The Weird by Ann VanderMeer; Jeff VanderMeer

Author:Ann VanderMeer; Jeff VanderMeer
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781466803190
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-09-23T14:00:12+00:00

The patrol car was behind the building. The doctor saw a crueller beauty in the stars than he had an hour before. They got in, and Craven swung them out onto the empty street. The doctor opened the window and hearkened, but the motor’s surge drowned out the river sound. Before the thrust of their headlights, ranks of old-fashioned parking meters sprouted shadows tall across the sidewalks, shadows that shrank and were cut down by the lights’ passage. The sheriff said:

‘All those extra dead. For nothing! Not even to…feed him! If it was a bomb, and he made it, he’d know how powerful it was. He wouldn’t try some stupid escape stunt with it. And how did he even know that globe was there? We worked it out that Allen was just ending a shift, but he wasn’t even up out of the ground before Billy Lee’d parked out of sight from the shaft.’

‘Let it rest, Nate. I want to hear more, but after you’ve slept. I know you. All the photos will be there, and the report complete, all the evidence neatly boxed and carefully described. When I’ve looked things over, I’ll know exactly how to proceed by myself.’

Bailey had neither hospital nor morgue, and the bodies were in a defunct ice-plant on the edge of town. A generator had been brought down from the mine, lighting improvised, and the refrigeration system reactivated. Dr Parsons’s office, and the tiny examining room that served the sheriff’s station in place of a morgue, had furnished this makeshift with all the equipment that Dr Winters would need beyond what he carried with him. A quarter-mile outside the main body of the town, they drew up to it.

Treeflanked, unneighbored by any other structure, it was a double building; the smaller half – the office – was illuminated. The bodies would be in the big windowless refrigerator segment. Craven pulled up beside a second squad car parked near the office door. A short rake-thin man wearing a large white stetson got out of the car and came over. Craven rolled down his window.

‘Trav. This here’s Dr Winters.’

“’Lo, Nate. Dr Winters. Everything’s shipshape inside. Felt more comfortable out here. Last of those newshounds left two hours ago.’

‘They sure do hang on. You take off now, Trav. Get some sleep and be back at sunup. What temperature we getting?’

The pale stetson, far clearer in the starlight than the shadowface beneath it, wagged dubiously. ‘Thirty-six. She won’t get lower – some kind of leak.’

‘That should be cold enough,’ the doctor said.

Travis drove off, and the sheriff unlocked the padlock on the office door. Waiting behind him, Dr Winters heard the river again – a cold balm, a whisper of freedom – and overlying this, the stutter and soft snarl of the generator behind the building, a gnawing, remorseless sound that somehow fed the obscure anguish that the other soothed. They went in.

The preparations had been thoughtful and complete. ‘You can wheel ’em out of the fridge on this and do the examining in here,’ the sheriff said, indicating a table and a gurney.

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