Thirteen Phantasms

by James P. Blaylock

  “Luminiferous ether.” He rolled the phrase across his tongue, listening to the magic in it.

  Ordinary matter like planets and people and baseballs traveled through the ether without being affected by it. The ether passed through them like water through a swimming-pool net. But anything that bent light, anything like a magnifying glass, or a prism, or even a Coke bottle, participated with the ether a little, and so experienced a certain drag.

  Molly had a collection of glass and crystal animals—people had offered her serious money for them, over the years—and Wilkins had noticed that in certain seasons some of them moved off of their dust-free spots on the shelf. The ones that seemed to have moved farthest were a set of comical rabbits that they had picked up in Atlantic City in—it must have been—1954. He had come to the conclusion that the effect occurred because of the angle and lengths of the rabbits’ ears.

  A correctly shaped crystal, he reasoned, would simply be stopped by the eternally motionless ether, and would be yanked off of the moving Earth like … like his pants had been ripped off of his body when the car-mirror post had hooked them.

  And so he had bought a lot of crystal-growing kits at a local hobby store, and had “seeded” the Tupperware growing environments with spatially customized, rabbit-shaped forms that he’d fashioned from copper wire. It had taken him months to get the ears right.

  The resulting crystalline silicon-dioxide shapes would not exhibit their ether-anchored properties while they were still in the refractive water—frozen water, at the moment—and he had not planned to put them to the test until next year.

  But tonight he would need an anchor. There was the Better Boy to be saved. The year, with all of its defeats and humiliations, would not have been for nothing. He grinned to think about the Better Boy, hanging out there in the shadows, impossibly big and round. A slice of that on a hamburger …

  Knock knock.

  Who’s there?

  Samoa.

  Samoa who?

  Samoa ether bunnies.

  He whistled a little tune, admiring the sunlight slanting in through the dusty window. The Early Girls and the misshapen Beefsteaks would have to be sacrificed. He would drape the nets under them. Let the worms feast on them in outer space if they had the spittle for it, as Thomas More had said.

  •

  Molly’s Spanish aunt had once sent them a lacy, hand-embroidered bedspread. Apparently a whole convent-full of nuns had spent the bulk of their lifetimes putting the thing together. Frank Sinatra couldn’t have afforded to buy the thing at the sort of retail price it deserved. Wilkins had taken great pains in laying the gorgeous cloth over their modest bed, and had luxuriated in lying under it while reading something appropriate—Shakespeare’s sonnets, as he recalled.

  That same night their cat had jumped onto the bed and almost instantly had vomited out a live tapeworm that must have been a yard long. The worm had convulsed on the bedspread, several times standing right up on its head, and in horror Wilkins had balled the bedspread up around the creature, thrown it onto the floor and stomped on it repeatedly, and then flung the bundle out into the yard. Eventually Wilkins and his wife had gone to sleep. That night it had rained for eight hours straight, and by morning the bedspread was something he’d been ashamed even to have visible in his trash.

  •

  When the obscuring ice melted, the rabbit-shaped crystals would be the floats, the equivalent of the glass balls that Polynesian fishermen apparently used to hold up the perimeters of their nets. The crystals would grab the fabric of the celestial ether like good tires grabbing pavement, and the lacy nets—full of tomato worms, their teeth in the flesh of the luckless Early Girls and Beefsteaks—would go flying off into space.

  Let them come crawling back then, Wilkins thought gravely. He searched his mind for doubt but found none. There was nothing at all wrong with his science. It only wanted application. Tonight, he would give it that.

  Still wearing his go-out-to-dinner pants, Wilkins expertly tied monkey-fist knots around the blocks of ice, then put each back into the freezer. Several times Molly had come out to the garage to plead with him to quit and come inside. He had to think about his health, she’d said. Remonstrating, he called it. “Don’t remonstrate with me!” he shouted at her finally, and she went away in a huff. Caught up in his work, he simmered down almost at once, and soon he was able to take the long view. Hell, she couldn’t be expected to see the sense in these nets and blocks of ice. They must seem like so much lunacy to her. He wondered whether he ought to wake her up around midnight and call her outside when the nets lifted off …

  Luckily he had made dozens of the rabbit-forms. There would be plenty for the nets. And he would have to buy more crystal kits tomorrow.

  Knock knock.

  Who’s there?

  Consumption.

  Consumption who?

  Consumption he done about all these ether bunnies?

  He laughed out loud.

  •

  By dinnertime he had fastened yellow and red twist ties around the edges of the nets. It would be an easy thing to attach the ether bunnies to the twist ties when the time was just right. He had spread the nets under all the tomato plants around the one that bore the pordigious Better Boy pulling back and breaking off encumbering vines from adjacent plants. He hated to destroy the surrounding plants. He hated to destroy the surroundings plants, but his eggs were all going into one basket here. If you were going to do a job, you did a job. Wasn’t that what Casey Stengel always said? Halfway measures wouldn’t stop a tomato worm. Wilkins had found that out the hard way.

  •

  Molly cooked him his favorite dinner—pork chops baked in cream of mushroom soup, with mashed potatoes and a vegetable medley on the side. There was a sprig of parsley on the plate, as a garnish, just like in a good restaurant. He picked it up and laid it on the tablecloth. Then, slathering margarine onto a slice of white bread and sopping up gravy with it, he chewed contentedly, surveying their kitchen, their domain. Outside, the world was alive with impersonal horrors. The evening news was full of them. Old Bob Dodge was right. This was Babylon. But with the summer breeze blowing in through the open window and the smell of dinner in the air, Wilkins didn’t give a damn for Babylon.

  He studied the plate-rack on the wall, remembering where he and Molly had picked up each of the souvenir plates. There was the Spokane plate, from the World’s Fair in ’74. And there was the Grand Canyon plate and the Mesa Verde one next to that, chipped just a little on the edge. What the hell did a chip matter? A little bit of Super-Glue if it was a bad one …

  There was a magic in all of it-the plates on the wall, the little stack of bread-slices on the saucer, the carrots and peas mixing it up with the mashed potatoes. There was something in the space around such things, like the force-field dome over a lunar city in a story. Whatever it was, this magic, it held Babylon at bay.

  He remembered the cat and the Spanish bedspread suddenly, and put his fork down. But hell—the ether bunnies, the saving of the enormous tomato—tonight things would go a different way.

  He picked up his fork again and stabbed a piece of carrot, careful to catch a couple of peas at the same time, dredging it all in the mushroom gravy.

  He would have to remember to put the stadium blanket into the trunk. Bob Dodge. … Even the man’s name had a ring to it. If God were to lean out of the sky, as the Bible said He had done in times past, and say “Find me one good man, or else I’ll pull this whole damned shooting match to pieces,” Wilkins would point to Bob Dodge, and then they could all relax and go back to eating pork chops.

  “More mashed potatoes?” Molly asked him, breaking in on his reverie.

  “Please. And gravy.”

  She went over to the stove and picked up the pan, spooning him out a big mound of potatoes, dropping it onto his plate, and then pushing a deep depression in the middle of the mound. She got it just right. Wilkins smiled at her, watching her pour gravy into the h
ole.

  “Salt?”

  “Doesn’t need it,” he said. “It’s perfect.”

  Molly canted her head and looked at him. “A penny?”

  He grinned self-consciously “For my thoughts? They’re not worth a penny—or they’re worth too much to stick a number on. I was just thinking about all this. About us.” He gestured around him, at the souvenir plates on the wall and the plates full of food on the table.

  “Oh, I see,” she said, feigning skepticism.

  “We could have done worse.”

  She nodded as if she meant it. He nearly told her about the ether bunnies, about why he had bought the old freezer and the nets, about Einstein and Miller—but instead he found himself finally telling her about Norm’s, about having nearly got run down in the parking lot. Earlier that day, when he had borrowed her keys and gone down to retrieve the car, she hadn’t asked any questions. He had thought she was miffed, but now he knew that wasn’t it. She’d just been giving him room to breathe.

  “Sorry I shouted at you when I got home,” he said when he had finished describing the ordeal. “I was pretty shook up.”

  “I guess you would be. I wish you would have told me, though. Someone should have called the police.”

  “Wouldn’t have done any good. I didn’t even get the guy’s license number. Happened too fast.”

  “One of those people in Norm’s must have got it.”

  Wilkins shrugged. Right then he didn’t give a flying damn about the guy in the Torino. In a sense there had not been any guy in the Torino, just a … a force of nature, like gravity or cold or the way things go to hell if you don’t look out. He hacked little gaps in his mashed potatoes, let in the gravy leak down the edges like molten lava out of a volcano, careful not to let it all run out. He shoveled a forkful into his mouth, and then picked up a pork chop, holding it by the bone, and nibbled off the meat that was left. “No harm done,” he said. “A few bucks … ”

  “What you ought to have done after you’d got home and put on another pair of pants was drive up Seventeenth Street. Your pants are probably lying by the roadside somewhere, in a heap.”

  “First thing in the morning,” he said, putting it off even though there was still a couple hours’ worth of daylight left.

  But then abruptly he knew she was right. Of course that’s what he should have done. He had been too addled. A man didn’t like to think of that sort of embarrassment, not so soon. Now, safe in the kitchen, eating a good meal, the world was distant enough to permit his taking a philosophical attitude. He could talk about it now, admit everything to Molly. There was no shame in it. Hell, it was funny. If he had been watching out the window at Norm’s, he would have laughed at himself, too. There was no harm done. Except that his inventor’s pants were gone.

  Suddenly full, he pushed his plate away and stood up.

  “Sit and talk?” Molly asked.

  “Not tonight. I’ve got a few things to do yet, before dark.”

  “I’ll make you a cup of coffee, then, and bring it out to the garage.”

  He smiled at her and winked, then bent over and kissed her on the cheek. “Use the Melitta filter. And make it in that big, one-quart German stein, will you? I want it to last. Nothing tastes better than coffee with milk and sugar in it an hour after the whole thing has got cold. The milk forms a sort of halo on the surface after a while. A concession from the Brownian motion.”

  She nodded doubtfully at him, and he winked again before heading out the back door. “I’m just going down to Builders Emporium,” he said at the last moment. “Before they close. Leave the coffee on the bench, if you don’t mind.”

  Immediately he set out around toward the front, climbing into his car and heading toward Seventeenth Street, five blocks up.

  •

  He drove east slowly, ignoring the half a dozen cars angrily changing lanes to pass him. Someone shouted something, and Wilkins hollered, “That’s right!” out the window, although he had no idea what it was the man had said.

  The roadside was littered with rubbish—cans and bottles and disposable diapers. He had never noticed it all before, never really looked. It was a depressing sight. The search suddenly struck him as hopeless. His pants were probably caught on a tree limb somewhere up in the Santa Ana mountains. The police could put their best men on the search and nothing would come of it.

  He bumped slowly over the railroad tracks, deliberately missing the green light just this side of the freeway underpass, so that he had to stop and wait out the long red light. Bells began to ring, and an Amtrak passenger train thundered past right behind him, shaking his car and filling the rear window with the sight of hurtling steel. Abruptly he felt cut off, dislocated, as if he had lost his moorings, and he decided to make a U-turn at the next corner and go home. This was no good, this futile searching.

  But it was just then that he saw the pants, bunched up like a dead dog in the dim, concrete shadows beneath the overpass. He drove quickly forward when the light changed, the sound of the train receding into the distance, and he pulled into the next driveway and stopped in the parking lot of a tune-up shop closed for the night.

  Getting out, he hitched up his dinner pants and strode back down the sidewalk as the traffic rushed past on the street, the drivers oblivious to him and his mission.

  The pants were a living wreck, hopelessly flayed after having polished three blocks of asphalt. The wallet and keys were long gone.

  He shook the pants out. One of the legs was hanging, pretty literally, by threads. The seat was virtually gone. What remained was streaked with dried gutter water. For a moment he was tempted to fling them away, mainly out of anger.

  He didn’t, though.

  Would a sailor toss out a sail torn to pieces by a storm? No he wouldn’t. He would wearily take out the needle and thread, is what he would do, and begin patching it up. Who cared what it looked like when it was done? If it caught the wind, and held it. … A new broom sweeps clean, he told himself stoically, but an old broom knows every corner.

  He took the pants with him back to the car. And when he got home, five minutes later, there was the cup of coffee still steaming on the bench. He put the pants on the corner of the bench top, blew across the top of the coffee, and swallowed a big slug of it, sighing out loud.

  •

  The moon was high and full. That would mean he could see, and wouldn’t have to mess with unrolling the hundred-foot extension cord and hanging the trouble-light in the avocado tree. And he was fairly sure that moonlight brought out the tomato worms, too. The hypothesis wasn’t scientifically sound, maybe, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t right. He had studied the creatures pretty thoroughly, and had come to know their habits.

  He set down the styrofoam ice chest containing the ice-encased ether bunnies, studied the nets for a moment, and then opened a little cloth-covered notebook, taking out the pencil clipped inside the spine. He had to gauge it very damned carefully. If he tied on the ice-encased bunnies too soon or too late, it would all come to nothing, an empty net ascending into the stratosphere. There was a variation in air temperature across the backyard—very slight, but significant. And down among the vines there was a photosynthetic cooling that was very nearly tempered by residual heat leaking out of the sun-warmed soil. He had worked through the calculations three times on paper and then once again with a pocket calculator.

  And of course there was no way of knowing the precise moment that the worm would attempt to cross the nets. That was a variable that he could only approximate. Still, that didn’t make the fine tuning any less necessary. All the steps in the process were vital.

  He wondered, as he carefully wired the ether bunnies onto the nets, if maybe there wasn’t energy in moonlight, too—a sort of heat echo, something even his instruments couldn’t pick up. The worms could sense it, whatever it was—a subtle but irresistible force, possibly involving tidal effects. Well, fat lot of good it would do him to start worrying about that now. It clear
ly wasn’t the sort of thing you could work out on a pocket calculator.

  He struggled heavily to his feet, straightening up at last, the ice chest empty. He groaned at the familiar stiffness and shooting pains in his lower back. Molly could cook, he had to give her that. One of these days he would take off a few pounds. He wondered suddenly if maybe there weren’t a couple of cold pork chops left over in the fridge, but then he decided that Molly would want to cook them up for his breakfast in the morning. That would be good—eggs and chops and sourdough toast.

  She had come out to the garage only once that evening, to remonstrate with him again, but he had made it clear that he was up to his neck in what he was doing, and that he wasn’t going to give himself any rest. She had looked curiously around the garage and then had gone back inside, and after several hours she had shut the light off upstairs in order to go to sleep.

  So the house was dark now, except for a couple of sconces burning in the living room. He could see the front porch light, too, shining through the window beyond them.

  The sky was full of stars, the Milky Way stretching like a river through trackless space. He felt a sudden sorrow for the tomato worms, who knew nothing of the ether. They went plodding along, inexorably, sniffing out tomato plants, night after night, compelled by Nature, by the fleeing moon. They were his brothers, after a fashion. It was a hard world for a tomato worm, and Wilkins was sorry that he had to kill them.

  He fetched a lawn chair and sat down in it, very glad to take a load off his feet. He studied the plants. There was no wind, not even an occasional breeze. The heavy-bodied tomato worms would make the branches dip and sway as they came along, cutting through the still night. Wilkins would have to remain vigilant. There would be no sleep for him. He was certain that he could trust the ether bunnies to do their work, to trap the worms and propel them away into the depths of space, but it was a thing that he had to see, as an astronomer had to wait out a solar eclipse.