The Weird Part 112

'I mean the roll was fogged, all twelve negs burned black, pure white prints. Nothing on them.

I thought I could bring them with me, but it didn't work.'

'Wait a minute. You telling me there's no trade?' Now he was p.i.s.sed, and ready to make a grab at her. She was little, she could elude him. He'd have to be fast. 'Well f.u.c.k I'm giving you my prints.'

'I saw them, that's enough. They came out good. You're a fine photographer. I can tell how much work you put into them. And I...appreciate that.'

That was it for Brovnik. Her whole story of being an accomplice, nothing but a lie to get a look at private records. This was suddenly more than personal; he would make it official, too.

He hurled the prints at her. They curled off in twelve different arcs, like a blossom opening around him as he leapt to cut her off.

She gasped, spinning away, and found herself trapped in a corner where a tall family mausoleum backed up against the brick of the surrounding buildings, below a high row of broken windows. Nowhere for her to go.

He stooped for the flashlight, which she'd dropped. 'All right, lady,' he said, and switched it on.

The light caught her for a glancing instant, and that was all it took all he got for his pains and for his memories. He saw that her skin was s.h.i.+mmery black, her short-cropped hair silvery gray, and the very centers of her eyes, brilliant white. Then she shrank to nothing and disappeared, like a little woman-shaped balloon deflating instantaneously to the size of a speck of lichen on the marble tomb, then even smaller, gone. The beam hit nothing but the chipped brick wall and a slab of marble with some cryptic gang hieroglyphs streaking the side.

He backed up, swinging the beam to and fro, up and down, looking for the crack she'd slid away through, the secret door that had opened to swallow her up, the rabbit hole, anything. Nothing. None of those things would explain what he'd seen, anyway.

In the time he'd had to look at her, really look and it was an almost subliminal impression he'd seen that she wasn't any dwarf. She had none of the characteristic squashed features, no stubby fingers or any of that. For her size, she was perfectly proportioned like a normal grown woman who had shrunk in the wash. This remained true as she vanished: All proportions stayed constant as if she were zooming backward down a tunnel with her eyes fixed on his, until she blinked out. The last thing he remembered was her faintly wounded look, and her color...that s.h.i.+fting silvery black like nothing he'd ever seen in a person though tantalizingly familiar.

Brovnik hunted through the cemetery till the sun came up, but he didn't find anything except his twelve dented, scratched prints. He shoved them in a crypt to rot and hurried back to his car. In the strong morning sunlight it was just barely possible to not think of her consciously. But somewhere inside, his mind kept going over the details; the cop inside him wouldn't quit.

It was his day off. After a few hours spent futilely trying to sleep, he went into the lab, fished out the negatives of the Arbus suicide, and studied them on the lightboard. The hair looked similar to what he'd seen in the flashlight beam an odd s.h.i.+ny gray, cropped short. The skin was the same shade of silvery black that no negro's skin had ever been. But that didn't mean it was her. The face might have proved something, but he was spared the sight of her piercing white pupils staring out of his negatives because she'd slid face down in the tub. Still, when he looked at the spiky hair, he felt a chill he hoped wasn't wholly based on recognition.

The next few days pa.s.sed with excruciating slowness as he waited for the sense of shock to move through his system and into the past so he could get on with a life of ordinary things. He had time off coming to him, and he took it. He went to the Catskills with an Instamatic camera and took color snaps of waterfalls and old bridges and empty inner tubes bobbing down the Esopus River. He didn't take any pictures of people. He met a woman in a restaurant bar who spent the night at his cabin; in the morning she was gone but he felt rea.s.sured because she had vanished in the usual way, while his eyes were closed. When he got back to the city after a week, he thought he'd put it all behind him; he thought he was refreshed.

His first night back on duty, a man shot his wife through the temples, cut the throats of his two-, three-, and four-year-olds, strangled the family Doberman (not necessarily in that order), and sentenced himself to life as a vegetable by badly misjudging the trajectory of his final bullet. The photography posed a number of technical problems for Brovnik, due to the cramped conditions, but he was working them out in a cool professional way when he happened to look through the open window onto the dark fire escape and saw the four of them standing there. Five, if you counted the dog. A tall silvery white woman, three little ones, and a four-legged ma.s.s of silver mist. Silvery white, with sharp white pupils, all looking at him as if he owed them something. It didn't make sense to him at first (and this was how his mind worked, hooked on little bits of logic he hoped might help him understand the larger problem) that they should all be silvery white, when the shrinking woman in the cemetery had been so inky black.

'What the f.u.c.k are you doing, Bravo? There's no pulse in that arm.' He looked down in horror and saw that he had been posing a limp arm adjusting the dead to make a better picture.

He backed off and drew the camera defensively to his eye, aiming it at the mother's splattered skull. For the first time he noticed that she was black. The children were black as well. So was the Doberman. All black.

Lowering the camera, he saw five white negatives watching him.

What did she do to me? he wondered.

'Bravo? What is it?'

He didn't answer the other cops. He knew he wouldn't ever be able to answer their questions. He forced his way to the window and showed his camera to the watchers outside, let them witness him opening the back and exposing the film. He yanked out a yard of it, unspooling the celluloid, letting it go ribboning into the night with all the latent images burned out, never to be seen, sparing them his camera's bite of immortality.

As the woman in the graves had done, they shrank away to nothing. Five new stars burned briefly in the night, a bit too low to top the horizon, then blinked out.

'Brovnik, what the f.u.c.k is wrong?' Heavy steps came toward him.

'I have to get out,' he said, stepping through the window. Questioning cries followed him all the way down the fire escape to the street, where he walked away quickly from the lights of the squad cars, his camera tugging like a bloodhound on the trail of everything that had ever eluded him.

The Country Doctor.

Steven Utley.

Steven Utley (1948) is an American writer of science fiction and fantasy. Early on, Utley belonged to what would become the famous Turkey City Writers' Workshop, which also included Bruce Sterling and Lisa Tuttle (the latter also included in this volume). A Nebula Award finalist, Utley has frequently appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and a.n.a.log. He is best known for his Silurian Tales, which chronicle the misadventures of a group of scientists sent back to the Paleozoic era. Collections include Beasts of Love (2005). 'The Country Doctor' is a bit of a departure for Utley, despite its archaeological bent: a creepy weird tale reminiscent of the work of Michael Shea.

Gardner was drowning, and strangers were laying hands on the bones of my fore-bears. I felt obligated to see that liberties weren't taken with my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and other good, G.o.d-fearing ladies, so I put the business on auto pilot and made the drive as if on auto pilot myself.

I viewed the visit as a familial duty, not a sentimental journey. I hadn't been back to Gardner in twenty-five years. I'd always told myself that, with my grandparents dead and their house taken over by obscure cousins-removed, there was nothing to come back for. Soon there would be nothing to come back to. The dam was completed, the waters were rising. Gardner was drowning.

Once in the town, however, I couldn't simply drive to the cemetery. It wouldn't have taken two minutes. Wherever you were in a place the size of Gardner, you weren't far from anywhere else, and now, especially, everything was smaller and closer together than it had seemed when I was a kid. But I found that I had to drive down my grandparents' old street, had to stop in front of what had been their house. I sat with the motor running and stared disconsolately. Throughout my childhood, though I moved wherever the military took my father, my grandparents' house, a big, warm clapboard pile, had remained the center of the world, the universe home. My earliest memories were of being in that house, surrounded by relatives, loved, safe. Now it sat waiting for the water. My grandfather had been a carpenter, among other things; I could see his shed in back. There had been a vegetable patch back there, too. My grandmother had sh.e.l.led a lot of peas and snapped a lot of beans from it.

The other houses on the block had once been features of a familiar landscape. Now, curtainless windows gave most of them a look of stupid surprise. One was carefully boarded up, as if the owners fully intended to return. The house next to it looked agape and miserable. Paint hung from it in strips. The owners must have stopped bothering with upkeep when they heard about the dam; finally, they'd just walked away. All but one of the lawns on the block were overgrown. A handful of people still remained, the die-hard element, determined to hold out until the water lapped over their doorsteps, and to keep their yards looking nice in the meantime.

It was three blocks to the cemetery, long blocks for someone dragging an orthopedic shoe. Nevertheless, I told myself. Nevertheless. I turned off the motor, got out of the car. The sun was at its zenith. There was no wind. A male chorus of cicadae sang of love's delights to prospective mates. The day felt and sounded exactly like all the summer days I'd spent in Gardner in my childhood. I put my hands in my pockets and started walking, slowly, stunned by the force of the memories crowding in on me. I remembered how my grandmother used to sit in a metal porch chair and, as she put it, have herself a little talk with Jesus while she snapped those beans. Sometimes she sang gospel songs. She only ever sang the melodies, but I had been to enough revival meetings to know the words to whatever she sang. Sometimes, hearing her, I'd stop my playing and sing the words while she hummed....

My eyes began to sting. Gardner was drowning.

Around the corner had lived Blanche, who was my grandmother's age and whose relation to me was, then and now, unclear. Someone lived there still a green station wagon with a dinged-up fender sat in the driveway, and there were curtains in the windows but Blanche herself was long dead, killed in an automobile accident. I'd liked her a lot. One summer, she had given me the empty coffee can in which I buried my grandmother's dead parakeet Petey. I knew exactly where I'd scooped out Petey's grave and wondered what I might find if I were to open it now. Nothing, probably at most, a few crumbling shards of coffee-can rust. Tiny little bones dissolve in no time. On the next block was the crumbling brick sh.e.l.l of Cobb's Corner Market, where I'd sometimes spent my entire weekly stipend, twenty-five cents, on comic books and a c.o.ke. Dime comic books and nickel soft drinks it had been that long ago, and it was all about to pa.s.s forever from sight and memory.

Drowning, drowning....

More vehicles were parked by the cemetery than there were in the whole town. I saw many opened graves it could have been the day after Resurrection Day. At least a dozen people wearing old clothes were working among the headstones.

I knew in a very broad way what these archeologists were supposed to be doing here, and I did see individuals sifting dirt through screens or duck-walking around exhumed coffins with tape measures in their hands, but what I mostly saw looked like just a lot of hot, dirty shovel work with nothing scientific about it.

I came upon two youngish men at the end of the first row of graves. On the ground between them was a new coffin. Its lid was open, and I saw that it was empty. One of the men nodded a h.e.l.lo at me.

'How's it going?' I said.

'Well,' he said, 'it is going.'

I gestured vaguely around. 'These're all my relatives.'

They looked at me as if I'd caught them doing something naughty.

'Well,' said the one who'd spoken before, 'we're taking real good care of everyone. Mister'

'Riddle.'

The second man pointed away and said, 'Most of the Riddle family's still located over on that side.'

'Yes,' I said, 'I know.' I did know; it was all coming back; I could have found the Riddles blindfolded, and the Riches and the Ba.s.setts, too. I had seen both of my maternal grandfather's parents buried here, then his wife, finally his own self. The first Riches and Ba.s.setts had been laid to rest here in the 1850s; Riddles came along after the war, when a lot of ruined Southerners were moving around and resettling. Relatively speaking, the concentration of Riddles wasn't great Riddles, it once was explained to me, tended to die young and tended also to have wanderl.u.s.t. My father had been orphaned when he was barely into his teens, and members of his line had come to rest in odd places throughout the South, the West, and as far away as the Coral Sea. The first graveside service I'd attended in the Gardner cemetery was for a young cousin of mine, Kermit, who one summer day had succ.u.mbed to the fascination of a fallen power line. The last one was for my grandfather.

I nodded at the new coffin. 'Who's this for?'

'Whoever,' one of the men said. 'We try to keep everything together, even the box somebody was buried in. Some of these old graves, though, you find a few splinters of wood and some rusty nails, nothing you could still call a coffin.'

'Is Doctor Taylor here?'

'He's somewhere around here.' He looked about and nodded off toward the south end of the cemetery. 'I think he's over that way.'

'Thank you.' The two men seemed glad to see me walk on. When I was a child, I'd sometimes been sent to spend the summer with my grandparents. My grandmother and great-grandmother had visited this cemetery often. Between them they must have known seven out of every ten people buried here. They always brought flowers, and usually they brought me. They'd move among the graves, place the flowers, murmur secrets to the dead or prayers to Jesus, murmur genealogy to me, life histories, accounts of untimely, often horrific, deaths most of their anecdotes were imbued with pain and tragedy. Sometimes I was interested and listened. Sometimes I was bored, drowsy from the heat, and instead listened to the cicadae. The sound of those summers was one long insect song, cicadae and honey-bees by day, crickets and mosquitoes by night, punctuated by gospel-piano chords, hands clapping time, voices singing, 'I'm gonna have a little talk with Jesus, I'm qonna tell Him all about my trouble....'

It kept coming back, coming back.

It came back as I pa.s.sed Dr. Sweeny's headstone, which lay in the gra.s.s by the edge of the driveway. Nearby, a man wearing a faded plaid s.h.i.+rt was excavating the grave with a shovel. As headstones in this cemetery went, Dr. Sweeny's was pretty fancy, with some decorative cuts and a longer inscription than most.

Dr. Chester Sweeny d. June 30, 1900 Erected in respectful memory by those he tended these 30 years Dr. Sweeny was the only doctor, the only Sweeny, and the only non-relative buried in the cemetery. I had been filled with dismay and disbelief the first time I saw his name on that stone. Until that moment, I'd thought that doctors were immune to sickness and exempt from death. Mammaw, I said to my great-grandmother, whom I'd been trailing past the rows, what kind of a doctor dies, Mammaw? 'Honey,' she told me, 'doctors die just like everybody else. Everybody's got to die. That's why the important thing in life's to be baptized in Jesus's name, so you'll go to heaven when you die.' But why, I demanded, do people have to die? She didn't answer, just looked at the stone, and after what was probably only seconds but must have seemed like a whole minute or a full hour to an impatient child, she said, 'Old Doc Sweeny. I went to his funeral. I was a girl then. I was nearly as young then as you are now.' She was in her sixties when she told me this; naturally, I couldn't think of her as a girl or imagine that she had ever been nearly as young as anybody. 'I remember because everybody in the whole valley come for it, and then's when I met your Pappaw for the first time. He didn't want nothing to do with me then, but later, well, I changed his mind. But that day everybody come to pay respects to old Doc Sweeny.' Was he as old as you, Mammaw? 'Doc Sweeny was as old as Methuselah. Why, my momma, that was your great-great-gran'maw Vannie Ba.s.sett, wasn't even born when he come here. My own daddy made the box to bury him in and druv it here in his wagon, and a man over to Dawson give this stone. Doc Sweeny was just as poor as everybody else and didn't have no money set aside. Seems like there never was so good a one as him again. He druv his buggy all over, day or night, rain or s.h.i.+ne. Not like these doctors we got now. Poor as he was, too, he always had some candy and play-pretties for us littlens in his pockets. I remember him visiting my momma when she was sick, and when he was leaving, he give me a piece of peppermint candy and said, My child, my child. And I was a sa.s.sy thing then, just like you, didn't have no more manners'n a pig. Instead of thanking him for the candy, I just said, I ain't neither your child,' and she had laughed delightedly at the memory of her own devilishness.

Thereafter, throughout the remaining summers of my childhood, Dr. Sweeny occupied a place in my mind as special as the one he occupied in the cemetery. I soon got over his being a dead doctor, but I remained impressed by his anomalous presence in what was effectively an outsized family plot. It suggested to me that he must have been, somehow, one of us. Even now, he had power to fascinate me. Gazing down at his stone, I found myself wondering exactly what he must have done, besides giving candy and cheap toys to children, to so endear himself. Mostly just be there, I guessed, when folks needed a sympathetic ear and a few sugar pills. Doctors in Sweeny's day had done more nursing than actual doctoring. Much of the nursing was ineffectual, and most of the doctoring was downright savage. There was no Food and Drug Administration to look over a physician's shoulder as he dosed people with G.o.d only knew what. Maybe this particular country doctor had won his neighbors' trust and respect simply by not killing inordinate numbers of patients.

I tore myself away, moved on, and found Dr. Taylor and a woman squatting in shade at the end of a row. He was strongly built, balding, with a sun-burnt face. She had long, reddish-brown hair tied back in a ponytail and was covered with freckles everywhere that I could see. A map of the graveyard was spread on the ground between them, with numbers and other marks scribbled all over it. None of the graves at this end of the row had been opened yet. I noticed four narrow, squarish stones set into the ground at the feet of two graves identified by a common headstone as those of John h.e.l.lman Rich and Julia Anne Rich.

'Doctor Taylor,' I said.

Both of them looked up, and I could tell from his expression that he didn't recognize me. We had met only briefly, weeks before.

'Doug Riddle,' I said.

'Mister Riddle!' He stood quickly, brushed dirt off his hands, started to offer to shake, pulled back suddenly. 'I don't know if you want to shake hands with me. I've been rooting around in graves all day.' He seemed genuinely fl.u.s.tered. He turned to the woman, who had risen with him. 'Gertie, this is Doug Riddle. My a.s.sociate, Gertrude Latham.'

'I'm very pleased to meet you,' she said. She seemed as ill at ease as he. She had a wonderful accent, German come through the heart of the Deep South.

'Finding out what you came to find out?' I said.

Taylor made an attempt at a smile. 'In this line of work, you never know what you'll find out.'

'Some people,' I said, meaning mainly my irrepressible Uncle G. A., 'called this place Gardner Gardens.'

They looked uncertain, as if unsure they'd heard me right. He ventured to say, 'Oh?'

'The planting ground,' I said, then shrugged. 'Small-town black humor.'

'Ah. Yes.' Taylor smiled again, more feebly than before, and tried to make up the difference by adding a chuckle, with results that embarra.s.sed everyone. My own smile began to hurt my mouth.

Gertrude Latham went for a save. She nodded toward Julia Anne Rich's grave and said, 'That headstone tells us a great deal about this young woman's life. Do you know anything about her?'

I glanced at the dates on the stone. Julia Anne Rich had died, age twenty-two, before the turn of the century, when my great-grandparents were children. 'I remember the name,' I said, 'from when I used to come here as a kid. I thought Julia Anne was a nice name ' I gave Latham an apologetic look ' for a girl's name. But I don't know anything about her in particular.'

Latham nodded at the grave again. 'Those are her babies there by her feet. Judging from the dates, she lost four of them in a row. The last one may have killed her.'

If this was archeology, I wasn't impressed. I felt sure I could have deduced as much from the information on the stones. Childbirth in the nineteenth century was perilous.

I said, 'There're more babies and mothers buried here than anything else. Lots of children's graves, too. Children used to die of everything. After World War Two, though, hardly anyone except old people got buried here. All the young people went into the service or moved to Evansville to work in the P-forty-seven factory. And they just never came back.'

The two archeologists were staring at me. There was something like admiration in Taylor's expression. I felt a sheepish sort of pleasure and could not help smiling as he asked me, 'Are you Gardner's official historian?'

I shook my head. 'But there was a time when I must've known the name on every last one of these headstones. I got to be a whiz at subtraction from figuring out by the dates how old people were when they died. And in the forties people did start going away and not coming back. My father went into the service and stayed in. And somebody in the family did go build P-forty-sevens, too. There were framed prints of the things hanging in a spare bedroom at my grandparents' house for years. Official prints, with the Republic Aircraft logo.'

'Mister Riddle,' Taylor said, 'we could use your knowledge to interpret this site. I'd appreciate it if you'd consider letting us interview you sometime.'

'You'd be what's known in anthropology as an informant,' said Latham.

Informant didn't have the ring to it that official historian did, but I was flattered all the same. There's little to compare with having people hang on everything you say. Anyway, I told myself, maybe Gardner was too small for a full-fledged historian. Nothing had ever happened here nothing that mattered to anybody besides Riddles, Riches, and Ba.s.setts, harvest time, tent meetings, weddings, funerals, somebody's barn being raised or burning down. No one famous had ever come from Gardner, or to it, for that matter. And it struck me then, with unexpected and shaming clarity, that I'd never made the effort to bring my own children or grandchildren to this place, that I should have been murmuring genealogy and tragic personal histories to them all their young lives, teaching them about family and the continuity of life. I should have been telling them, 'Every one of your ancestors lived and suffered and sometimes all but swam up waterfalls like salmon to make sure you'd be here today and the family would continue and the thread be unbroken. They were brave and wonderful people, and if you don't believe it, just look here at your great-aunt, your great-something Julia Anne, who lost four babies one right after another, which isn't even a record, and it must've seemed to her like the worst thing in the world to lose the first one but then she carried three more, suffered crus.h.i.+ng loss every time, died a probably painful and possibly protracted death trying to deliver the last one ' And, 'Doug,' my wife would've said by then, 'Dad,' my daughter would've said by now, each with that same disapproving furrow between her eyebrows. I do get carried away at times.

I blinked the thoughts away and looked at the two scientists. 'So,' I said, 'what're you finding out?'

Latham said, 'We never really know what we've found until we've finished an excavation and, uh, put all the pieces of the puzzle together.'

'Is there a puzzle here?'

She essayed a smile. It was the best smile any of us had managed thus far. 'There's always a puzzle.'

'And you always find a solution?'

Her smile got even better. 'This is what you'd call quick and dirty archeology. We have to excavate by shovel, get as much information out as we can, as fast as we can, and move on. We don't have a lot of time. All we can do is figure out what the person was buried with and measure the bones. And we try to look for evidence of disease that would show up in the skeletal material.'

'Is there evidence of a lot of disease?'

Everything suddenly felt awkward again. I could tell by the look she gave Taylor that she regretted her last statement.

I looked over my shoulder and saw Roy Rich's grave right where I'd left it decades before. 'Here's a puzzle for you,' I said. 'What does this stone tell you about Roy Rich's life?'

Latham glanced at it. 'He died at age fifteen.'

'He was lucky to live that long,' I said. 'Or maybe not so lucky. I remember Roy. He was deformed. Not "differently abled," not even "physically handicapped." Deformed. His sister Betty, too.' I pointed to Betty's headstone, next to his. 'She died at age twelve. Those two had everything in the world wrong with them. I guess you'll see for yourself when you open the coffins.'

The two scientists were silent. It was very hot, and sweat gleamed on Taylor's pate and beaded on Latham's forehead and upper lip. I felt slimy inside my clothing. The cicadae would not shut up.

At last, Taylor said, stiffly. 'We'll write a report when we finish the excavation. If you like, I'll send you a copy.'

'I'm sure it'd be much too technical for me. Tell me something about my ancestors that I can go home and tell my wife.'

Taylor looked about as unhappy as any human being I'd seen lately. Latham looked as if she were trying to wish somebody away me, of course. The more ill at ease they became, the pus.h.i.+er I felt. Maybe it was the gene for devilishness, handed down from Mammaw.

'It doesn't necessarily have to be something nice,' I said, 'if that's what's holding you back. Nothing you tell me can be any more horrible than some of the things Granny and Mammaw told me.' I looked over the rows. A truck pulled away from the gate, bearing some of my dead away to strange soil. 'Doctor Taylor, when we met last month, you said this ground's full of history, and this was a one-time-only chance to get at it.'

'Yes,' he said, slowly warily, I thought. 'Yes, I did say that.'

'This is the last time I'll ever see this place. Living or dead, everyone's being scattered. I know it's true I'll be able to visit my relatives' new graves over in Dawson, but they'll be, they'll seem out of place over there. This is where my grandparents and great-grandparents were buried. This little spot in the road was their home. It was my home, too, for a while. Next year, it'll all be gone, the whole valley'll be under water. It'll be like Gardner never existed. So please indulge me. I'm not going to gum up the works for you, I really don't want to be in your way or bother you a lot, but I need...I need to carry away everything from here that I can this time.'

'We try,' Taylor said, 'we try very hard to be careful of the feelings of living relatives of the people we exhume. It's been my experience that relatives shouldn't, well, watch. And that despite what they say, they don't really want to know everything.'

'Look. There're a few chicken thieves buried here. There's even supposed to be a horse thief. And one of my cousins stabbed her husband with a big sharp kitchen knife when he beat up on the kids. He isn't buried here, but the point is, I don't have many illusions about my family. I'll try not to be shocked by anything you tell me.'