Thirteen Phantasms (8 page)

The thing was done in an instant. The alien was gone, the infernal machine was gone, the ship, likewise, had vanished, and by the time the driver of the brougham could fathom the cacophony of alarms from within his coach, turn, and pursue a course toward the river, the dog-cart was nowhere to be seen.

A thorough search of the Victoria Embankment yielded an abandoned, rented dog-cart and a putty nose, but nothing else save, perhaps, for a modicum of relief for all involved. As we all know, the papers milked the crisis for days, but the absence of any tangible evidence took the wind from their sails, and the incident of “The Ape-Box Affair” took its place alongside the other great unexplained mysteries, and was, in the course of time, forgotten.

How Langdon St. Ives (for it was he with the putty nose), his man Hasbro (who masterminded the retrieval of the floating ship), and Newton the orang-outang wended their way homeward is another, by no means slack, story. Suffice it to say that all three and their craft passed out of Lambeth Reach and down the Thames to the sea aboard a hired coal barge, from whence they made a rather amazing journey to the bay of Humber and then overland to Harrogate.

This little account, then, incomplete as it is, clears up some mysteries—mysteries that the principals of the case took some pains, finally, to ignore. But Lord Placer, poor fellow, is dead these three years, Marleybone has retired to the sea-side, and Lord Bastable … well, we are all aware of his amazing disappearance after the so-called “cataleptic transference” which followed his post-war sojourn in Lourdes. What became of Jack Owlesby’s pursuit of Olivia I can’t say, nor can I determine whether Keeble hazarded the making of yet another amazing device for his plucky niece, who was the very Gibraltar of her family in the months that followed the tumult.

So this history, I hope, will cause no one embarrassment, and may satisfy the curiosities of those who recall “The Horror in St. James Park.” I apologize if, by the revelation of causes and effects, what was once marvelous and inexplicable slides down a rung or two into the realm of the commonplace; but such explication is the charge of the historian—a charge I hope to have executed with candor.

The last customer stopped at the door to wave. Ted happily waved back. He was always happiest when customers left. This one was maybe twenty years old and wore a white T-shirt with the face of Kerouac stenciled onto it. He had bought a Beat Poets Map, studded around the perimeter with ill-drawn faces of San Francisco writers and red
X’s
to mark the spots where those luminaries had eaten and drunk and lived the Bohemian high life. The aluminum-frame door swung shut behind him and clipped his elbow, and Ted heard just the first note of a stifled grunt.

For a moment he was cheered by the whole episode, but then he was a little ashamed. He had embarrassed the kid by asking him about the black beret that had been shoved into a back pocket of his Levi’s so as to be casually displayed. And then he had made up a transparent lie about his own days in North Beach, which the kid was forced out of politeness or stupidity to swallow. It was cheap as dirt to humor a customer, but somehow Ted couldn’t manage it anymore. He was out of patience all the time these days, and he hadn’t any reason to be.

Today maybe he did have a reason. It was his anniversary, and he didn’t feel very anniversarylike. There was something about the expectations that went along with a gala event that was almost guaranteed to make it less gala. He had screwed up in the gift department, too. He had forgotten all about it until the last moment, then called the local florist and had a bouquet sent over along with a card that he hadn’t signed. It was the sort of remembrance you’d send to a bereaved widow because you didn’t want to look her in the face.

He would find a way of making it up to her. Not being a shithead for one thing. Whatever Nona had planned was going to have to be all right with him—more than all right.

Just being alone in his bookstore should have been enough to loosen him up. It was pretty nearly perfect, as bookstores went—crammed with volumes in dark wooden cabinets he had designed and built himself. There were stacks of lawyers’ bookcases too, that he had very nearly stolen at an antique auction in Los Angeles years ago. Now they lined twenty feet of one wall, full of first editions and old collectable, signed books that nobody bought. His cash register numbered the day’s receipts. The Beat Poets Map, at $6.50, had been sale number nine.

He picked a pink fluorite crystal out of a wooden box on the counter. Beneath it were three hand-blown marbles and a trilobite fossil. Such things were like ballast to him, or perhaps amulets. Right at the moment, though, the charms kept their own secrets. The magic had gone out of them.

He set the crystal down and stepped across to lock the door. There were forty-five minutes to go before closing, but what was he waiting for? Sale number ten? He poured himself a glass of scotch from the counter bottle and sat back in his chair. A roach ran up the wall beside him—a little brown roach of the swarming variety. It was alone, out without its friends. He slammed at it with his bare fist, missing it by six inches. The tremor in the wall jarred it loose, and it fell to the floor and scuttled under the counter. Ted waited for it to reappear, but it was too canny and stayed hidden.

He leaned back, putting up his feet, pretending to have lost interest in the roach. On the wall in front of him was a literary map of London in Dickens’s day. He had been very proud of it twenty years ago, back when he was a student. Around the edge were drawings of Dickens and Keats and a dozen other nineteenth-century writers. The irony of it nearly made him laugh, and again he regretted having poked fun at the poor aspiring Beat. He made a silent toast to the kid’s trip north to San Francisco. He hoped the kid found what he was looking for and that for his own sake he left the beret at home. Then he sipped the scotch, trying to remember the impulses that drove youth to pursue its will-o’-the wisps and wishing that he hadn’t lost most of his.

He wondered what he meant, exactly—what it was he had lost. Impulses? Youth? Will-o’-the-wisps? He didn’t much mind losing the last two. It was a more restful world than it had been twenty years ago. Now he was married, and he loved his wife, to whom he’d just sent an insulting anniversary gift. Her being big about it would make him feel that much smaller. It was impulses that were giving him trouble. For the last few months—he didn’t like to put too fine a point on it—he’d had trouble holding up his end of the bargain in bed.

Now Nona was making anniversary preparations. There had been something in the wind that morning. She had even decided against going to work. She taught music to elementary school children, shuffling from school to school with a carton full of triangles and sticks and cymbals. She was perfect for it. She had the patience of a stone idol. He realized that he had been simmering in slow dread ever since breakfast, anticipating Nona’s anniversary surprise and thinking about his end of the bargain.

Nona knew that he was in the dumps and had determined to cure him. It was stress, she said. But what stress? What did he do but lounge around? He loved books, and here were books, lining the walls. Of course, there was the tremendous pressure of the mob of customers, all nine of them. Maybe that was it, fear of financial failure. He couldn’t fail financially, though, because his parents had left him a private income.

The roach crept out from under the counter and made a run for a stack of books heaped against the wall, as if it were invisible. Ted let it go, humoring it. When it was on the wall again he’d have another try at it.

Maybe he was just being morbid. Late afternoons were a good time for it. They were also a good time for thinking about food. He had seen a cartoon once in which Little Lulu confronted death, and her entire past flashed before her eyes—a nonstop waterfall of cakes and pies and ice cream and cookies. That’s how his afternoons went, remembering and anticipating food. But today he had tried to eat a cheeseburger and french fries at one. They’d been greasy and cold and he had dumped half of them into the trash.

The roach reappeared, climbing the wall not three feet behind him. He had been told that they rode in on cardboard boxes, on trains out of the east, like hoboes. They fed on glue. The creature stopped, midway up the wall, playing possum. It was a subtle animal. It had been seen, and it knew it. It lived in a violent, hateful world, what with everybody despising roaches. Ted abruptly felt sorry for the thing, sitting there at the edge of death, peering into the abyss.

On impulse, he found a box under the counter, took a glass paperweight out of it, shredded the little bit of tissue paper in the bottom, and then slid it along the wall beneath the roach, which sprinted toward the edge of the closest bookshelf. He cut off the thing’s retreat, flicking it down into the box, where it crept in under the nest of shredded tissue, hiding in terror. Ted dropped a couple of scraps of leftover cheeseburger in after it, then covered the box with a piece of cardboard, which he punched full of holes. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with the roach, but he felt a certain sympathy for it, which doubled, he was surprised to find, now that he had provided the thing with a home and a meal.

He picked up his felt-tip pen and wrote
East, West, Homes Best
on the side of the box, running a little curlicue out of the tail of the last
T
. Then he wrote
Moe
underneath, which was a good enough name for a roach.

He drifted into the storeroom. Something was being suggested to him, something that he couldn’t glimpse except out of the corner of his eye. His desk was a littered mess, and he had to push papers out of the way to switch on the lamp. Books lay in heaps on the floor, waiting to be priced and shelved. He couldn’t bear to look at them. He found his jar of thumbtacks and emptied it onto the blotter. Then, picking up a heavy, stainless-steel letter opener and holding it like a dagger, he hacked holes into the lid of the jar.

There was a spider under the counter out front. It had been there for days, spinning its web back in the corner. Ted didn’t like spiders at all, but now it occurred to him that they would be about twice as tolerable if they were set up with a house and meal, just like the roach.

He was shoveling the spider into the jar, trapping it with the lid, when someone began knocking on the door. He froze, thinking at first to stay hidden behind the counter. Carefully, he peered Indianwise around the edge of it, holding the lid on the jar. The woman at the door waved at him happily.

There was a quartz crystal as big as a baby’s fist hanging on a copper chain around her neck, and her hair had been done up, apparently, with an electric fan. She wore a low-cut, ground-length muumuu, spun out of flax or chaff or something, probably in Pakistan. Twenty years ago she had been a hippy, or else hadn’t been and was making up for it now. She poked the spring-hinged mailbox open and chattered through it.

Ted couldn’t entirely make out what she said, but it had to do with its still being ten minutes until closing and she had driven all the way out from somewhere and. … He moved across to unlock the door, thinking that he didn’t have a jar big enough to fit the woman into. She wedged herself into the doorway when he had pushed the door only a third open, so that she blocked his way, and he couldn’t push it any farther, and she had to hunch down to shove past him, brushing against him heavily, almost intimately. She smoothed the sides of her dress as if they had got crushed coming through, and took a curious look at the spider in the jar.

She reeled backward, grimacing.

“Spider,” Ted said. “His name is Clyde.” He found that he was still recovering from her entrance.

“He’s a
pet?”
she asked, turning so that she looked at him out of the side of her head.

“Yes, he is. Silly, isn’t it? It’s a form of therapy, actually—the New Age approach to phobias. Effective, too. There was a time that the very sight of such a thing would have sent me toward the door. I’m just now feeding him.”

“What?” she asked. “Flies?”

“No, bits of a cheeseburger. Defeats the purpose to feed them flies. It’s a sort of Garden of Eden approach to therapy. Buddhist, really. Suggested by Eastern teachings. Ghandi and that crowd.” It struck him suddenly that Eastern teachings would hardly suggest feeding cows to spiders, but the woman apparently wasn’t having any trouble with the notion. This is just another customer, he told himself, and probably a very nice one. Settle down.

“I’m Laurinda Bates,” she said, looking intently at the jar now. The spider stood across from the food, gathering courage, as if it had tackled flies and silverfish before, but never a piece of cow. “This is fascinating. What’s in here?”

“Cockroach, actually. He and I are old friends. I used to have a horror of them, like most people do, but then I read some literature written by a man who had just spent three years in Nepal, and I saw the way. It was as simple as striking up a friendship. It’s sort of like the notion that a friend of so and so’s is a friend of mine. Befriend one roach and suddenly you don’t hold a grudge against any roach. The same goes for the spider. Change species, though, and you’ve got to start fresh. An attachment to a daddy longlegs doesn’t transfer, say, to a black widow.”

“What a beautiful notion. It’s simple, really, isn’t it?”

“Nothing to it, and it works, too. I’m living proof.”

“I’m the same way. I owned a collie as a girl. Marvelous dog. It died when I was in high school, and I’ve never had another dog, but I’ve loved collies ever since. All of them, instantly. I’ve never been able to abide those little smashed up dogs, though—pugs. Always running at the nose.”