trilling on a limb.

She sat so easily on her stool, as if it were a nest. Golf Shirt paid for the drinks. He always had the exact change, unless he wanted to leave a tip. Coretti watched them work their way methodically through six c.o.c.ktails each, like insects feeding on nectar. But their voices never grew louder, their cheeks didn't redden, and when at last they stood, they moved without a trace of drunkenness a weakness, thought Coretti, a gap in their camouflage.

They paid him absolutely no attention while he followed them through three successive bars.

As they entered Waylon's, they metamorphosed so quickly that Coretti had trouble following the stages of the change. It was one of those places with toilet doors marked Pointers and Setters, and a little imitation pine plaque over the jars of beef jerky and pickled sausages: We've got a deal with the bank. They don't serve beer and we don't cash checks.

She was plump in Waylon's, and there were dark hollows under her eyes. There were coffee stains on her polyester pantsuit. Her companion wore jeans, a T-shirt, and a red baseball cap with a red-and-white Peterbilt patch. Coretti risked losing them when he spent a frantic minute in 'Pointers,' blinking in confusion at a hand-lettered cardboard sign that said, We aim to please You aim too, please.

Third Avenue lost itself near the waterfront in a petrified snarl of brickwork. In the last block, bright vomit marked the pavement at intervals, and old men dozed in front of black-and-white TVs, sealed forever behind the fogged plate gla.s.s of faded hotels.

The bar they found there had no name. An ace of diamonds was gradually flaking away on the unwashed window, and the bartender had a face like a closed fist. An FM transistor in ivory plastic keened easy-listening rock to the uneven ranks of deserted tables. They drank beer and shots. They were old now, two ciphers who drank and smoked in the light of bare bulbs, coughing over a pack of crumpled Camels she produced from the pocket of a dirty tan raincoat.

At 2:25 they were in the rooftop lounge of the new hotel complex that rose above the waterfront. She wore an evening dress and he wore a dark suit. They drank cognac and pretended to admire the city lights. They each had three cognacs while Coretti watched them over two ounces of Wild Turkey in a Waterford crystal highball gla.s.s.

They drank until last call. Coretti followed them into the elevator. They smiled politely but otherwise ignored him. There were two cabs in front of the hotel; they took one, Coretti the other.

'Follow that cab,' said Coretti huskily, thrusting his last twenty at the aging hippie driver.

'Sure, man, sure...' The driver dogged the other cab for six blocks, to another, more modest hotel. They got out and went in. Coretti slowly climbed out of his cab, breathing hard.

He ached with jealousy: for the personification of conformity, this woman who was not a woman, this human wallpaper. Coretti gazed at the hotel and lost his nerve. He turned away.

He walked home. Sixteen blocks. At some point he realized that he wasn't drunk. Not drunk at all.

In the morning he phoned in to cancel his early cla.s.s. But his hangover never quite came. His mouth wasn't desiccated, and staring at himself in the bathroom mirror he saw that his eyes weren't bloodshot.

In the afternoon he slept, and dreamed of sheepfaced people reflected in mirrors behind rows of bottles.

That night he went out to dinner, alone and ate nothing. The food looked back at him, somehow. He stirred it about to make it look as if he'd eaten a little, paid, and went to a bar. And another. And another bar, looking for her. He was using his credit card now, though he was already badly in the hole under Visa. If he saw her, he didn't recognize her.

Sometimes he watched the hotel he'd seen her go into. He looked carefully at each of the couples who came and went. Not that he'd be able to spot her from her looks alone but there should be a feeling, some kind of intuitive recognition. He watched the couples and he was never sure.

In the following weeks he systematically visited every boozy watering hole in the city. Armed at first with a city map and five torn Yellow Pages, he gradually progressed to the more obscure establishments, places with unlisted numbers. Some had no phone at all. He joined dubious private clubs, discovered unlicensed after-hours retreats where you brought your own, and sat nervously in dark rooms devoted to areas of fringe s.e.xuality he had not known existed.

But he continued on what became his nightly circuit. He always began at the Backdoor. She was never there, or in the next place, or the next. The bartenders knew him and they liked to see him come in, because he bought drinks continuously, and never seemed to get drunk. So he stared at the other customers a bit, so what?

Coretti lost his job. He'd missed cla.s.ses too many times. He'd taken to watching the hotel when he could, even in the daytime. He'd been seen in too many bars. He never seemed to change his clothes. He refused night cla.s.ses. He would let a lecture trail off in the middle as he turned to gaze vacantly out the window.

He was secretly pleased at being fired. They had looked at him oddly at faculty lunches when he couldn't eat his food. And now he had more time for the search.

Coretti found her at 2:15 on a Wednesday morning, in a gay bar called the Barn. Paneled in rough wood and hung with halters and rusting farm equipment, the place was shrill with perfume and laughter and beer. She was everyone's giggling sister, in a blue-sequined dress, a green feather in her coiffed brown hair. Through a sweeping sense of almost cellular relief, Coretti was aware of a kind of admiration, a strange pride he now felt in her and her kind. Here, too, she belonged. She was a representative type, a f.a.g-hag who posed no threat to the queens or their butchboys. Her companion had become an ageless man with carefully silvered temples, an angora sweater, and a trench coat.

They drank and drank, and went laughing laughing just the right sort of laughter out into the rain. A cab was waiting, its wipers duplicating the beat of Coretti's heart.

Jockeying clumsily across the wet sidewalk, Coretti scurried into the cab, dreading their reaction.

Coretti was in the back seat, beside her.

The man with silver temples spoke to the driver. The driver muttered into his hand mike, changed gears, and they flowed away into the rain and the darkened streets. The cityscape made no impression on Coretti, who, looking inwardly, was seeing the cab stop, the gray man and the laughing woman pushing him out and pointing, smiling, to the gate of a mental hospital. Or: the cab stopping, the couple turning, sadly shaking their heads. And a dozen times he seemed to see the cab stopping in an empty side street where they methodically throttled him. Coretti left dead in the rain. Because he was an outsider.

But they arrived at Coretti's hotel.

In the dim glow of the cab's dome light he watched closely as the man reached into his coat for the fare. Coretti could see the coat's lining clearly and it was one piece with the angora sweater. No wallet bulged there, and no pocket. But a kind of slit widened. It opened as the man's fingers poised over it, and it disgorged money. Three bills, folded, were extruded smoothly from the slit. The money was slightly damp. It dried, as the man unfolded it, like the wings of a moth just emerging from the chrysalis.

'Keep the change,' said the belonging man, climbing out of the cab. Antoinette slid out and Coretti followed, his mind seeing only the slit. The slit wet, edged with red, like a gill.

The lobby was deserted and the desk clerk bent over a crossword. The couple drifted silently across the lobby and into the elevator, Coretti close behind. Once he tried to catch her eye, but she ignored him. And once, as the elevator rose seven floors above Coretti's own, she bent over and sniffed at the chrome wall ashtray, like a dog snuffling at the ground.

Hotels, late at night, are never still. The corridors are never entirely silent. There are countless barely audible sighs, the rustling of sheets, and m.u.f.fled voices speaking fragments out of sleep. But in the ninth-floor corridor, Coretti seemed to move through a perfect vacuum, soundless, his shoes making no sound at all on the colorless carpet and even the beating of his outsider's heart sucked away into the vague pattern that decorated the wallpaper.

He tried to count the small plastic ovals screwed on the doors, each with its own three figures, but the corridor seemed to go on forever. At last the man halted before a door, a door veneered like all the rest with imitation rosewood, and put his hand over the lock, his palm flat against the metal. Something sc.r.a.ped softly and then the mechanism clicked and the door swung open. As the man withdrew his hand, Coretti saw a grayish-pink, key-shaped sliver of bone retract wetly into the pale flesh.

No light burned in that room, but the city's dim neon aura filtered in through venetian blinds and allowed him to see the faces of the dozen or more people who sat perched on the bed and the couch and the armchairs and the stools in the kitchenette. At first he thought that their eyes were open, but then he realized that the dull pupils were sealed beneath nict.i.tating membranes, third eyelids that reflected the faint shades of neon from the window. They wore whatever the last bar had called for; shapeless Salvation Army overcoats sat beside bright suburban leisurewear, evening gowns beside dusty factory clothes, biker's leather by brushed Harris tweed. With sleep, all spurious humanity had vanished.

They were roosting.

His couple seated themselves on the edge of the Formica countertop in the kitchenette, and Coretti hesitated in the middle of the empty carpet. Light-years of that carpet seemed to separate him from the others, but something called to him across the distance, promising rest and peace and belonging. And still he hesitated, shaking with an indecision that seemed to rise from the genetic core of his body's every cell.

Until they opened their eyes, all of them simultaneously, the membranes sliding sideways to reveal the alien calm of dwellers in the ocean's darkest trench.

Coretti screamed, and ran away, and fled along corridors and down echoing concrete stairwells to cool rain and the nearly empty streets.

Coretti never returned to his room on the third floor of that hotel. A bored house detective collected the linguistics texts, the single suitcase of clothing, and they were eventually sold at auction. Coretti took a room in a boardinghouse run by a grim Baptist teetotaler who led her roomers in prayer at the start of every overcooked evening meal. She didn't mind that Coretti never joined them for those meals; he explained that he was given free meals at work. He lied freely and skillfully. He never drank at the boardinghouse, and he never came home drunk. Mr. Coretti was a little odd, but always paid his rent on time. And he was very quiet.

Coretti stopped looking for her. He stopped going to bars. He drank out of a paper bag while going to and from his job at a publisher's warehouse, in an area whose industrial zoning permitted few bars.

He worked nights.

Sometimes, at dawn, perched on the edge of his unmade bed, drifting into sleep he never slept lying down, now he thought about her. Antoinette. And them. The belonging kind. Sometimes he speculated dreamily...Perhaps they were like house mice, the sort of small animal evolved to live only in the walls of man-made structures.

A kind of animal that lives only on alcoholic beverages. With peculiar metabolisms they convert the alcohol and the various proteins from mixed drinks and wine and beers into everything they need. And they can change outwardly, like a chameleon or a rockfish, for protection. So they can live among us. And maybe, Coretti thought, they grow in stages. In the early stages seeming like humans, eating the food humans eat, sensing their difference only in a vague disquiet of being an outsider.

A kind of animal with its own cunning, its own special set of urban instincts. And the ability to know its own kind when they're near. Maybe.

And maybe not.

Coretti drifted into sleep.

On a Wednesday three weeks into his new job, his landlady opened the door she never knocked and told him that he was wanted on the phone. Her voice was tight with habitual suspicion, and Coretti followed her along the dark hallway to the second-floor sitting room and the telephone.

Lifting the old-fashioned black instrument to his ear, he heard only music at first, and then a wall of sound resolving into a fragmented amalgam of conversations. Laughter. No one spoke to him over the sound of the bar, but the song in the background was 'You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly.'

And then the dial tone, when the caller hung up.

Later, alone in his room, listening to the landlady's firm tread in the room below, Coretti realized that there was no need to remain where he was. The summons had come. But the landlady demanded three weeks' notice if anyone wanted to leave. That meant that Coretti owed her money. Instinct told him to leave it for her.

A Christian workingman in the next room coughed in his sleep as Coretti got up and went down the hall to the telephone. Coretti told the evening-shift foreman that he was quitting his job. He hung up and went back to his room, locked the door behind him, and slowly removed his clothing until he stood naked before the garish framed lithograph of Jesus above the brown steel bureau.

And then he counted out nine tens. He placed them carefully beside the praying-hands plaque decorating the bureau top.

It was nice-looking money. It was perfectly good money. He made it himself.

This time, he didn't feel like making small talk. She'd been drinking a margarita, and he ordered the same. She paid, producing the money with a deft movement of her hand between the b.r.e.a.s.t.s bobbling in her low-cut dress. He glimpsed the gill closing there. An excitement rose in him but somehow, this time, it didn't center in an erection.

After the third margarita their hips were touching, and something was spreading through him in slow o.r.g.a.s.mic waves. It was sticky where they were touching; an area the size of the heel of his thumb where the cloth had parted. He was two men: the one inside fusing with her in total cellular communion, and the sh.e.l.l who sat casually on a stool at the bar, elbows on either side of his drink, fingers toying with a swizzle stick. Smiling benignly into s.p.a.ce. Calm in the cool dimness.

And once, but only once, some distant worrisome part of him made Coretti glance down to where soft ruby tubes pulsed, tendrils tipped with sharp lips worked in the shadows between them. Like the joining tentacles of two strange anemones.

They were mating, and no one knew.

And the bartender, when he brought the next drink, offered his tired smile and said, 'Rainin' out now, innit? Just won't let up.'

'Been like that all G.o.dd.a.m.n week,' Coretti answered. 'Rainin' to beat the band.'

And he said it right. Like a real human being.

Egnaro.

M. John Harrison.

M. John Harrison (1945) is an influential English writer whose story 'The New Rays' also appears in this volume. Harrison was a leading figure in the British science fiction New Wave of the 1960s, along with writers like Michael Moorc.o.c.k and J. G. Ballard. However, only Harrison can be said to have written in such a way as to modernize or comment on the traditional weird tale in his short fiction. His work has been instrumental to several generations of fantasists working in non-escapist modes. 'Egnaro' suggests at least two interpretations by story's end, one of which repudiates the idea of reportage from weird or supernatural places.

Egnaro is a secret known to everyone but yourself.

It is a country or a city to which you have never been; it is an unknown language. At the same time it is like being cuckolded, or plotted against. It is part of the universe of events which will never wholly reveal itself to you: a conspiracy the barest outline of which, once visible, will gall you forever.

It is in conversations not your own (so I learnt from Lucas) that you first hear of Egnaro. Egnaro reveals itself in minutiae, in that great and very real part of our lives when we are doing nothing important. You wait outside the library in the rain: an advert for a new kind of vacuum pump, photographed against a background of cycads and conifers, catches your eye. 'Branch offices everywhere!' Old men sit on the park benches, and as you pa.s.s make casual reference to some forgotten campaign in the marshes of a steamy country. You are always in transit when you hear of Egnaro, in transit or in limbo. A book falls open and you read with a sudden inexpressible frisson of nostalgia, 'Will I ever return there?' (Outside, rain again, falling into someone else's garden; a wet black branch touches the window in the wind.) A woman at a dinner party murmurs, 'Egnaro, where the long sunlit esplanades lift from a wine-dark sea...'

It is this overheard, fragmentary quality which is so destructive. By the time you have turned your head the woman is speaking of tomatoes and hot-house flowers; someone has switched off the news broadcast with its hints of a foreign war; the accountant in the seat opposite you on the train has folded up his Daily Telegraph preparatory to getting off at Stockport. You forget immediately. Egnaro in the beginning at least hides itself in the interstices, the empty moments of your life.

Lucas himself had a similar incidental quality. He was a fattish, intelligent, curly-haired man, between thirty and forty years old and p.r.o.ne to migraine headaches, who had worked his way up from records and goldfish in the Shude Hill Market to a shabby bookshop on one of the streets behind Manchester library. I did his accounts once a month in a filthy office he kept above the shop; afterwards he would treat me to a Chinese meal and pay me in cash, for which I was grateful. I sold some of my wife's books to him when she died. He was quite decent to me on that occasion.

He conducted the business evasively. Receipts were scribbled on decaying brown paper bags, in a variety of hands. He had three signatures. I never knew how many people he employed. He never paid his bills. He concealed from me almost as much as he was concealing from his suppliers, his partners, and his VAT inspector. To tell the truth I let him hide as much as he pleased: no one in the gray streets outside cared, and I was glad of the work. I hated the office, with its litter of half-empty plastic cups and plates of congealed food; but I liked the shop. After the rambling, apologetic evasions upstairs it had a sour candor.

Its window was packed with colorful American comics cellotaped into plastic bags, and its door was always open. Inside it was the relic of a dozen bankruptcy cases: car rental, cheap shoes, do-it-yourself. Lucas had ripped out the original fitments, leaving raw scars on the wall to remind him, and replaced them with badly carpentered shelves. A tape player and two loudspeakers pumped the narrow aisles full of pop music which drew in the students and teenagers who made up his bread and b.u.t.ter clientele. They came in full of a sort of greedy idealism, to buy science fiction and crankcult material books about spoon-bending, flying saucers and spiritualism books by Koestler and Crowley, Cowper Powys and Colin Wilson all the paraphernalia of that 'new' paradigm which so attracts the young. As a sideline Lucas sold them second-hand records, posters, novelties, and from a bas.e.m.e.nt stinking of broken lavatories and mold film magazines, biographies of James Dean, and children's comics.

They loved it. Every flat surface was strewn with the poor stuff they wanted, and I don't think any of them ever realized that Lucas hated them, or that this was his revenge on them.

He kept the p.o.r.nography at the rear of the shop. On slack afternoons he would stand behind the cash desk, sealing the new stock into plastic wrappers so that the customers couldn't maul it. This activity seemed to relax him. His plump fingers had performed the task so often that they worked unsupervised, deftly folding the wrapper, pulling the cellotape off the reel, smoothing it down, while Lucas's thoughts went elsewhere and his face took on a collapsed, distant expression; so that he looked, with his curly hair and smooth skin, like a corrupt but puzzled cherub. Occasionally he would leaf through a copy of Rustler or Big Breasted Women in Real Life Poses before he sealed it up, or stare with sudden stony contempt at the businessmen browsing the back shelves.

Once or twice a month the police would come unannounced and remove his entire stock in black polythene dustbin bags. No one expected this to have any effect. He had the shelves full again the next day. They treated him with a jocular familiarity and in the face of their warrants and destruction orders he was resentful but polite. He made no distinction between p.o.r.nography and science fiction, often wondering out loud why they confiscated the one and not the other.

'It all seems the same to me,' he maintained. 'Comfort and dreams. It all rots your brain.' Then, reflectively: 'Give them what they want and take the money.'

Though he believed this, his cynicism wasn't as simple as it seemed. The art student, with his baggy trousers and his magenta dyed hair, coming in for the latest Carlos Castaneda or John Cowper Powys; the shopgirl who asked in a distracted whine, 'Got anything about Elvis Presley? Any books? Badges?'; the accounts executive in the three-piece suit who snapped back his cuff to consult his digital watch before folding the new issue of Young Girls in Full Color or Omni into his plastic attache case: I soon saw that Lucas's contempt for them stemmed from his fellow-feeling.

In unguarded moments he showed me some of his own collection: florid volumes ill.u.s.trated in the Twenties and Thirties by Harry Clarke; Beardsley prints and Burne Jones reproductions. He had newspapers from the fifties and sixties, announcing the deaths of politicians and pop stars; he had original recordings by Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. If he knew exactly what the teenagers wanted to buy, it was because he was privy to their dreams; it was because he had haunted the back streets of London and Manchester and Liverpool only a few years before, searching for a biography of Mervyn Peake, a forgotten novel, a bootleg record. And if he hated them it was because he had lost their simplicity, their ability to be comforted, the ease with which they consummated their desires.

He was trapped between the fantasy on the shelves, which no longer satisfied him, and the meaningless sheaves of invoices floating in pools of cold coffee on the desk upstairs. Therein lay his susceptibility to Egnaro. Where my own lay I am not half so sure.

'We all love a mysterious country,' said Lucas.

We were sitting in his office, looking through his collection, warming our hands over the one-bar fire which drew a sour, failed smell from the piles of ancient magazines and overflowing waste bins. The accounts for February were finished. His takings were down, he claimed, his overheads up. All that month a wind from Siberia had been depressing the city center, scouring Deansgate from the cathedral eastward, and forcing its way into the shops. Downstairs the tape-player was broken. Students drifted listlessly past in ones or twos, or cl.u.s.tered round the window with their collars turned up, arguing over the value of the stuff inside.

'For instance,' Lucas explained, leaning over my shoulder to turn a page: 'This tribe has lived for centuries under a volcano on an island somewhere off the south west coast of Africa. The exact lat.i.tude is unknown. Their elders worship the volcano as a G.o.d; they're said to have inhuman powers.' He turned several pages at once, his pudgy fingers nimble. 'It's the draftsmanship I love. There! You can see every head under the water, even the straws they're breathing through. Look at that stipple! You won't find drawing like that in the rubbish downstairs.'

He sighed.

'I used to spend hours with this stuff as a kid. See the spider monkeys, trapped in the burning village? They act as the eyes of the witch doctor: he never sees anything for the rest of his life but flames!'

He had been preoccupied all day, sometimes depressed and edgy, at others full of the odd nostalgic eagerness which with him stood in for gaiety. He couldn't settle to anything. Now he was showing me an ill.u.s.trated omnibus of some American writer popular in the Nineteen Twenties, Edgar Rice Burroughs or Abraham Merritt, which had cost him, he said, over a hundred pounds. It had been privately printed a decade ago and was very hard to come by. I could make little of it, and was surprised to find he kept it with his treasured editions of Under the Hill and Salome. The pictures seemed badly drawn and drab, unwittingly comic in their portrayal of albino gorillas and wide-eyed, frightened women; the tales themselves fragmentary, motiveless and unreal.

'I've never seen much of it,' I admitted.

Personally, I told him, I had adored Kipling at that age. (Even now, if I close my eyes, I can still picture 'the cat who walked alone,' his tail stuck up in the air like a brush and that poor little mouse speared on the end of his sword.) When he didn't respond I closed the book with exaggerated care.

'It's very nice,' I said, 'but not my sort of thing. Are you hungry yet?'

But he was staring down into the cold black street.

'It's almost as if he'd been there, don't you think?' he said. 'Watching the way the ash drifts down endlessly over the pumice terraces.'

He was talking to himself, but he couldn't do it alone. He was trying to woo me, even though we had so little in common he didn't know what to say. His obsession had him by the throat, and the Rice Burroughs volume had only been an introduction, a way of preparing me. Later I would begin to recognize these moods, and learn how to respond to them. Now I merely watched while he shook his head absently, abandoned the window, and, breathing heavily through his mouth, made a pretence of fumbling through the heaps of stuff under the desk. The book he came up with fell open, from long usage, at a page about halfway through. I see now that this is what he had wanted to show me all along. He looked at it for a minute, his lips moving slightly as he scanned the text, then nodded to himself and thrust it into my hands.

'I always wondered what this meant,' he said, with a peculiar deprecatory shrug. 'You might be interested in it: what he really meant by it.'

It was an American paperback, one of those with the edges of the pages dyed a dull red and the paper that smells faintly of excrement. There were newer editions of it in the shop downstairs; in fact it was quite popular. Its author claimed to link certain astronomical events with the activities of secret societies and Gnostic sects, although what he hoped to prove by this was unclear. It was called The Castles of the Kings, or something similar. The bookstalls have been full of this sort of thing for the last ten years; but Lucas's copy had been bought in the mid-fifties when it was not so common, and its pages were tobacco brown with age. While I was reading it he fussed round the office, shuffling through the invoices, trying to tidy the desk, warming his hands at the fire: but I could feel him watching me intently.

'We know what we see,' the pa.s.sage began, 'or think we do...' And it went on: ...but is it possible that the real pattern of life is not in the least apparent, but rather lurks beneath the surface of things, half hidden and only apparent in certain rare lights, and then only to the prepared eye? A secret country, a place behind the places we know, which seems to have but little connection to the obvious schemes of the universe?

In certain lights and at certain seasons the inhabitants of any city can see enormous faces hanging in the air, or words of fire. Also, one house in an otherwise dark street will be seen to be lit up at night for a week, even though no one lives there. From it will come sounds of revelry, although no one is observed to enter or leave it. Suddenly all is quiet and dark again, as if nothing had happened! But ordinary people will remember.

Scientists give us many explanations to choose from. Are we really to believe that reality is built from tiny motes whirling invisibly about one another?

There was more of this; an account of an eclipse witnessed in China during the fourteenth century; and then the following curious paragraph: In India newly married couples wade in the estuarine mud catching fish in a new garment. 'What do you see?' their friends call from the bank. 'Sons and cattle!' is the answer. Are we to doubt that India exists? In the Dark Ages they had never heard of America! When the Jew of Tunis exhibited a fish's tail on a cushion, did anyone doubt that it was a fish?