Thirteen Phantasms (38 page)

Nobody wanted any more of his dry goods after that. That’s what I think. You don’t buy tea towels and string from a madman. When I was in Tampa I found his warehouse out on the road to the airport. The salt air off the Gulf had corroded the tin roof over the years, and now he didn’t make enough money to repair it. When storms blow in it rains all over his dry goods. I stopped in there and shook his hand. But that was a month after his incredible ride aboard the starship, and the television interview had soured him. He never should have opened his mouth, he said. Now his business wasn’t worth a fig. Not a fig. And it was going from bad to worse. They wouldn’t leave him alone, he said.

Who? I asked, just to make sure. I thought I knew who he meant.
What
he meant, rather. A tremendous toad croaked outside the window off and on as we talked, and twice in the twenty minutes I was there he went out searching for it, making little clicking and smacking noises as if trying to attract a cat. Funny behavior, really, in light of the supposed nature of that toad.

But I was happy about one thing—that he knew that
I
knew that he wasn’t just idly chasing toads. That didn’t serve to pep him up much, though. My testimonial, lord knows, wouldn’t help him sell dry goods.

I’ll tell you how I stumbled upon the aliens. I have some astonishing collections, books mostly—books and kaleidoscopes, about forty kaleidoscopes. Almost no one collects them, even though everyone, at one time or another, has gazed through the lens of a kaleidoscope and has understood, at least for an instant, that the jeweled symmetry glowing in the sunlight at the end of that dark corridor is possessed of the ancient, and magical enchantment of an Aladdin’s lamp or of a glowing, carnival spaceship in the dark of the starry heavens. There can’t be any mistaking it.

I read not long ago about an Eastern European magician with the unlikely, probably assumed, name of Wegius. It sounded like the name of a cartoon duck. This Wegius, one way or another, managed through astounding coincidence, while turning a pair of matched kaleidoscopes—one before either eye and with a single, geared crank—to cause the jewels within each to fall into like patterns simultaneously. His acolyte, working amid bubbling chemical apparatus in an adjoining room, heard a wild shriek and, rushing in, found his master catatonic in a chair. The two kaleidoscopes on the table before him sat frozen in twin symmetry. The acolyte gazed first into one and then into the other, and understood the curious coincidence that had befallen the magician. His master, he conjectured, had been drawn in through the meshing of those faceted reflections, had fallen into a land from which he hadn’t any hope—or any desire, likely—of returning.

The magician lived on in his suspended state, taking neither food nor drink, for nearly twenty-five years. The acolyte found himself growing daily more tempted to peer into both mysteriously frozen kaleidoscopes at once, but he was too cautious; he feared for his soul. He cast the kaleidoscopes, crank and all, into a fire and left them there to melt in an alchemical stew along with other reputedly magical debris.

That story might have been fabricated, but it’s given me a certain amount of hope. I’ve built any number of the things since, filling them with combinations of gems and mounting them like binoculars so as to be able to involve both eyes at once. The task is almost hopeless. The possible combinations of identical jewels as they sweep about and fall away and hide behind each other and creep up the sides of their chambers seems infinite. It probably
is
infinite; I don’t know. If it is don’t tell me.

Late on the night of the twenty-third I sat in my study overlooking the pond and the little section of glades that runs along toward the back of my house. It was humid, I remember. The window was open! Frogs croaked in the weeds around the pond. It must have been past midnight. It was my idea to gaze through the twin kaleidoscopes toward the light of the full moon. Romantic notion, you’ll say; it’s not as romantic as it sounds. The moon’s light is ample on a bright night, and if the corridor of the kaleidoscope is long enough and the circumference small enough, the circle of the moon entirely covers the glass, and the patterns appear to be reflected against the moon’s very surface. I’m sure that the process gives me an edge against that infinitude of changing patterns.

So I was squinting into the twin lenses of the kaleidoscopes, moonlight bouncing off the triple mirrors in the corridors. The jewels, their color faded, were falling and shifting into angular glass flowers. My thumb and forefinger moved desperately slowly the knob that turns the cylinders, pausing each time the little heaps of gems overbalanced and a jewel or two tumbled free and changed the pattern as irreversibly as a creeping glacier crumbles and alters the face of a mountainside. My eyes, almost involuntarily, flitted the 240,000-odd miles across space—first focusing on the revolving jewels, then on nothing, then on the moon.

I saw by chance the descent of the starship, glowing, falling through the night sky, silhouetted for one crystal moment against the pale yellow lamp of the full moon.

At first I thought it was just a random combination of tumbling jewels in the kaleidoscope, but that could hardly have been the case: I’d seen the strange, falling ship with both eyes, through both kaleidoscopes at once.

I leaped up and extinguished the two candles that burned in the room. All was silent. The night air was tense, waiting, watching. The toads and crickets didn’t make a peep. I went outside and climbed onto the roof of the house. My shadow in the moonlight stretched away over the rooftop and lost itself in the shifting darkness of the great pepper tree that shades half the roof. One by one the toads and frogs began to croak and the air roundabout slackened. Off in the swamps there was a glowing—far too bright to have been a swarm of fireflies, although it was the same sort of greenish phosphorescent shimmer. The glow faded and was gone. I slid down and went back to my kaleidoscope, and it was then that I was stricken with a wild thought.

It was possible, in the light of what I’d seen, that an alien starship had • tumbled out of the heavens and across the lenses of my scope. It was also possible—and I began to think that it might, indeed, have happened—that an identical combination of gems had, miraculously, fallen within each of the twin corridors. If the latter were the, case, I thought wildly, then I’d accomplished my goal and had entered that land into which the magician Wegius had wandered five hundred years ago. My excitement dwindled, though, when I realized that the magical land was in no way different from the mundane universe I’d just vacated.

In fact, my neighbor, Mrs. Krantz, came out about then and shouted at her dog. What if Wegius, I thought, what if
I
, for that matter, had willfully become a catatonic in one world in order to occupy a magical land in which Mrs. Krantz shouted perpetually at her dog? And no sooner had the thought struck me than Mrs. Krantz burst out again: “Shut up!
Shut
up!
Will
you shut up!” Her dog barked, an hysterical, high-pitched yelp. It dashed around with its tail between its legs. It howled. It slammed into a tree. Mrs. Krantz howled after it. “Shurrup! Shurr
up!”
I’d been condemned to a lunatic’s hell. Wegius had made a grim, unfathomable mistake. But how had Mrs. Krantz gotten there? She had no kaleidoscopes. Impossibly, it had to have been a starship that I’d seen, and not a peculiar and coincidental assortment of jewels.

Early next morning, who was on the television but the dry goods salesman from Tampa. I watched all that day. Eighteen times he was on, like I said. Newscasters made light of his story. One, around midday, couldn’t contain himself and kept leering and winking into the camera. Aliens were thick as sand fleas, he said, snorting a little as he laughed. It was very funny. He pretended to misunderstand, to apprehend that Myron Chester was referring to Colombians. Was he sure it wasn’t a downed plane, flying in illicit narcotics? Were they using telepathy or just talking Spanish? They go so fast, you know. It’s almost hypnotizing. Sounds like gibberish, really He winked away at the camera, and each wink, I suppose, drove another nail into the coffin that held the dry goods company. Tea towel orders fell off. Balls of string stacked up in the warehouse. Baling wire rusted. The corrugated roof was eaten by salt air off the gulf. Rain blew in and mold sprouted and night winds scattered dry goods across the lonely countryside. Things fell to bits. Mrs. Krantz’s dog went spectacularly mad. I waited for some further sign.

On the day following, Myron Chester was on the television only once. Madmen aren’t much fun in the long run. They wear out. That same morning, a monstrous turtle, an alligator snapper, appeared on Mrs. Krantz’s driveway. It was impossibly large—as big as the hood of a car. That’s not hyperbole; it’s the truth, and it was a startling sight. Mrs. Krantz was at it with a broom. She danced around it, pounded on its shell, poked at it, shouted insanely. The turtle sat there perplexed, its head darting in and out. It bit off the tip of the broom handle. Mrs. Krantz was wild with broom madness. She dashed into the house and returned with a great long butcher knife in one hand and—I swear it—a cast iron skillet in the other. Did she want to eat the creature? I can’t say. I watched all this from the window.

The turtle had scuttled away toward the pond. She saw it splash into the shallows and disappear. Her dog went berserk, capering around and around the yard, smashing into fences, caroming off trees, twirling, somersaulting, yowling. “
Will
you shut up!” shouted Mrs. Krantz, chasing after it, waving the skillet.

Two alligators appeared on the pond later that afternoon. There was nothing remarkable about them. One of my neighbors said that they’d tramped in from the glades, another that there was an underground outlet to the pond, a subterranean river, an amphibious highroad traveled by turtles and alligators and unbelievable toads. “You watch,” he said, and I told him I would. I did, too. But what I learned, I learned by purest chance, wildest coincidence.

It was late afternoon, evening actually. The television had given up on the alien threat, and the moon was up over the trees; I could sit in my study window and watch it rise. But it was a pale moon yet, with watery rays that wouldn’t have any substance until nightfall, an hour or so away. So I gazed through the twin kaleidoscopes, carefully manipulating the controls out of habit. There was no use watching the moon, so I pointed the scopes at the late sun’s reflection on the pond. The jewels fell and fell. Colored snowflakes metamorphosed, collapsed, expanded. Sapphires and rubies crossed paths and resulted in dozens of momentary amethysts. My mind was on the mysterious turtle that had come up out of » the pond—the impossible turtle. Such creatures didn’t exist outside of dreams. I idly turned the iron crank, thinking of unlikely beasts. My eyes ceased to focus on the crystals, drifting out, in a manner of speaking, through the corridors of the kaleidoscope toward the pond, with its subterranean rivers—rivers that ran into the swamps, into the sea, into the center of the Earth.

For twenty minutes I sat thus. It’s possible that I repeated Wegius’s fluke any number of times and didn’t see it. My mind wrestled with aliens. Peculiarities in the movement of the jewels, finally, made me attend to my business. I blinked and squinted. I thought that the shimmer of my eyelashes was muddling the clarity of the lenses. There were lines that had nothing to do with the gems—refractions of light, I thought at first, rays of the sun angling up off the surface of the pool and reflected from one to the other of the mirrors. They had the appearance of the crinkles in very old glass or of the vertices of clear crystal. But as I watched them, wondering at the phenomenon, puzzling over it, I began to see certain patterns, to suspect certain truths. The glassy threads and the swirls of faint color had little to do with the rainbow gems of the kaleidoscope. And this, as I say, I discovered through mere, uncanny coincidence.

I watched the faint, slow movement of the shimmering lines. I peered at them, tried to focus through the lenses. The lines receded and disappeared. My eyes chased them along the dark corridors, in among the tumbling stones. The apparitions hovered there, like a distant star that flickers in the corner of your eye but disappears entirely when you try to catch it. I thought of the falling ship that drifted across the ivory face of the moon, and I let my eyes once again wander out past the jewels and into the dimming evening toward the shadow-encircled pond. Finally, focusing on nothing, I saw them.

It was as if they were made of very clear ice or of striated glass, and they seemed to capture the late, cold rays of the sun and the first feeble rays of the rising moon and reflect a universe of colors. They appeared to me then not so much as creatures from the stars, but as the stars themselves.

The sun set, the moon rose, and the rainbow colors dancing on the pond faded in the moonlight, into blues and deep purples—the colors of a sky at dawn. They waited there, outside my window. In time I became aware that my legs were cramped. I was on my way to becoming a frozen Wegius. It was impossible to look away, but in the end I did. I stood and stretched and half expected Mrs. Krantz to smash out raging and waving broomsticks and kitchen devices as a sort of counterpoint to my aliens. But that wasn’t the case.

What I saw out on the pond, through the common, undistorting window glass in the casement, were the two alligators sitting together, soaking in the rays of the moon. A black circle floated nearby. When it raised its head, I recognized it: the giant snapper that had had the misfortune to stray up onto Mrs. Krantz’s driveway And atop it, I swear, perched like Solomon on his throne, was a stupendous toad—the toad of creation, the toad to end all toads. I thought of my conversation with the neighbor, of the subterranean river, of the “unbelievable toads.” “You watch,” he had said, and I’d thought him a lunatic. I admit it.