CONTEST: Tell Us Your New Weird Story, Win Tons of Cool Stuff!
UPDATE: Just now visiting and want to enter the contest? Note this update about additional prizes, etc.
In honor of the publication of The New Weird anthology, which we hope you’ll consider buying, Ann and I have decided to have a little contest. Tell us your “new, weird” story–something strange (but entertaining and either PG-rated or with the naughty bits blocked out) that happened to you or you witnessed in the last couple of years. Work-related, fun-related, whatever–go wild. Hopefully some of these will be bizarre but also uplifting, although that’s not a requirement. It’s more about…hey, this world we live in is an odder place than we might think. All of those stories in The New Weird from China Mieville, Clive Barker, K.J. Bishop, Steph Swainston, Jeffrey Ford, Jay Lake, Pual Di Filippo, Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison, and others–they’re not strange; the world is strange!
What do you win? The three winners, chosen by Ann and me, will win ONE COPY OF EACH ANTHOLOGY WE EDIT BETWEEN NOW AND 2010, PERSONALIZED. Yes, that’s correct. You will get a copy of The New Weird, Steampunk, The Leonardo Variations (Clarion charity anthology), Fast Ships/Black Sails (pirates), Best American Fantasy 2, Best Horror 2009, Last Drink Bird Head, Mapping the Beast: The Best of Leviathan, and various other anthologies currently in the planning stages. Heck, we’ll even throw in the first couple issue of Weird Tales with Ann as fiction editor. We also reserve the right to give out honorable mentions, said HMs to receive a copy of the NW antho.
Contest Rules:
- Must post the incident in the comments field on this blog entry (with at least a first name for now, although anonymous monikers are vaguely acceptable) and also, if you have a blog, we strongly suggest you post it there and link back to us (gives us all more traffic and content!)
- Try not to go over 500 words in relating your true story
- Contest ends February 17th, Sunday, at midnight EST.
- You can be located anywhere in the world and still enter the contest, but we reserve the right to ship books to overseas contest winners using an method other than first class airmail.
Also, check out The New Weird’s connection to Mike Libby’s awesome Insect Lab.
February 10, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Let me just wander over to my just about any day in my blog archives… Oh, my favorite “weird” moment was hearing the story of the city of Tooele!
A true story about a time I heard a true story!
from http://jmmcdermott.blogspot.com/2007/05/tooele.html
an old man with hands like gnobby tree roots scribbled on a napkin the letters “T O O E L E” and he told me a story from when he was in army, in utah.
he said he was staying in this scandinavian town near salt lake city, but up and over a mountain. he said when the mormons came, their fearless leader told these scandinavian settlers to start this town at that spot on the mountain. they did.
this one fellow - not the greatest speller or grammarian in the world - had fallen in love with a scandinavian woman. he wrote her letters regular enough.
town didn’t have a name, but it had a beautiful woman. fellow scrawled the words “too ele” on the envelope, gave it to the guys that he knew were headed that way.
men wandered up the mountain for their reasons. they had stuff to trade, stuff to do. they walked up the hills with these love letters. they wandered house to house saying “tooele” to all those scandinavians that barely spoke english, anyhow.
fellow didn’t stop writing his letters, you know. he kept at those letters.
someday the mapmakers walked over the hills. they pointed at all these men and women in houses and farms laughing in the campfire light.
the people only knew one name for this place. so they named it after the love letters.
the old guy with hands like gnarled white roots who told me this story about this time he was stationed at in the army handed me the napkin, and the pen. he had this look on his face like he was thinking about his youth, when he met his wife, and got his first job out of the army, and made something of himself up until today, where we’re sitting in this old church cafeteria on the western edge of urban civilization, and the long prairie a short walk from this church, sipping orange juice as if it were coffee.
i thanked the man for his story. i didn’t ask him what i wanted to ask him.
what happened to her: ele? what happened between her and the man that named a town after her?
http://www.tooelecity.org/
February 10, 2008 at 2:56 pm
[...] including a web exclusive, on the publisher’s page for the anthology. We’re also running a contest where you can win a copy of the anthology, along with tons of other cool [...]
February 10, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Only 200-300 words? This might prove to be a real challenge, considering the six years I’ve taught middle school and high school, but I might write one later tonight or tomorrow, if teaching stories are permitted. Some of those kids were just plain weird.
February 10, 2008 at 3:37 pm
It can go a little longer–I’m just wary of getting stuff over 1,000 words, is all. ANY kind of story is permitted. Don’t edit yourself. Just do it!
JV
February 10, 2008 at 3:49 pm
I have a perfect one then. I’ll have to post the “proof” on my blog, so later tonight then.
February 10, 2008 at 6:03 pm
I’m in two minds about entering - is ‘proof’ - of whatever description - mandatory? I’ve two stories in mind, but I don’t think I could provide proof the particular incidents actually happened.
Other than my word as a gentleman, that is…
February 10, 2008 at 6:53 pm
I haven’t lived long enough to have weird things happen to me. THIS CONTEST IS AGEIST. DOWN WITH THE SYSTEM.
February 10, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Proof isn’t necessary. I’m a professional writer. I know b.s. when I see it. :)
February 10, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Trust me on this - if I didn’t have the photos of this incident, it’s a bit too much to believe. I’m going to start writing in it a few minutes, once I make sure the cell phone images have transferred to my email account.
February 10, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Holy shit. Do I have the time? Has anything remotely interesting ever happened to me? Think, man, think.
February 10, 2008 at 7:42 pm
O.K., good to know. I’ll save my b.s. for people who aren’t professional writers. But I probably won’t offer the story I’d really like to; it’s too easy to write off due to the quantities of alcohol involved.
Now all I have to worry about in compressing the other one into around 500 words…
February 10, 2008 at 7:42 pm
My God, the number of people putting roadblocks in their way…don’t be chickenshits–post post post! In fact, for now we only need a first name if any of you are shy…
JV
February 10, 2008 at 7:50 pm
I meant there to be a smiley-face involved in that last comment. :)
February 10, 2008 at 8:00 pm
I walked into a diaster zone one Monday morning. The window, already shattered by incompetent workers who supposedly were repairing the roof, looked even worse as the student climographs I had taped there to cover the cracks were all askew. There was a horrid smell in the room, and there were drops of a yellowish chalk-like substance, almost like paint, on some of the desks. I hurried to clean up this foul mess before the 8 AM bell. Later, as the students entered the room, they too began to complain of that almost rotten, fetid odor. A quick search was done after homeroom ended and one of the students found a dead bird, hidden amongst their books. It had apparently succumbed to dehydration, but that was only the first of a whole wave of dead birds that spring semester.
Around this time, I had decided to add a little “decoration” to my classroom, and as I was lacking in suitable geography and history posters, I decided to use a little gag gift that a college buddy of mine had given me. Little did I know just how powerful of a scarecrow this talisman would be.
The next Monday, I entered my classroom and again was greeted with evidence of a dead bird and its droppings, all around the room but in a little pristine area in one front corner, towards which the dead bird’s body pointed, as if it had died of fright. The week after, two more dead birds, each in the same area, both also turned up as if the sight in front of them was just too unbearable.
It took about six weeks (and numerous complaints) for the workers to patch the roof and stop the insane suicidal flights of the starlings. Six weeks, eight dead birds and one that was too terrified to do more than to flap its wings weakly as it gave a terrible squawk as I entered the room.
Now one probably is wondering what man-made creation could be so terrifying to these poor animals as to make them die under its dire glaze? Well, that classroom scarecrow was nothing more than this:
Click on the link to see the blood-curdling image
There, if you want more stories like that, I have a few others I could share… ;)
February 10, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Here’s my story and the blog entry (and plugging your contest) can be found at http://charles-tan.blogspot.com/2008/02/my-new-weird-moment.html
There’s been one story I’ve peddling for the past few years about the perils of wishing for something you don’t really want. This story takes place back in 2003 or 2004, when I was still in college (Ateneo de Manila University) and the comic/manga shop CCHQ was still in existence.
At the time, I was spending most of my free time at CCHQ, watching comic and manga fans enter the shop (and occasionally helping out when the need arises). Now there’s this clique of girls from the school nearby, Miriam University, and long story short, I ended up befriending some of them.
Now one of the girls in that clique–who I barely knew but I did catch the name–started stalking me via my cellphone. She made around a dozen 2-second missed calls and when I did hit the “answer†button on my phone, she’d drop the call. There were a couple of text messages though, wanting to talk to me about manga and life in general, but honestly, I don’t want to hold an entire conversation via my phone’s small computer screen and keyboard.
I didn’t succeed in getting her to stop pestering me that day and so I told the entire incident to my pal Elbert. Now Elbert was busy with his comics work back then and when he heard that I had acquired a stalker, he foolishly said he wished he had one because that was an affirmation of fame (or at the very least some attention).
Now Elbert had another good friend–I currently forgot the person’s real name so let’s make up a new one such as Louie–who recently changed numbers. Now in the Philippines, we had two Telecom providers back then, Globe and Smart. Now the two companies distinguished themselves apart by the first four digits of their cell numbers: Globe began with 0917 while Smart began with 0918 and 0919. Elbert managed to acquire Louie’s phone number but he forgot which provider he belonged to and so he sent a message to all three possible numbers, identifying himself and apologizing if the recipient wasn’t Louie.
Well, suffice to say, one of the numbers was indeed Louie. However, one of the other people he contacted was my stalker. Now Elbert hangs out at CCHQ more than I do and was also exposed to that particular clique of girls. Since I was less than enthusiastic to be pestered by my stalker, she instead started calling and texting Elbert. That was one stalker off my back and well, I always did say Elbert was a people person.
February 10, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Here’s one for the Christopher Priest fans. Sorry, this story is not an uplifting one. But it is strange, and thinking about it still gives me chill bumps.
I work as a nurse in an outpatient infusion center. We administer all kinds of IV meds, including Chemotherapy. One day, several years ago, a young woman walked into our unit for her first treatment. She was 23 years old with piercing blue eyes and short spiky hair with leopard spots. Very cute. She knew she was going to lose her hair, so she decided to have fun with it. I admired her attitude.
While going through the process of getting her admitted and settled, she told us she had an identical twin sister living across the country. The day she learned her diagnosis, she called her sister and told her, “I have cancer.” Then her sister said, “I do too.” The twin had been diagnosed with the SAME kind of cancer–a rare type of ovarian cancer–on the SAME day.
The sister came home, and we treated both of them in our clinic. Of course, she did the leopard thing with her hair as well.
February 10, 2008 at 8:59 pm
This happened about five years ago, when I was using the Piccadilly Line several mornings a week to get to uni. We’d made it from Sudbury Hill to Alperton when the driver let us know our train would now be terminating at Acton Town instead of Cockfosters, so we’d all have to disembark and wait for another one. No explanation, but apologies for any inconvenience, etcetera and so on. There were the usual grumbles as people reached for mobiles to start phoning in their excuses. I made like a stoic Brit and carried on reading my book.
I kept hold of my book, though I didn’t do much reading once the train reached Acton Town. It was well after nine but the platform was already fairly crowded. It only became more so as the minutes dragged by and even more commuters trickled down the steps in search of an eastbound train. I engaged in the kind of pointless exercises people do in these situations; staring at my watch, or up at the announcement boards, or gazing into the tunnel for any sign of an approaching train. We’d been stuck there for ten or so minutes before I spotted the girl with the matching socks and umbrella.
She was about two carriage lengths further down the platform. The first thing I wondered about was the umbrella; it was March, a bit chilly, but there was no sign of rain. Then I thought something to the effect of, who the hell goes to the trouble of matching their socks to their umbrella? Both were a pale, but very bright green, a very ‘notice me!’ colour. The skirt that stopped a little bit above the socks was dark grey or maybe black, as was the jacket above that. I can’t really say what she looked like because I didn’t get a good look at her face ( maybe early 20s, dark hair ) but I did notice a couple of rings - at least three - on her right hand, because that was the hand holding the umbrella.
She might have been there already, or arrived on the same train as me, or shown up while we’d been waiting for its replacement, I don’t know. She stood out briefly because her socks matched her umbrella, and that peculiar fashion statement made me smile. I went back to my clock/announcement board/tunnel watching, but now I’d mix in a glance or two along the platform to see if Green Socks & Umbrella was still there, and she always was, until she wasn’t.
She was still at Acton Town though, because as I looked around to see where she’d gotten to, I spotted her again. All the way across the station on the District Line platforms.
Unless you’re familiar with Acton Town tube station, you’ll just have to take my word for it: there is no way she could have made it all the way over there in the time since I’d seen her on the Piccadilly side. Especially when Acton Town was as congested as it was that morning. No way, couldn’t be done. Yet there she was. Green socks, green umbrella, undoubtedly the same girl even if I hadn’t gotten a good look at her face. The chances of two people wearing bright green socks that perfectly matched their bright green umbrella… forget it. It was her.
She couldn’t have simply sauntered across the tracks: people tend to notice that kind of thing. And she couldn’t have made it through the crowds, up the stairs, across the walkway and down the stairs again on the other side in, what, less than thirty seconds?
But there she was.
I lost track of developments regarding the Piccadilly line service while I tried to figure out what I was seeing and how it was possible, but people were starting to squeezing past me to reach the front of the platform. The announcement board said that the next eastbound train was only three minutes away. Meanwhile, an eastbound District Line train arrived, so I looked over to see if Green Socks & Umbrella was going to take it. The near enough empty platform the train left behind told me she probably had.
Only she hadn’t.
Because when I looked back towards the tunnel there she was, standing pretty much exactly where she’d been when I first noticed her.
Explanations? I haven’t really got one, though a friend once suggested some kind of freakish trick with reflections. Because it’s the way my brain’s wired, I did consider various, shall we say ‘otherworldly’ possibilities, but if you ask me if I’ve ever seen a ghost, I’d probably answer no.
I’d still like to know what kind of person takes the trouble to match their socks to their umbrella.
(With apologies for taking liberties with the word limit.)
February 10, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Not long ago, on a trip to Tokyo, I was doing some serendipitous urban meandering. I ended up in a cemetery. I don’t remember which one, but like most in the area it was quite lush, with plenty of old trees and other foliage that helped give the entire, rather vast, grounds a collection of private, quiet, contemplative niches–no small feat in the center of the largest conurbation on Earth. It was beautiful, but melancholy. At midafternoon the ravens (how appropriate!) and cats (with their timeless air of ownership) greatly outnumbered the humans.
Walking among the thickets and elaborate tombs, along which ran strings of pictographs whose meanings mostly eluded me, an appropriately somber mood was naturally adopted. Family names and histories carved in rock and painted on wood. Dates of birth, death. Names of family members who went before, and those who yet persist aboveground to carry the family’s honor. Portraits. Flowers. Incense and offerings.
My feet wandered on though the high-rent portion of the grounds and my eyes drew me toward a particularly grand construction of polished black granite. This one was clearly new, and clearly not cheap. A respected community elder, or a successful businessman, perhaps. I drew closer, slowed, stopped, and after a few silent seconds burst into a horrifyingly audible giddy laughter, there amongst the headstones and distant mourners.
Since I had already publicly shamed myself, I managed a snapshot before respectfully hightailing it out of there.
(click to see) The greatest burial site ever.
Strange and uplifting indeed. I’d have liked to have met whoever decided on that message (and that typography!) for their headstone. The only dead, anonymous stranger who still brings a smile to my lips to recall.
February 11, 2008 at 12:56 am
(well i did my bestest, so here goes)
A Weird and Freaky Occurrence
Nearly six months ago I moved back home with my mother on account of her failing health. Our land sits midway between Austin and College Station–deep into the forest wilderness of Texas. At one time this small secluded region of the world was given the name of Black Jack, because of all the Black Jack oak trees peppering the area, but only a small stooped forlorn church and a sullen patch of a cemetery are all there is to show of the place.
One evening last fall I set out for my daily walk and the strangest thing happened. During the spring and summer everything is beautiful. Softly undulating hills, tree-spackled stretches–a veritable Bag End. Wildflowers proliferate, and the pungent scent of grass and hay is enough to make one dizzy, added with the tangy smell of mustang vines that festoon across the trees and hang like bloated spider webs.
But in the fall and winter months, the sylvan charm quickly drains away leaving a haunting landscape. The tree foliage is swept up, leaving branches as dour and shriveled as roots, jutting into the air like vulgar insinuations. The sky is bleak and dismal, a gray-brown slab the color of tree bark. And often the wind is carrying on. It doesn’t shriek like banshees or moan like a demon wielding a cello. It begins as a high-pitched whistle and becomes a hiss, then a terrible protracted ululation. The most unholy, throaty utterance made by nature. A wailing threnody. Scary as shit, actually.
But on this day there was no wind. No rustle of leaves, or whir of insects. The country road leading past my home is the most unfrequented, desolate place on earth. As I slowly ambled along, mentally unknotting a book I had been reading, I glanced up and my insides lurched and I froze in mid step.
Ten feet away, two naked oaks were barely visible beneath a black shroud of feathers. Perched on nearly every branch were a hundred giant birds with two hundred black beady eyes.
All two hundred black beady eyes were pinned on me.
They sat motionless…not even an involuntary lifting of the chest or twitch of the neck. They had massive heads and stout, pointy beaks–unlike any bird I had ever seen out there and I’d lived there for a number of years already.
There was something sinister in their silence. An ungodly brooding in their stillness. They continued peering down at me, unmoving.
I began to back up, then turned and slowly walked back the direction I’d come from. All the time a dark terror seized me, that the birds would suddenly rise up in unison and converge upon me there in the middle of the hinterlands with none to hear my life rent and plucked apart.
But three days later I saw them again. They were near the same place, huddled together in a circle on the dirt road. I spotted them from a distance, a congregation of statues. They stared solemnly at each other, but so vacant were their gazes that their communion seemed to be with some beings from beyond this dimension–I am not certain, but I didn’t care. I turned and got the hell out of there.
One thing I do know, though. They were not scavenging. I looked. There was no fetid remains of an animal carcass. No bloody leftovers. Nothing.
That was the last time I saw those things. I can only speculate and entertain wild notions about why they appeared alone near my home. For whatever they were, I do not think they came out of Noah’s Ark, or–if they were on the Ark–they were among those few creatures Noah had never intended to be released into the world again.
February 11, 2008 at 1:21 am
[...] CONTEST: Tell Us Your New Weird Story, Win Tons of Cool Stuff! (tags: SF) [...]
February 11, 2008 at 3:17 am
I don’t know if this qualifies as weird or not, but it was certainly surreal to me. Last summer two of my friends took their families on vacation together to the mountains, whereupon one of said friends promptly went into labor, three or four months prematurely (with twins, no less). *That* story turned out fine in the end, but it precipitated me taking a night off work and going to the mountains, unscheduled, to help my other friend with the herd of kids, while K’s husband spent most of his time at the hospital with her.
One of the prescheduled items on the itinerary was a day trip to a theme park called Santa’s Land. Oh goody, I thought. The kids’ll enjoy it and it’ll wear them out and they will sleep tonight and all will be well.
Oh, I was wrong. I couldn’t have been much more wrong.
This theme park… if Clive Barker and Tim Burton had got together to design a theme park based on the Freddy movies and with a Christmas theme, this would have been it. Word limitations prevent me giving the full details (and I’m still working through them with my therapist) but I will share one example of the horror:
On the map that one receives, on the back of the brochure, is marked “The Elves’ Bunkhouse”. We visited the Elves’ Bunkhouse. It is a small building…. perhaps the size of the average kitchen. It has a sign on it, telling anyone who cares to know that it is, in fact, the Elves’ Bunkhouse– come and see a slice of life for Santa’s Elves!
As we enter, we face a v. short hallway, perhaps four or five feet in length, with a door leading off to the left, and a plasterboard figure against the wall facing the door. It’s a cutout of an elf holding up a sign. The sign welcomes us to the Elves’ Bunkhouse. The elf is smiling. It is not a reassuring smile. It just gets worse as we step into the exhibit. The first indication that all is not well is the fact that it is *unlit*. Visitors stand in a short hallway. Before us and to the right is the actual exhibit, in an L shape, behind plate glass. And it is /horrifying/.
To the right: the bedroom. There are two beds, in the bedroom. In the beds are elves, one to each bed. The elf on the left is freakish. It’s huge. It’s easily two and a half times the size of the rest of the elves in the exhibit, and it looks hydrocephalic. It’s either sleeping or in a coma, and it’s breathing. It is sucking in huge breaths, and letting them out again with a mechanical regularity that speaks of nothing organic. The elf in the bed on the right is the same size as the rest of the elves in the exhibit. It’s lying in bed, unmoving. Not breathing. It’s pale and pasty and did I mention it’s not moving?
The thing is *dead*. It has to be.
On the floor in front of that bed, facing onlookers, is a small rocking chair. It’s a cute little rocking chair. In the cute little rocking chair is a cute little teddy bear. It’s rocking. Back. And forth. And back. And forth. Very. Very. Slowly. I do not know why. But rocking. Watching us. Watching it.
That is the elves’ bedroom. The elves’ kitchen is equally terrifying.
In the back of the kitchen, perched on the sideboard, an elf sits pumping water from an old-fashioned hand pump. It is doing this at the same speed as the teddy bear is rocking in the other room, which is to say: far too slowly to actually pump water, but just the right speed to appall anyone who is watching. It is staring into the middle distance with an expression that is probably intended to be cheerful but is instead only vaguely horrified.
At the table sit two more elves. They are, I believe, intended to appear grandparent-y, but they do not. No, they do not. The grandmotherly elf is grinning cheerfully through the plate glass at visitors, and she looks ready to either go for someone’s throat or stab herself in the head. The grandfatherly elf wears the same expression.
On the table in front of them rests what is, I suspect, meant to be a ham. It is not. It looks like someone took a corpse from a Halloween haunted house show and cut the limbs off and left it on the table in front of these elves.
Stuck in the ham is a cleaver.
Grandpa elf’s hand is moving up and down in front of the cleaver as though he is meant to be slicing the meat. The cleaver does not move. There is nothing in his hand. *I* have never cut ham with a cleaver. But then, I am not a deranged plastic elf.
The final touch to all of this freak show: the exhibit was painted in the most excitingly bright colours- vivid, neon pinks and greens and oranges and blues and lots and lots of black… and was then illuminated by blacklight. It looks like someone bought the thing at auction from a defunct Halloween show and dropped it wholesale in this park, pausing only to cut the limbs off the ham and stick Christmas hats on the mass murderers-cum-elves.
It was delightful, for all the wrong reasons, and the whole park was like that: just a carnival of gorgeous, magical wrongness. It was probably a very nice theme park when the brochure was printed, which looks to be at a guess somewhere around 1987.
Now I just want to go back with a news crew.
February 11, 2008 at 10:21 am
[...] win a personalised copy, and also a copy of a whole lot of other anthologies between now and 2010, here. Best three weird true-life stories [...]
February 11, 2008 at 10:40 am
Can we post links? If so, here’s a true story of mine: http://www.annatambour.net/Night-of-the-living-crickets.htm
February 11, 2008 at 11:39 am
Excellent contest - I blogged about it here. And my entry:
An American, an Australian, and a Mexican climb into the cab of a pick-up truck for the long drive into the high Sierra Madre.
I always thought that sounded like the beginning of a bad joke, but it was more than just a bit surreal feeling on a cool February morning in Chihuahua. The drive itself was just over 12-hours long, with the first 4 or 5 on paved roads and the remaining on dirt roads winding through the mountains. Surprised to see snow drifts under pine trees, ice-covered puddles in the road, and a paper town, I kept couldn’t help but think of a John Wayne movie that I’ve never actually seen. After the jarring, ass-numbing ride in a single-bench, standard transmission truck with cranky, jet-lagged Aussie and a young Mexican who didn’t speak a word or English, I arrived to the remote camp just in time to start a 12-hour night shift with a drill-crew of French Canadians who only spoke French and Spanish – it was a long night of wishing I’d remembered to pack my thermos for coffee.
The bad joke never really had a punch-line…but I’ll leave you with another set-up. A Mexican Archaeologist and an American Geologist sit in the bar car of Mexico’s Copper Railroad after a tough 10-day tour. The language barrier was eased with alcohol as I related the time I was mistaken for a terrorist at Hoover Dam.
February 11, 2008 at 12:15 pm
I was once attacked by a horse who tried to eat my shirt because I smelled like apples. Not weird enough? How about the time I saw a woman come out of closet when I was six. I though nothing of it back then, and later wondered if she was a ghost. To this day I think I was crazy, or maybe it was a half remembered dream.
Or how about the time I met a crazy man in a bar, who told me he had a secret alien language, and would pay me to write a novel in it, and that I had a destiny in driving a giant submarine at the bottom of lake erie to the moon with the last members of the beatles in it. We liked hangning out with him, he bought us food if we listened to him ramble. He also told me I had multiple personalities, and that each one was named fred.
Or maybe the time I was at a White Zombie concert, and a friend of mine wanted to start a riot, so he set his shirt on fire, and we all danced around it, and people through garbage on it, and it was a blaze and it smelled awful (like burning plastic) and then I got tackled by the body guards and sprayed with a fire hose.
February 11, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Not long ago I lived in a house on a very busy and noisy street.
I often had trouble sleeping, despite the plywood and foam barrier I constructed over the huge street-side window.
One night I tossed and turned, drifting in and out sleep. The buses and cars would rumble by my room. Folks would be pulling in and out of Brothers Liquor Store, directly opposite our house.
I was dreaming. Behind the closed door was something I didn’t want to see. As the door opened, I tried to let out a cry, some kind of release. At that moment, I heard a prolong, agonizing moan and cry, unlike anything heard before or since. It wasn’t me crying out. I realized the sound came from the waking world, but forced it away and continued my fitful sleep. A short time later my eyes opened and I was aware of a different set of sounds outside - no cars, no buses, but still something going on, an engine humming, the sound of water.
I swung out of bed and, peering through the bubble peek of the front door, could make out a figure or two and some lights in the street. I opened the door and walked down to the street. A firetruck and a few guys were around. I asked the guy closest to me, “What’s going on?”
“A man was hit by a car, crossing the street,” he said, pointing to the street corner. I recalled the cry I heard earlier.
“Where is he?” I asked, unclear of what was happening.
“Oh, he’s there, there, there…”, the guy said, pointing to spots all over the street. There were plastic tarps scattered about for more than a block, covering the larger remains of the victim.
“We washing him down.”
I then noticed the source of the water sound. Another fireman was using a hose up the street, power washing up the blood and smaller pieces of the vicim. This guy was being washed into the sewer system.
It turns out the car must have been speeding and hit the victim as he walked across the street. His body was torn apart. The car never stopped.
I looked around, stunned. I walked back up the stairs and returned to bed, creeping out on what was going on outside my window.
The next day I learned that the guy was a gentleman caller of our neighbor Ada. He’d had his drinks with Ada and was strolling home when stepped off the unlit corner and was hit. Someone posted a homemade sign on the corner uility poll. BE CAREFUL CROSSING STREET. Indeed.
February 11, 2008 at 12:33 pm
The day afternooned quietly, unseen from my eyes. I had passed the last 3 hours watching a non-memorable movie somewhere, and though everything seemed merry and calm, my heart was troubled by something as I watched the window of my parents house from the empty street.
Before I rang the bell I caught myself thinking “What if I arrived home to find that my father had a heart attack?”
“Perish the thought!” I chastised myself immediately, and still trembling finally rang the doorbell.
Everything was all right though, my parents lively and in a good mood.
But late that night I recalled the dream my father told me one week before.
“It was not a dream,” he then said (and still does). “I was lying on my bed, putting away a news magazine, when I noticed a movement at the end of the bed.”
“What was it?” I remembered asking.
“The damnedest thing I ever saw: A little cherubim sort of figure strolling and dancing in the empty air. But it made me scared: it kept laughing and pointing its finger at me, till it vanished near the window.”
I keep imagining that little devil (”it was a demonic creature, I don’t know why I know it, but I do,” he said) till this day.
Anyway, I fell asleep, woke up, visited a girlfriend, spent some quality time with her, and went back to my parents at about the same time as the day before. I didn’t think anything this time, but felt a little nervous.
There was nobody home.
All the lights were on, there was the smell of food and cigarettes in the air, as if they had just left the house.
I looked at the telephone in the bedroom (this was before cell phones got cheap and ubiquitous), and found a little note saying
“Gone to Hospital. Call grandpa.”
No kiss, no bye, no nothing.
I called and found out my father had had a heart attack. That I was to go to the hospital since he had already died twice and they didn’t count on him surviving much more.
I remember asking his battered cyborg figure, in the E.R., “What’s it like in the other side?”
“Grey,” he said. “I felt suddenly very relaxed and I switched off. And then on. Just like that.”
Just like that. Too much stress and cigarettes, the doctors later said.
I wondered about that little demon, then.
My father is alive and well to this day, and he doesn’t remember the episode unless I re-tell him the specifics, which is a little bit strange.
But I never forgot. Even as I worry about work, about my kid, or smoke cigarettes aplenty, there’s always a little part of me that watches the sides of perception, the corners of my own eyes, just to check if there isn’t a little cherubim laughing somewhere. I wonder if he’ll ever come.
February 11, 2008 at 1:04 pm
I don’t know if our votes count, but I totally vote for Larry.
February 11, 2008 at 2:13 pm
I entirely concur with ^ that post. Larry’s story is made of win.
February 11, 2008 at 2:21 pm
I got married last August in Missouri. Two good friends of mine, brothers, were flying from Vermont into St. Louis, which is about three hours away from the wedding site, and I drove to pick them up. No problems on the way up, but halfway back, we were driving through this woody, hilly area, very narrow, all twisty roads, and we crested a rise and found a car parked on the right shoulder just over the top, with the door open several feet into our lane. A woman was climbing out of the car, screaming something at us, waving her hands, and as we passed her, I could see a body lying by the side of the road, near her front bumper. Feet and knees and waist were all I saw, but he had that inert look of accident victims. The only scenario that made sense to me was that the woman in the car had hit (and from the looks of things, killed) the man in the ditch. I’ve always been secretly afraid that I don’t handle myself well in emergencies, but my hands and feet worked this time without even conferring with my brain, slamming the brakes, turning the wheel, and in about one second I had pulled the car over, grabbed my cell phone, and jumped out. The brothers got out too, and we started back toward the woman and the body. She was still screaming. But then we realized that she wasn’t screaming at us. She was screaming at the body. Which was moaning. And wiggling. She screamed again: “You’re drunk! You’re drunk!” Just then a car drove by, the third (counting mine and the woman’s) I’d seen in about an hour. In a coincidence I would have blushed to include in any work of fiction, it was a state trooper. He pulled over past my car, and as he got out and walked toward us, I mumbled something to the woman, something like, “Okay, I’m going to let him deal with this now.” The rest of the weekend (including the wedding) went without a hitch.
February 11, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Almost eight years ago my girlfriend and I decided to get married after six years of silent engagement. Having witnessed our fair share of unwieldy, family-run weddings, we decided to get married 1,500 miles from home with a few unwitting friends in attendance (an annual Memorial Day weekend bash in Hermosa Beach, CA). The rules were straightforward: tell as few people as possible; don’t tell family members. Once we met up in Hermosa Beach, friends were asked to reserve 30 minutes on a Saturday morning for the event they never imagined happening: me getting married to someone who’d never spent time in an institution. . . .
In the weeks leading up to our wedding, my girlfriend (behind my back) was desperately searching for one of my closest friends with whom I’d lost touch. Dave and I had played in numerous bands together over the years–we were a pretty amazing rhythm section–but when he moved from Dallas to San Francisco three years earlier he simply disappeared. She never found Dave and eventually gave up on surprising me (except for the showing-up bit).
On the Thursday before the wedding a group of us went looking for a bar in Hermosa Beach showing the Dallas Stars’ playoff game; the first bar we came to wouldn’t allow us in because some were wearing Stars jerseys. After the game (a loss) we returned to our motel to continue drinking. As we were walking through a parking lot mere seconds from our room I heard someone shout my name –Simon’s not a common name in the U.S.; it usually means me. I walked up to the car and was surprised to see Dave’s brother, Jimmy, in the driver’s seat. As I was about to ask him what the hell he was doing in Hermosa Beach he leaned back to reveal my long-lost friend, Dave, who was in Hermosa Beach to help Jimmy who’d just moved from Dallas. (The two had actually been in the bar that wouldn’t let us in, also watching the Stars.) My girlfriend immediately grabbed Dave and made him promise to stay for the wedding, explaining how she’d searched for him for almost two months; not only did he stay, but he flew his girlfriend (now wife) down from San Jose. We haven’t lost contact since.
February 11, 2008 at 3:54 pm
(Big fan of all your work, Jeff. Heard about this on another forum from Larry. I started something a little more fantastical, but then I re-read the instructions that it had to be non-fiction. Apologies for any errors in the French, my skills have deteriorated in the many years since this incident.)
I liked watching the noon rush at Les Halles, the march of business suits, the women under wide-brimmed hats with flowers in their hands. Giggling clusters of orange and black momos, bright yellow scarves. Where did they come from? Where were they going?
He was watching me, in a grey shirt and blue jeans. He didn’t seem to have anywhere in particular to be. He was young and I was young.
I smiled.
“Vous etes belle,†he said.
I smiled again. “Merci. Comment ca va?â€
“Venez chez moi.†he continued. Where else would you wish to go? The accent was flavored with the desert and the banlieue. Come live with me and be my love.
I nodded, still smiling. “Je devrais partir,†I said. “I need to go,†while all around the men marched, the women glided and noone stopped to watch. What was there to see?
I began to walk toward the platforms. Orange, grey or blue. Where could I go?
He followed close. “Ou venez-vous?â€
I hesitated.
“Laisse-moi tranquille,†I said.
He shook his head. “Venez avec moi.†Come home with me and be my love.
To the right and to the left, we danced a figure eight.
And then I ran. The woman wore a wide-brimmed hat, held flowers in her hand. She paid for her bouquet and turned.
“Il ne me laisse pas tranquille!†I cried.
“Calm down,†she said, not in French. She gripped my arm, and we marched away.
He watched, stricken. I glanced back and thought, farewell.
“You’re safe now. I’m an American. He won’t dare follow us.†She stopped and let me go.
“Thank you so much!†I gushed. “I suppose I was excited I could understand him.â€
She shook her head. “You go into a store and you practice with the people at the counter. You don’t talk to strangers. Today is May day.â€
I nodded, contrite, and watched my shoes.
Later, I sat at a fountain on the left bank, squinting in the bright light. He was young, and dressed in red, and I was young. He passed a handsome smile. His eyes were very blue.
“Bonjour!â€
I turned away.
“Bonjour!,†he repeated. “Vous ne pouvez pas parler?
“Non,†I said, sadly. It was May day. “Je ne parle pas.†I do not speak.
February 11, 2008 at 4:21 pm
I grew up in a farmhouse with walls made of lath and plaster. One night I was asleep in bed, dreaming (for reasons probably irrelevant to anything else) of rabbits. Suddenly, and involuntarily as far as I know, I sat up and threw my arms over my head. The next moment, a patch of plaster about four feet in diameter broke loose from the ceiling directly above and crashed down on me.
I don’t want to exaggerate the danger I was in. Had it fell on me while I was lying down, I doubt it would have caused permanent injury; even a broken nose would have been unlikely. Still, the chunks of plaster were heavy, and would have hurt.
The real mystery is, why did I sit up and cover myself? Given the nature of plaster in old houses, it’s hard to imagine a little bit of it falling before the rest and alerting me (and doing it somehow without me being aware of it). It is also odd that the only time plaster ever broke loose anywhere in that house was directly over my bed while I was sleeping in it.
After the plaster stopped falling, and I woke up enough to realize what had happened, I yelled “ouch!” Since that failed to get me any attention, I went into my parents’ bedroom and woke up my dad. “Some plaster just fell on me,” I told him. “Uhn,” he observed, and fell back to sleep. I spent the rest of the night on the couch. The next morning my dad saw the hole in the ceiling and apologized for underestimating the situation.
February 11, 2008 at 7:31 pm
The summer after my sophomore year of high school, some friends and I were trying to get a prog band together. They knew a guy who could play drums for us–I’ll call him Joe. So one afternoon in mid-July, we went over to Joe’s house so I could meet him.
Plans with Joe to drum for us fell through, so I didn’t see him again all the rest of the summer. But somehow I couldn’t stop thinking about him–not in an infatuated kind of way, but how you return again and again to something that strikes you as a little strange, a little off, but you can’t put your finger on why. I’d think about Joe’s drum set in the family basement; his nice house with the new, cream-colored carpet; his amiable manner. Nothing specific, just arbitrary memories, the few things that I had seen of him and his life–these images kept appearing in the recesses of my mind at random times, over and over, to the point that I noticed it and wondered why I was thinking of him so much.
(The next part of the story gets difficult to tell because I only realized it in retrospect.)
Also beginning sometime in the second half of the summer, I had recurring thoughts about the major road leading to the high school, which I traveled every weekday; I’ll call it Woodlawn. The thoughts would come to me in a specific formula: ‘There’s not been an accident on Woodlawn Road in a long time. It’s about time there was a crash on Woodlawn Road. It’s been a long time since there’s been an accident on Woodlawn Road. It’s about time…’ This would filter through my mind, layered under my everyday thoughts–often enough that I half-noted it, but dismissed it because it made no sense, and was morbid besides.
One school day in September after the last bell, I passed Joe in the hall on my way up to my locker as he was heading towards the main exit. He smiled and said hi, despite that I’d not talked to him since July; he was a nice guy.
A few hours later, I got a phone call from a friend–Joe had been killed in a car accident on Woodlawn Road on the way home from school. He was in the backseat, and the vehicle was rear-ended when his ride slowed to make a left-hand turn.
Beyond the shock of his death, I was floored–the thoughts I’d had about Woodlawn came rushing full into memory. I realized that for two months I had had two sets of odd, recurrent thoughts that directly spelled out Joe’s impending death.
That event forced me to acknowledge that I had fair amount of premonitory images running under my everyday thoughts, like a stream running underground. Before Joe’s death, I had always believed I was inventing memories of things that happened; but this event was the one that convinced me I wasn’t. Since then, I’ve learned how to coax that subconscious stream above ground. A decade later, premonitions are a regular part of my life…. But that’s a different story.
I still wonder about Woodlawn Road and the peculiar, repeated formula the premonition took. Was that just how the premonition came to me, or was the formula an articulation of the road’s ‘intent’? Was Joe some kind of cyclical sacrifice? I wonder if my traveling Woodlawn so often kicked a latent prescient ability into high gear, making me privy to the road’s intentions before it struck.
To this day I don’t know how to feel about Woodlawn Road–whether I foresaw preternatural intent…or just a terrible accident.
February 11, 2008 at 9:43 pm
(I posted this in 2005 so will post an edited version here to fit the 500 word limit.)
For those who don’t know, Baguio is a small city situated on a plateau in the middle of the mountains of Benguet. Because of its height, the city is an ideal place for vacation during summer. It’s a beautiful place: pine trees can survive in my country there and flowers bloom all year ’round because of the cool temperature.
Likewise, any city has its own share of ghosts and spirits but Baguio seems to be well-known for them moreso since the Hyatt Hotel collapsed in the 1990 quake and killed 1,300 people. I suppose the primeval appearance of the pine tree forests, combined with the late night mists, make Baguio a choice spot for hauntings– and haunted imaginings.
Among my friends who went up to Baguio with me several years ago was (Jester). It was on our second night in Baguio that I found out (Jester) has a kind of “second sightâ€, which was a surprise as he never struck me as a “spiritual” kind of guy. And well, it’s one thing to know a friend can see ghosts. But to actually see him do it…
After an an incident that early evening involving a fun yet jumpy visit to the Baguio Mansion–another weird story too long to mention here and which I wasn’t present at that time anyway– (Jester) seemed a little nervous when we all trooped back up to the condo where we were staying. For the evening, we decided to hang out and watch TV in the condo’s living room.
It was only then I confirmed that (Jester) was acting right strangely when he asked if anyone was upstairs despite everyone being right there with him. Later on, I surreptitiously saw (Jester) was looking around the unit from the corner of his eyes. And when I checked to see what he was looking at, I noticed his gaze always kept returning to the top of the stairs, which was in front of us.
(Jester) didn’t know I was looking at him. It was a weird feeling: if he was just pulling our leg about the “second sightâ€, he wouldn’t have known I was observing him at that time. But looking at him at that time, I thought he really looked like he was seeing something at the top of the stairs.
Was it a ghost? I’m still a bit of a skeptic to really believe in that, preferring to trust my own senses. Still, the feeling that these invisible spirits are around you unknowingly has inspired a lot of my own short stories.
http://estranghero.blogspot.com/2005/11/sixth-sensebecause-inestimable-luke.html
February 12, 2008 at 12:11 am
Hey–thanks and keep them coming. Won’t comment further until after the deadline.
JV
February 12, 2008 at 12:13 am
When I was a kid, I spent an inordinate amount of time wandering the halls of my local mall, which was once the major retail center in our city, but was slowly fading into decay and irrelevance throughout those years. The management later tried to spruce the place up by building elaborate sand castles just inside each entrance, which now that I think about it, may in fact be weirder than my story. Anyway, cruising the mall on foot became even cooler when at the age of fifteen I somehow acquired a girlfriend to accompany me; for the sake of this anecdote I’ll call her Dawn, since that was her name. Resting from our peregrinations one day in the Woolworth’s cafeteria, we enjoyed an Icee, as was our habit. Mine was a blend of cherry and cola flavors, as I recall, while hers was a cherry and bubble gum flavored mixture. And that’s the second detail that’s weirder than the actual story–who was it that cooked up “bubble gum” as being a tempting drink flavor, and why was it blue, and why did we drink it when it tasted like wiper fluid? While we sat there gargling these concoctions, an elderly woman dressed all in white with plastic sandwich bags on her hands approached our table, touched me on the shoulder and said, “The LORD is speaking to you, so drink orange juice and listen to his word.” She then walked out of the cafeteria. The two of us sat in silence for a moment, and then leapt up to follow her, but she’d disappeared, although it’s not as though there was a crowd to hide in.
After that, my friends in school called me the Messiah, but the citrus paradise? That eschaton has not yet been immanentized.
February 12, 2008 at 12:14 am
One night, my husband and I were lying in bed, sleeping, when we were awakened by the sound of someone in the kitchen. The voice was unfamiliar, but human, calling out “Hello?†like you do if you want to know if you’re alone in the house. It sounded like an old woman, or perhaps a sick child. We lay in the dark, completely still, trying not to breathe until we could figure out who, or what was in the children. There were only four of us in a small house, and our two children were asleep. We would have heard their door open if they had woken up, and they certainly would have come into our room by then.
We wanted to believe that we had dreamed it, but then we heard it again, “Hello?†then “Hi?†It didn’t sound like either one of the children. It didn’t sound like anyone we knew. Then, creepiest of all the voice called plaintively, “Mommy? Daddy?â€
By then we were terrified, thinking that something weird has happened to change one of the kids’ voices, that someone had broken in, or worse, that there was a ghost in the house. There were at least two people who died in that house (that we knew of) and one of them had been a child.
The truth is even weirder.
As the voice came closer, she said “Hello†again, and then meowed. It was our cat, Chibi. She had learned to imitate human speech.
We still have that cat. She almost never says “Mommy†or “Daddy†anymore, but she still says “Hello†when she thinks she’s alone in the house. It still sounds just like a human.
February 12, 2008 at 8:06 am
[...] While I’m trying to come up with a real post, here are a couple more links: How would you feel if you were a new SF writer, and on the back of your brand-spanking-new first novel you found this?(Via.)Jeff VanderMeer is soliciting his readers’ weird stories on his blog. [...]
February 12, 2008 at 9:10 am
Please forgive the heinous crime of going a little over the word limit. I included a bit of background and what turned out to be something of a diatribe on my blog. Good luck to everyone!
______________________________________________________________________________________
In the assumed security of their bedroom, the couple slept fitfully, uncomfortable in the strange, unseasonable humidity. Outside, the night was deep, but alive, and the wind howled through the tall trees across from the house like banshee calling the names of the dead. The banging of loose alsynite on the neighbour’s patio echoed through their tired minds with the ritual clang of muffled cymbals. On the edge of dreams, the night noises turned the woman’s chaotic thoughts to her baby daughter, asleep in the room next door. Too tired to wake, but too awake to settle, she tossed and turned and whimpered in her state of half-sleep.
For a time, she dreamt of savage dogs. Beside her, her husband now lay awake, listening to the trees amplifying the sound of the wind, making it seem more violent and devastating than it actually was. Without warning, the wind would pick up and send itself screaming through the old eucalypts, tearing the leaves off their branches and whipping them into a furious whirlwind that raced up the driveway and battered against the fences, where they would settle for a short while before being scattered again. By morning, the leaves would lie dying in great mounds, but for the moment they were a swarm of angry imps that kept the husband on edge and his wife unsettled.
Her mind turned again to their daughter, who slept contentedly in her cot, unfazed by the frantic carnival taking place outside her window. Even in her fitful sleep, the wife’s thoughts were always on her child, always hoping for the best, always protecting against the worst. She could not know that it was herself who needed more attention at this moment than her daughter.
In the quiet space between whirlwinds, the husband had finally fallen asleep. Exhaustion kept his mind free from the disturbing menagerie of imagery that plagued his wife’s brain, and would have kept him at rest if it weren’t for the sudden piercing crash that burst into his subconscious.
Next to him, his wife sprang from the bed. In a fit of the purest panic, she screamed incoherently and he leaped across the bed to follow her, fully wakened more by the terror he heard in his wife’s voice than the dreadful noise of the imps. The light went on immediately and she made for their daughter’s bedroom, believing the helpless baby to be in certain danger.
Her husband, recognising the din for what it was, reached for her arm and held on to her, turning her around to face him in the hopes of calming her down. She could hear herself screaming, and as he reassured her above the clatter of the whirlwind, she came to her senses and he held her.
As one, they opened the door to their daughter’s bedroom. Sitting up, with a smile poking around the edges of her dummy, the small child waved happily to her mother and, almost as if reassuring her that everything was fine, said “Hi, Mamma.â€
Down the hall and in the laundry, an empty container and can of insect repellent slowly stopped spinning and came to rest against each other. In the light of day, the couple would understand, and laugh together. But the husband would not easily forget the sound of panic and terror in his wife’s voice that the strangeness of night had wrought.
February 12, 2008 at 12:02 pm
One day last summer I was on my way to write at my favorite little local coffee shop in a nearby suburb. I managed to set aside some time early on a Sunday morning, which is rare. I was happy, but a bit groggy.
On the way there, I passed one of the little town’s numerous parks. Some movement in the field caught my eye and I glanced over to find out what it was. There I saw a woman driving a big old conversion van and leaning out the window. What’s more, she was driving the van through the nicely manicured grass in the center of the park. It took me a moment to figure things out, but as she turned the vehicle, it appeared she was trying to corral a small white horse. Had we been in a more rural setting, I might not have thought twice, but the park is immediately outside a very large city, so this was unusual.
Did I mention it was very early in the morning, and I wasn’t quite awake yet?
I slowed down and discovered that it wasn’t a horse she was driving along side, but a very large dog. VERY large dog. As it stood, its head was level with her driver’s side window. I’m fairly knowledgeable about dogs, but I had no idea what kind this was. It wasn’t bulky or thick, like a Mastiff or a Dane or anything. It was pure white and thin.
I can’t be sure, but I think the woman was walking the dog by driving in circles through the park with a leash in one hand, and the steering wheel in the other. She wasn’t really going that slow either, which is what initially led me to my corralling theory. And it probably explains why the animal was so thin.
Now, from the size of the dog-pony I gather it would need a lot of exercise and I could see how driving might just wear the beast out, but seriously? Cruising through the park? If you bought a dog that big, wouldn’t you realize the amount of work that would go into keeping it in shape?
So, for the second time (long story) before 10:30 am that day, I had my cell phone in my hand, considering whether to call 9-1-1. I really wanted to tell them about the lady that was potentially tearing up their lovely public park. But I was afraid they would ask questions and I would accidentally start blathering about the pony/puppy thing and I would be labeled a kook. I hate that.
Anyway, maybe I had it wrong. Maybe the van was out of gas and that nice reindeer was pulling it to the nearest service station.
February 12, 2008 at 12:15 pm
A few years back I was living in the cottage behind my mother’s house, which was large and august and very poorly lit. She was renting it from an incarcerated doctor, and wasn’t allowed to take down the voluminous drapes, or install new lights in the narrow staircase on cramped landing on the top floor. She shared the entire building with only my grandmother, and both enjoyed it tremendously despite the gloom.
One morning over breakfast my mother told us that she had heard awful noises during the night in the landing outside her door. Sounds of somebody stomping up and down the staircase, slamming the closet door, a truly awful racket. Surprised, she’d laid still in bed, and the noises had eventually stopped.
“Ho, ho!†we laughed. “The house is haunted!†And we thought nothing more of it.
A few weeks later it was my grandmother’s turn. She awoke to hear a hellish commotion without, and quietly and confidently began to pray. The sounds abated, and she went back to sleep.
This worried us, because my grandmother is 88. Nobody in our household would play a trick like this on her. Then a few days later my mother heard noises from the attic, noises which sounded like large bags of potatoes being dumped onto the floor. Or bodies, I morbidly suggested. Nobody laughed.
One day she mentioned these noises to the owner’s mother when she came by to inspect a problem. “Oh yes,†she confided. “My son would often hear somebody following him up the stairs at night when he came home alone. The house is haunted. If you listen, you can sometimes hear somebody breathing in the dark.â€
My middle brother Nick broke up with his girlfriend, moved out, and decided to spend a week or two at my mother’s while searching for a new apartment. He works out a lot, sky dives, runs triathlons, and out of the three of us has always been the one most likely to get into trouble. “Nick,†I said, “If you hear noises, you’d better open that door and see what’s up.â€
“Don’t worry,†he said with a smile, “I’ll kick that sorry ghost’s ass.â€
Nothing happened for a week, and then one morning he came down looking very disturbed.
“What happened?†I asked, assuming the best and the worst. “What did it look like?â€
“I didn’t open the door,†he said quietly. When I began to protest, he looked down at his plate. “It sounded awful. I pulled the covers over my head and stayed quiet till it stopped.â€
We all sat in silence after that. I couldn’t believe it.
Nothing happened for roughly a month. We postulated theories, investigated the attic, did research online for murders that might have taken place decades before. Nothing. Could it be raccoons? A drunk neighbor with a key? Nothing seemed likely. I started getting nervous whenever I went upstairs to fetch something, looking carefully about myself as I walked about.
Finally one morning my mother recounted the last time the house was disturbed in such manner. The noises had started up again, and this time they had been particularly bad. It sounded like the closet doors were going to be torn right off their hinges, like the boards would be split on the steps. My mother, who has seen her fair share of the world and been through more than most, decided that she had had enough. She stood up, belted on her robe, and strode up to her bedroom door. Without hesitating she yanked the door open, and all the noises immediately stopped. The landing was empty, the doors were all closed, there was no sign of any disturbance.
“Enough,†she said. “This is no longer amusing. Go away and don’t come back.â€
And that was the last time anybody reported ever hearing anything in the house. We moved out six months later, and a couple is living there now. Occasionally when I go back to visit my family, I drive past our old street. And I think: have they heard anything? Has it come back?
February 12, 2008 at 12:25 pm
[...] TALES fiction editor Ann VanderMeer’s new anthology, The New Weird, featuring stories by Clive Barker, China Miéville, M. John Harrison, Sarah Monette, Michael [...]
February 12, 2008 at 1:54 pm
This happened to me when I was in college.
One evening I was taking the “L” home from a late class (I live in Chicago) to my then neighborhood on the far North Side of the city. During the course of the half-hour trip I became keenly aware that I was looking at my own reflection in one of the darkened windows of the train car, only that there was no possible way it could be my reflection in the window. From where I was sitting my profile couldn’t be reflected at the angle it was in the window. I then noticed that the shirt on my supposed reflection was different from my own. During the course of the trip I watched, thinking that perhaps the individual whose reflection I was studying just looked a little like me and that his visage had been rendered almost exactly as mine through an optical illusion. We rode the train together until the last stop at Howard where we both got off. I alone and he with a young woman. I took a glance at him then just a few feet away as we left the “L” platform and was shocked to see that he might be my twin in just about every detail.
He did not see me as he was engaged with his companion.
I had a ten minute walk from the train to where I lived at the time and for every step he, my doppleganger I guess, was behind me though a little ways off with the slower pace of the young woman. It’s an uneasy feeling to be followed by yourself and strange thoughts went through my head as to my own sanity or my possible death and that I was a conscious ghost or something along those lines.
Finally, I reached the door of my house and stood staring at the lock on my front door with the key shaking in my hands as I heard them go past with sidewalk behind me, halting for a moment and then continuing on up the block and out of sight.
I’ve yet to see my double again. But other people have seen him here in Chicago. I believe his name is Matthew. At least that’s what people tell me.
February 12, 2008 at 2:03 pm
OK, I never told anyone this story because I am not the type of person to believe stories like this. I am of the “Science will explain this” school of thought.
I had just moved to LA with my partner after graduating college. Neither of us had a job yet, our apartment had no electricity, and our bed broke in the move so we were lying on a mattress on the floor. I had a lingering sense of dread all week but I ascribed it to all the big changes in my life. I awoke to a phone call–caller ID showed that it was my close friend’s father’s cell phone. He broke down into tears on the phone, telling me that my friend had died suddenly of pneumonia. I broke down as well. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
I spent most of the day around the apartment, crying surrounded by cardboard boxes. Eventually our electricity was turned on. At some point someone called to offer me a job and I took it. At dinner time my partner dragged me out of the house, telling me that I could lay around crying forever. She said my friend would want us to celebrate her life that night. It was a chilly, clear and still night. We were seated at a covered, walled-in patio with two gigantic martinis. My partner urged me to have a toast. I didn’t want to cry in the restaurant so I sat quietly with my drink raised, staring at the table. “This drink is for our Emma Rose, a true friend” she began-
And even though we were on a walled-in patio, a gust of wind blew up out of nowhere. The wind was so strong that it blew the silverware off the table and onto the ground. The other diners looked up in confusion at the sound of the falling cutlery. No one else’s napkin was even ruffled.
I won’t tell you that I had many happy visitations from the ghost of my friend after that occasion, because this was the only time I ever brushed up against the weird.
February 12, 2008 at 11:38 pm
Some great stuff here. Please keep it coming. Re whether you can submit something you’ve already posted to your blog–yes, sure. You just have to post it here, too.
JV
February 13, 2008 at 12:49 am
River Terror, Soviet Russia style.
While still in college, my buddy and I went kayaking on a remote Siberian river (this was before perestroika and Gorbachev)
We were quite wide-eyed and naive at the time, and did not really know what to expect. There were three of us at first, but the other guy decided to head home after we ran out of our food supplies and had to revert to whatever we could find in the local village stores - stale bricks of rye bread, vodka and garlic (the only things they sell, and even then in dire shortage)
We paddled for days, surrounded by complete wilderness. The only signs of civilization we noticed then was an empty can of Coca-Cola (not available in Russian stores whatsoever at the time) lying in the middle of a pristine boreal forest - we had no idea how it got there, could’ve got thrown out from an airplane, I suppose.
So one unnaturally quiet evening we were perfunctorily paddling along one such boring stretch, with only high forest along both sides of river, and traces of alcohol and garlic in our clouded minds.
Suddenly… we something sticking out of the water, probably a half-submerged log - but eerily resembling a human hand, with fingers and all.
Slightly spooked, we decided to investigate. My pal also remembered that there are some former GULAG prisons in the area, still open for business - and losing inmates sometimes.
We paddled closer, and sure enough, it was a pale human arm, drifting down the still waters, angrily sticking its fingers to the sky, as though intent on clutching it, and anybody who would dare to approach.
Well, my friend proved to be either utterly drunk or just incredibly curious, but he began to poke the sinister thing with his oar. I just decided not to look. In the gathering dusk I could only see the dark outlines of trees and a deathly-still mirror of water.
He said… “could be one of the escaped inmates… wait… he’s full of holes…”
As it turned out, this was a shooting-gallery mannequin from one of the prisons nearby, a plastic doll thrown into the river after extensive use.
Somehow, it seemed a fitting conclusion to our daredevil “conquest” of Siberia, a haunting wilderness with a dreadful history, most of which lies deep underwater, with only a ghastly hand sticking out to grab you.
February 13, 2008 at 1:56 am
For those who don’t know, Baguio is a small city situated on a plateau in the middle of the mountains of Benguet. Because of its height, the city is an ideal place for vacation during summer. It’s a beautiful place: pine trees can survive in my country there and flowers bloom all year ’round because of the cool temperature.
Likewise, any city has its own share of ghosts and spirits but Baguio seems to be well-known for them moreso since the Hyatt Hotel collapsed in the 1990 quake and killed 1,300 people. I suppose the primeval appearance of the pine tree forests, combined with the late night mists, make Baguio a choice spot for hauntings– and haunted imaginings.
Among my friends who went up to Baguio with me several years ago was (Jester). It was on our second night in Baguio that I found out (Jester) has a kind of “second sightâ€, which was a surprise as he never struck me as a “spiritual” kind of guy. And well, it’s one thing to know a friend can see ghosts. But to actually see him do it…
After an an incident that early evening involving a fun yet jumpy visit to the Baguio Mansion–another weird story too long to mention here and which I wasn’t present at that time anyway– (Jester) seemed a little nervous when we all trooped back up to the condo where we were staying. For the evening, we decided to hang out and watch TV in the condo’s living room.
It was only then I confirmed that (Jester) was acting right strangely when he asked if anyone was upstairs despite everyone being right there with him. Later on, I surreptitiously saw (Jester) was looking around the unit from the corner of his eyes. And when I checked to see what he was looking at, I noticed his gaze always kept returning to the top of the stairs, which was in front of us.
(Jester) didn’t know I was looking at him. It was a weird feeling: if he was just pulling our leg about the “second sightâ€, he wouldn’t have known I was observing him at that time. But looking at him at that time, I thought he really looked like he was seeing something at the top of the stairs.
Was it a ghost? I’m still a bit of a skeptic to really believe in that, preferring to trust my own senses. Still, the feeling that these invisible spirits are around you unknowingly has inspired a lot of my own short stories.
February 13, 2008 at 9:28 pm
My seventh grade teacher’s name was Ms. Stranges. She was tall, slim, and the youngest teacher in the school. She had long blond hair, pale freckles, and an awe-inspiring grasp of MS-DOS. In my own nerdy, hormone-crazed pre-teen way, I was totally in love with her. I think we all were, to some extent.
Until she told us about the grapefruit baby.
I can’t remember exactly how it came up. I think it may have been one of the jocks in our class (a Polo-wearing soccer player who fancied himself a charmer) who asked her why she didn’t have any kids and if that meant that her commitment to her husband was somewhat tentative. You can get away with a lot in a small Catholic school, as long as your teacher wasn’t a priest or a nun.
“I did have a baby” said Ms. Stranges. “Sort of.”
The doctor thought she might have cancer because there was an unknown mass in her ovaries. But what they found during surgery was a mass of embryonic flesh about the size of a grapefruit. It had sparse hair and a single tooth. The doctor theorized that she had gotten pregnant, then miscarried, but the foetus had somehow reattached itself to the uterus, where it was able to absorb some small amount of nutrients. They had no way of knowing how long it had been there, but his guess was close to a year.
“Because,” said Ms. Stranges, “it takes a while to grow a tooth.”
Twenty-four pre-teen boys and eight pre-teen girls sat in complete silence as we tried to process this information.
“Weird, huh?” she said. “Okay, everyone take out your History books and open to page two-sixteen.”
I have no idea if what she said was true. Like I said, you can get away with a lot in a small Catholic school. But the part I know for sure is that I never had a crush on another teacher after that.
February 13, 2008 at 10:02 pm
This is a true story of mine. Each time I tell this to friends, they always laugh at me and consider that I think too much.
It was 2003, I just started my study for MA degree in the United Kingdom. As an unwealthy foreign student, I had to seek for some places to buy cheaper food. One day, I walked in the downtown and found a store named “Exotic Fruits.” As a matter of fact, the fruits in the store were far from “exotic;” I didn’t see any buddha’s heads (custard apples), bellfruits (wax apples), lychees, or anything I couldn’t tell apart, let alone really weird ones such as cubic seedless watermelons. Anyway, I still bought six bananas, whose yellow skins looked smooth and beautiful, whose fragrance smelled delicious, but they were nonetheless the commonest fruits in this not so exotic store.
Just before paying the money, I noticed something a little bit strange. The shopman reached his hand over the bananas and seemed to chant some words I couldn’t understand.
Back to my dorm room, I took one banana and would like to enjoy it while studying on my assigned reading. As I pulled down the skin, I was shocked. Although the skin was as beautiful as before, the flesh was completely rotten! Some parts of the flesh even crumbled upon the floor. It was even more amazing that the reading stuff I was studying was the ending of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” I checked the other bananas, the results were the same.
In the early morning of the next day, I walked past the same store and saw the workers bringing in new stocks of fruits. The gestures of the clerk looked like performing some ceremony right before each box moved into the store. I could not help but think about the story I just read and consider that he was mesmerizing the fruits. But, how could the fruits be mesmerized?
I told this experience to my professor and classmates during the next seminar, they were as amazed as myself.
I still could not find out the answer until last month after reading Cat & Jeff’s “The Surgeon’s Tale.” In such a world where magic seems almost dead and science has ascended for several centuries, the skill of mesmerizing items could be one of the arts of Preservationists.
February 13, 2008 at 11:38 pm
I know this is a true story, because it’s my true story. And it happened more than a few years ago, but it’s new in the telling.
_____
When I was thirteen, I was in love with Jesus and Jars of Clay, and my new youth minister and his wife moved into the parsonage next door, along with their two poodles and their strange, fascinating tales of battling cults and going immortal combat on the supernatural antagonists lurking all around us.
The youth minister didn’t last long at my small Baptist church in the wildwood. But what an impression he made: in two months, he managed to confiscate my cousin’s AC/DC collection, hypnotize us with the story of the demon who followed him home from K-Mart, and challenge all the kids to identify the Unforgivable Sin - while warning us to be extra-careful not to commit it while we trying to figure out what it was.
He was also singlehandedly responsible for the most terrifying dream I’ve ever had.
I had skipped Wednesday night bible study one week shortly after he came, and I felt a guilty little thrill of disobedience. Before the new youth minister, Wednesday night bible studies were just a minor nuisance; but now, we were to understand that the fires of hell awaited us, complete with dark lurking monsters in the shadows, if we got careless and didn’t outfit ourselves regularly with the armor of God every chance we got. That Wednesday night, I crawled in bed and lay awake wondering if there really were demons outside my window, like the ones that our youth minister could see and here and expel.
I fell asleep thinking about demons. Then I dreamed.
I dreamed I was walking down a long hallway. The walls were painted bright orange-red and the house was old, like our farmhouse. The rooms were bare and the whole house was empty, except for a light from the room off to the right, just up ahead of me.
I could hear someone crying softly from inside that room, a muffled, terrified sound. I didn’t want to go in that room. But there didn’t seem to be anywhere to go that wasn’t straight ahead; so like every doomed protagonist, I kept walking, pushed forward by the insatiable nightmare force of dreams.
I opened the door. It was a bedroom. There was a bed but no other furniture, except for a red guitar on a stand in the corner. Sitting in front of the bed was a boy with black hair and freckles. He was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, and his eyes were black, solid black, like his hair.
He looked up at me, and he said: “Help me.”
“I rebuke you, I bind you, and I cast you out,” I said. They were words I had gotten from a Frank Peretti novel, and words my youth minister had told us we could use. They were safe.
Except that they didn’t work.
“Help me,” the boy said again, and he stood up and moved toward me. He held out his hand to me, and started to speak again, and I was suddenly filled with a deep, certain knowledge that the thing I was looking at wasn’t a boy at all, but something evil, something dark, something that wanted to trick me, and hurt me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I turned and ran out of the room back into the hallway. Immediately, I woke up, completely terrified, chanting, “I rebuke you, I bind you, and I cast you out,” over and over again, biting my pillow and squeezing my eyes shut.
I was fine when I got on the school bus the next morning. I sat next to Sarah, one of the few people in my class to whom I wasn’t distantly related by birth or marriage or scandal. “You weren’t at Bible Study last night,” she said. Her voice dropped low, like she too was afraid of it, the what-if-God-sends-us-to-hell part of it that was new to the both of us.
“I had to go to dance class,” I lied, not wanting to tell her I had stayed away on purpose. Though it wasn’t as if a Baptist dancing was much better.
“He told us…” she said, and she trailed off and stared at her Trapper Keeper. “He told us about his little brother.”
I waited for the rest, and she told me.
“He had to perform an exorcism,” she said solemnly. “His brother had been listening to heavy metal, and he started to worship the devil.”
The youth minister had waited til his brother left the house, and exorcised the demons from his brother’s room. They’d broken his guitar. When his brother had come back, she said, “he’d spoken to them in tongues while they cast out the evil spirit.”
I stared out the window.
“It’s a good thing you didn’t go last night,” Sarah said. “He warned us that if we heard the story, we might have bad dreams.”
February 14, 2008 at 1:35 am
I’ve never had any experiences with the supernatural before. But there was one experience that stuck in my mind as being particularly odd.
One morning, when I was about fifteen, I woke up rather groggily and put on my glasses. I noticed my hands were covered with a brown substance, which I thought was very odd. I went to the bathroom to wash my hands, and saw with amazement that the space between my nose and upper lip was covered in dried blood, apparently from a bloody nose I’d had during the night.
But how did I get the blood all over my hands?
Curiouser and curiouser, however, was that when I checked my pillow, there was only a single drop of blood on it. That was it. I had no recollection of the bloody nose, or waking at all during the night, but apparently, I’d had enough sense to use my hands to stop the blood from getting on anything while I was sleeping. I found it bizarre.
February 14, 2008 at 2:29 am
I was sitting beside a window in a coffee shop of the old student union when I noticed a yellow-jacket crawling along the windowsill. Seeing its slender black and yellow body and its big black eyes, I recalled the story my father had told me of how he had been stung by a swarm of yellow-jackets as a child. This one appeared to be alone, but still I worried. I imagined someone coming along after me and, distracted by her studies, reaching over and being stung by the wasp. Holding the book I was studying, I killed the yellow-jacket, its body crunching underneath the spine of the heavy volume. The thing sat there lifeless on the windowsill. It was dead.
That night, I was ripped out of my sleep by a sharp pain. Whatever it was kept jabbing me. I rolled out of bed and turned on the light. A yellow-jacket was crawling on the sheets. Not thinking quickly enough, I killed it.
I had never seen a yellow-jacket at the apartment before or since that night. I moved away. Since then I have been stung twice by a cousin of the yellow-jacket. That is, I hope, enough vengeance for their species. The yellow-jacket hasn’t come for me here. At least not yet.
February 14, 2008 at 3:24 am
I was jostled awake by a hand on my shoulder. It was dim, as was I, and there was a dirty face distending and contracting in front of me. I had been watching poorly duplicated horror films with my friend at his grandmother’s house. Most of the titles were third generation foreign films; as such, we were left in the dark as to most of what we were watching. In drifting off in his grandmother’s chair, which was nicotine-stained and far too small, it seems that I came into contact with the VCR remote — pausing the image on the aforementioned face.
As I had an early shift before my afternoon classes, my friend offered to bring me home. It felt good to leave his grandmother’s as it was cramped and stale. While I could breathe easier once outside, the night was starless which fe