At certain times I could almost dissolve entirely into this inner realm of awful purity and emptiness. I remember those invisible moments when in disguise I drifted through the streets of Mirocaw, untouched by the drunken, noisy forms around me: untouchable. But instantly I recoil at this grotesque nostalgia, for I realize what is happening and what I do not want to be true, though Thoss proclaimed it was. I recall his command to those others as I lay helplessly prone in the tunnel. They could have apprehended me, but Thoss, my old master, called them back. His voice echoed throughout that cavern, and it now reverberates within my own psychic chambers of memory.
“He is one of us,” it said. “He has always been one of us.”
It is this voice which now fills my dreams and my days and my long winter nights. I have seen you, Dr. Thoss, through the snow outside my window. Soon I will celebrate, alone, that last feast which will kill your words, only to prove how well I have learned their truth.
The Shadow on the Doorstep
JAMES P. BLAYLOCK
It was several months after I had dismantled my aquaria that I heard a rustling in the darkness, a scraping of what sounded like footsteps on the front porch of my house. It startled me out of a literary lethargy built partly of three hours of Jules Verne, partly of a nodding acquaintance with a bottle of single malt scotch. In the yellow glow of the porch lamp, through the tiny distorting panes of the mullioned upper half of the oaken door, I saw only a shadow, a face perhaps, half turned away. The dark outline of it was lost in the shaded confusion of an unpruned hibiscus.
The porch itself was a rectangular island of hooded light, cut with drooping shadows of potted plants and the rectilinear darkness of a pair of weather-stained mission chairs. Encircling it was a tumult of shrubbery. Beyond lay the street and the feeble glow of globed lamps, all of it washed in pale moonlight that served only to darken that wall of shrubbery, so that the porch with its yellow bug light and foliage seemed a self-contained world of dwindling enchantment.
I couldn’t say with any confidence as I sat staring in sudden, unexplained horror at the start this late visitor had given me, that the leafy appendages thrusting away on either side of him weren’t arms or some strange mélange of limbs and fins. With the weak light at his back he was a fishy shadow suffused in the amber aura of porch light, something that had crawled dripping out of a late Devonian sea.
In the interests of objectivity, I’ll say again that I had been reading Jules Verne. And it’s altogether reasonable that a mixture of the book, the shadows, the embers aglow in the fireplace, the late hour, and a morbid suspicion that nothing but trouble travels in the suburbs after dark combined to enchant into existence this troublesome shade that was nothing, in fact, but the scraping of a branch of hibiscus against the windowpane. But you can understand that I wasn’t anxious to open the door.
I set the book down silently, the afterimage of the interior of the Nautilus slanting across my consciousness and then submerging, and I remember wondering at the appropriateness of the scene in the novel: the crystal panels bound in copper beyond which floated transparent sheets of water illuminated by sunlight; the lazy undulations of eels and fishes, of lampreys and Japanese salamanders and blue-and-silver clouds of schooling mackerel. Slipping into the shadows beyond the couch, I pressed myself against the wall and crept into the darkened study where a window would afford me a view of most of the porch.
My aquaria, as I’ve said, were dismantled some months earlier—six, I believe—the water siphoned out a window and into a flower bed, the waterweeds collapsed in a soggy heap, the fish astonished to find themselves imprisoned in a three-gallon bucket. These last I gave to a nearby tropical fish store; the empty aquaria with its gravel and lumps of petrified stone I stored beneath a bench in the shed under my avocado tree. It was a sad undertaking, all in all, like bundling up pieces of my boyhood and packing them away in a crate. I sometimes have the notion that opening the crate would restore them wholesale, that the re-creation of years gone by could be effected by dragging in a hose and filling the tanks with clear water, by banking the gravel around rocks heaped to form dark caverns, the entrances of which are shadowed by the reaching tendrils of waterweeds through which glow watery rays of reflected light. But the visitor on the porch that night dissuaded me.
Three aquarium shops sit neatly in my memory by day and are confused and shuffled by night, giddily trading fishes and facades, all of them alive with the hum and bubble of pumps and filters and the damp, musty smell of fish tanks drip-dripping tropical water onto concrete floors. One I discovered by bicycle when I was thirteen. It was a clapboard house on a frontage road along a freeway, the exhaust of countless roaring trucks and automobiles having dusted the peeling white paint with black grime. Inside sat dozens of ten-gallon tanks, poorly lit, the water within them half evaporated. There wasn’t much to recommend it, even to a thirteen-year-old, aside from a door in the back—what used to be a kitchen door, I suppose—that led along a gravel path to what had been a garage.
These thirty years later I can recall the very day I discovered it—the gravel path, that is—easily a year after my first bicycle journey to the shop. I wandered around inside, shaking my head at the condition of the aquaria, despising the guppies and goldfish and tetras that swam sluggishly past their scattered dead companions. My father waited in a Studebaker at the curb outside, drumming his fingers along the top of the passenger seat. A sign in pencil scrawl attracted my eye, advertising another room of fish “outside.” And so out I stepped along that gravel path, shoving into the darkened back half of the garage, which was unlit save for the incandescent bulbs in aquarium reflectors.
I shut the door behind me for no other reason than to keep out sunlight. Banks of aquaria lined three walls, all of them a deep greenish-black, the water within lit against a backdrop of elodea and Amazon swordplant and the waving lacy branches of ambulia and sagittaria. There was the faint bursting of fine bubbles that danced toward the surface from aerators trapped beneath mossy stones. On the sandy floor of one aquarium lay a half-dozen mottled freshwater rays from the Amazon, their poisonous tails almost indistinguishable from the gravel they rested on. A half-score of buffalo-head cichlids hovered in the shelter of an arched heap of waterfall rock, under which was coiled the long finny serpent’s tail of a reedfish.
The aquarium seemed to me to be prodigiously deep, a trick, perhaps, of reflection and light and the clever arrangement of rocks and waterplants. But it suggested, just for a moment, that the shadowed water within was somehow vast as the sea bottom or was a sort of antechamber to the driftwood and pebble floor of a tropical river. Other aquaria flanked it. Gobies peered up at me from out of burrows in the sand. An enormous compressiceps, flat as a plate, blinked out from behind a tangle of cryptocoryne grasses. Leaf fish floated amid the lacy brown of decaying vegetation, and a hovering pair of golfball-sized puffers, red eyes blinking, tiny pectoral fins whirring like submarine propellers, peered suspiciously from beneath a ledge of dark stone. There was something utterly alien about that room full of fishes, existing in manufactured amber light, a thousand miles removed from the dusty gravel of the yard outside, from the roaring freeway traffic not sixty feet distant.
I stood staring, oblivious to the time, until the door swung open in a flood of sunlight and my father peeked in. In the sudden illumination the odd atmosphere of the room seemed to decay, to disperse, and it reminds me now of what must happen to a forest glade when the morning sun evaporates the damp enchanted pall that is summoned each night by moonlight from the roots and mulch and earth of the forest floor.
One dimmed tank was lit briefly by the sunlight, and in it, crouched behind a tumble of dark stone, was an almost hidden creature with an enormous head and eyes, the eyes of a squid or a spaniel, eyes that were lidded, that blinked slowly and sadly past the curious scattered decorations of its tank: a half-dozen agate marbles, a platoon of painted lead soldiers, a brass sheriff’s star, and a little tin shovel angl
ing from a bucket half full of tilted sand and painted in tints of azure and yellow, a scene of children playing along a sunset beach.
I was old enough and imaginative enough to be struck by the incongruity of the contents of that aquarium. I wasn’t, though, well enough schooled in ichthyology to remark on the lidded eyes of the creature in the tank—which is just as well. I was given over to nightmares as it was. A year passed before I had occasion to visit the shop beside the freeway again, and I can recall bicycling along wet streets through intermittent showers, hunched over in a yellow, hooded slicker, my pant legs soaked from the knees down, rewarded finally with the sight of no shop at all, but of a vacant lot, already up in weeds, the concrete foundation of the clapboard house and garage brown with rainwater and mud.
Here it was nearly midnight, thirty years later, and something was stirring on my front porch. Wind out of the west shuffled the foliage, and I could hear the sighing of fronds in the queen palms along the curb. I stood in shadow, watered against a tilted bookcase, peering past the edge of the casement at nothing. There was a rustling of bushes and swaying shadow. Something—what was it?—was skulking out there. I was certain. Hairs prickled along the back of my neck. A low mournful boom of distant thunder followed a windy clatter of raindrops. The wet ozone smell of rain on concrete washed through the room, and I realized with a start that a window had blown open behind me. I turned and pushed it shut, crouching below the sill so as not to be seen, thinking without meaning to of wandering in the rain across the ruins of that tropical fish shop, searching in the weeds for nothing I could name and finding only shards of broken glass and a ceramic fish-bowl castle the color of an Easter egg.
I slipped tight the bolt on the window and crept across to my bookcase, peering once again out into the seemingly empty night where the branches of hibiscus with their drooping pink flowers danced in the wind and rain.
In San Francisco, in Chinatown, in an alley off Washington, lies the second of the three aquarium shops. I was a student at the time. I’d eaten a remarkable dinner at a restaurant called Sam Wo and was wandering along the foggy evening street, looking for a set of those compressed origami flowers that bloom when dropped into water, when I saw a sign depicting Chinese ideographs and a lacy-looking tricolored koi. I slouched down a narrow alley between canted buildings, the misty air smelling of garlic and fog, barbecued duck and spilled garbage. Through a slender doorway veiled with the scent of musty sand there sounded the familiar hum of aquaria.
The shop itself was vast and dark beneath low ceilings. Dim rooms, lost in shadow, stretched away beneath the street, scattered aquarium lights glowing like misty distant stars. Flat breeding tanks were stacked five deep on rusted steel stands below a row of darkened transom windows that fronted the alley. Exotic goldfish labored to stay afloat, staring through bubble eyes, their caudal fins so enormously overgrown that they seemed to drag the creatures backward. One of the fish, I remember, was the size and shape of a grapefruit, a stupendous freak bred for the sake of nothing more than curiosity. Illogically, perhaps because of my having stumbled years earlier upon that shed full of odd fish along the freeway, it occurred to me that the more distant rooms would contain even more curious fish, so I hesitantly wandered deeper, under Washington, I suppose, only to discover that yet farther rooms existed, that rooms seemed to open onto others through arched doors, the ancient plaster of which was so discolored and mossy from the constant humidity that it appeared as if the openings were chipped out of stone. Vast aquaria full of trailing waterweeds sat bank upon bank, and in them swam creatures that had, weeks earlier, lurked in driftwood grottoes in the Amazon and Orinoco.
There was something about the place that brought to mind the shovel and bucket, the promise of pending mystery, perhaps horror. Each aquarium with its shadowy corners and heaped stone and lacy plants seemed a tiny enclosed world, as did the shop itself, utterly adrift from the noisy Chinatown alleyways and streets above, which crisscrossed in a foggy tapestry of a world alien to the hilly sprawl of San Francisco, each successive layer full of wonder and threat. There was something in my reaction to it akin to the attraction Professor Aronnax felt to the interior of the Nautilus with its library of black-violet ebony and brass, its twelve thousand books, its luminous ceilings and pipe organ and jars of mollusks and sea stars and black pearls larger than pigeons’ eggs and its glass walls through which, as if from within an aquarium, one had a night-and-day view of the depths of the sea.
I was confronted on the edge of the second chamber by a tiny Oriental man, his face lost in shadow. I hadn’t heard him approach. He held in his hand a dripping net, large enough to snare a sea bass, and he wore rubber boots as if he were in the habit of clambering into aquaria to pursue fish. His sudden appearance startled me out of a peculiar frame of mind that accounted for, I’m certain, the curious idea that in the faint pearl-like luminosity of aquarium light, the arm and hand that held the net were scaled.
I found my way to the street. He hadn’t said anything, but the slow shaking of his head had seemed to indicate that I wasn’t entirely welcome there, that it was a hatchery, perhaps, a wholesale house in which casual strollers would find nothing that would interest them.
And it was nothing, years later, that I found on the front porch. The wind blew rain under the eaves and against the panes of the window. Water ran along them in rivulets, distorting even further the waving foliage on the porch, making it impossible to determine whether the dark places were mere shadow or were more than that. I returned to my couch and book and fireplace, piling split cedar logs atop burned-down fragments, and blowing on the embers until the wood popped and crackled and firelight danced on the walls of the living room. It must have been two o’clock in the morning by then, a morbid hour, it seems to me, but somehow I was disinclined toward bed and so I sat browsing in my book, idly sipping at my glass, and half listening to the shuffle and scrape of things in the night and the occasional rumble of faraway thunder.
I couldn’t, somehow, keep my eyes off the door, although I pretended to continue to read. The result was that I focused on nothing at all, but must have fallen asleep, for I lurched awake at the sound of a clay flowerpot crashing to bits on the porch outside, the victim, possibly, of a rainy gust of wind. I sat up, tumbling Jules Verne to the rug, a half-formed dream of tilted pier pilings and dark stone pools of placid water dissolving into mist in my mind. A shadow loomed beyond the door. I snatched at the little pull-chain of the wall sconce overhead and pitched the room into darkness, thinking to hide my own movements as well as to illuminate those of the thing on the porch.
But almost as soon as the light evaporated, leaving only the orange glow of the settled fire, I switched the light back on. It was futile to think of hiding myself, and as for whatever it was that lurked on the threshold, I hadn’t any monumental desire to confront it. So I sat trembling. The shadow remained, as if it watched and listened, satisfied to know that I knew it was there.
There had been another tropical fish store in San Pedro in a dock-side street of thrift shops and bars and boarded-up windows. The harbor side of the street was built largely upon pilings, and below the slumping wooden buildings were shadowy broken remnants of abandoned wharfs and the shifting gray Pacific tide. The windows of the shop were obscured by heavy dust that had lain on the cracked panes for years, and there were only dim, scattered lights shining beyond to indicate that the building wasn’t deserted. A painted sign on the door read TROPICAL RARITIES—FISH AND AMPHIBIA and below it, taped to the inside of the door and barely visible through the dust, was a yellowed price list, advertising, I recall, Colombian horned frogs and tiger salamanders, at prices twenty years out-of-date.
The door was locked. But from within, I was certain of it, came the humming of aquaria and the swish-splash of aerated water against a background of murmuring voices. Had I been ten years younger, I would have rapped on the glass, perhaps shouted. But my interest in aquaria had waned, and I had come to the neighbor
hood, actually, to purchase tickets for a boat ride to Catalina Island. So I turned to leave, only vaguely curious, noting for the first time a wooden stairway angling steeply away toward the docks, its stile gate left carelessly ajar. I hesitated before it, peering down along the warped banister, and saw hanging from the wooden siding of the building a simple wordless sign depicting ideographs and a tricolored koi. It was a shock of curious recognition as much as anything that impelled me down those stairs, grinning foolishly, rehearsing what it was I’d say to whomever I’d meet at the bottom.
But I met no one—only the lapping of dark water against the stones and a scattering of red crabs that scuttled away into the shadows of mossy rock. Overhanging buildings formed a sort of open-air cellar, dark and cool and smelling of mussels and barnacles and mudflats. At first the darkness within was impenetrable, but as I shaded my eyes and stepped into the shadows I made out a half-dozen dim rings of mottled stone—amphibian pools, I imagined, their sides draped with trailing water plants.
“Hello,” I called, timorously, I suppose, and was met with silence except for a brief splashing in one of the pools. I stepped forward hesitantly. I had no business being there, but I was struck with curious wonder at what it was that dwelt within those circular pools.
The first appeared to be empty of life aside from great tendrils of tangled elodea and a floating carpet of broadleaf duckweed. I knelt on the wet stone and swept the duckweed aside with my hands, squinting into the depths. Some few bits of clouded daylight filtered in from above, but the feeble illumination was hardly enough to lighten the pool. Something, though, glistened for a moment below, as if beckoning, signifying, and I found myself glancing around me guiltily even as I rolled up my shirtsleeve. In for a penny …, I thought to myself, plunging my arm in up to the shoulder.
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