Thirteen Phantasms

by James P. Blaylock

  I squinted out at Monroe’s house. The little airstream sphere glowed in the moonlight or perhaps through fog-filtered neon which had mysteriously pierced the thick mists. And the mist swirled deeper, obscuring the field of fuchsia and dandelion, fading telephone poles. The airstream shuddered and, it seemed to me then, rose from its nesting place and followed in the wake of the striding tower toward the bay.

  It sounds (I know) very much like a madness. But so what? What do I care for madness? What struck me as insidious was the fact that, next morning in the dim sun of coastal autumn, both had returned and sat placid as herons among their respective weeds.

  And what is true about mechanisms is that as we move from the Jurassic age of technology toward some ultimate goal, relentlessly like armadillos (and all, one day, likely to be made into preposterous hats or scaled croquet balls), all our devices become simpler and grayer and their function becomes less clear. They become primitive and bestial and even prehistoric in the most roundabout way. What must it have been like when the earth was all ocean? When there was nothing but monsters? Imagine yourself another Professor Hardwigg afloat on gray Paleozoic seas where, twenty feet beneath the surface, unbelievable whales and amphibious beasts tear at each other and then disappear into the mouths of dim primordial caves. Chambered cephalopods and trilobites and sea snails as great as Monroe’s airstream creep sluggishly about dim reefs amid the rubbery stalks and bladders of seaweeds. Imagine yourself afloat on a pitching wooden raft in a prehistoric age a million years before the first armadillos would decide among themselves to wander north out of Mayan jungles toward sunlight and open spaces.

  That same gray atmosphere, trust me, born again of seaweed and oceans, washes in night by night, drawn by the moon as surely as the tides. And amid fuchsias and dandelions, monsters lie humped and waiting, striding off by night in the mists. And each morning gray mold covers my shoes and sprouts from the walls along with, doubtless, the germinating seeds of tiny trilobites and nautili.

  My clothing, as well as my shoes, is becoming gray felt, just as Monroe’s did. All this is not madness. The armadillos have turned back, to the grand amazement of science, and so, I fear, has everything else. And the airstream, the tower, and the pink of fading neon—what are they up to? That is what is unclear. That they come and go in the night along fog-enshrouded avenues and beneath pale lunar rays is a certainty. But I’m not an impatient man. If the thing has knocked once on the windowpane, it will knock again.

  The Old Curiosity Shop

  The trip down from Seattle in the rattling old Mercury wagon took most of two days. Jimmerson tried to sleep for a few hours somewhere south of Mendocino along Highway I, the Mercury parked on a turnout and Jimmerson wedged in between the spare tire, his old luggage, and some cardboard boxes full of what amounted to his possessions. None of it was worth any real money. It was just trinkets, souvenirs of his forty years married to Edna: some salt and pepper shakers from what had been their collection, dusty agates and geodes from a couple of trips to the desert back in ’56, old postcards and photographs, a pair of clipper ship bookends they’d bought down in New Orleans at the Jean Lafitte Hotel, and a few books, including the Popular Science Library set that Edna had given him for Christmas a hell of a long time ago. Most of the rest of what he owned he had left in Seattle, and every mile of highway that spun away behind him made it less and less likely that he would ever return for it.

  News of Edna’s death had reached him yesterday in the form of a letter from the county, identifying Doyle Jimmerson as “responsible for the costs incurred by Edna Jimmerson’s burial.” And of course he was responsible—for more than just the costs. They were married, even if he hadn’t seen her for nearly a year, and she had no other kin. He would have thought that Mrs. Crandle, the next-door neighbor, would have sent him the news of Edna’s death sooner, but Mrs. Crandle was a terrible old shrew, and probably she hated him for how he had left, how he had stayed away. …

  He had never felt more married to Edna than now that she was dead. His long-cherished anger and all his tired principles had fallen to dust on the instant of his reading the letter, and as he lay listening to the slow dripping of the branches and the shifting of the dark ocean beyond the car windows, he knew that he had simply been wrong—about Edna’s fling with the Frenchman, Mr. des Laumes, about his own self-righteous staying-away, about his looking down on Edna from the self-satisfied height of a second-story hotel room along the waterfront in Seattle where he had lived alone these past twelve months.

  There was a fog in off the ocean, and as he lay in the back of the Mercury he could hear waves sighing in the distance. The eucalyptus trees along the roadside were ghostly dark through the mists, the ocean an invisible presence below. There was the smell of dust and cardboard and old leather on the air, and water dripped onto the roof of the car from overhanging branches. Now and then a truck passed, gunning south toward San Francisco, and the Mercury swayed on its springs and the fog whirled and eddied around the misty windows.

  •

  Before dawn he was on the road again, driving south along the nearly deserted highway. Fog gave way to rain, and the rugged Pacific coast was black and emerald under a sky the color of weathered iron. It was late afternoon when he pulled into the driveway and cut the engine, which dieseled for another twenty seconds before coughing itself silent. He sat there in the quiet car, utterly unsure of himself—unsure even why he had come. He could far easier have sent a check. And he was helpless now, worthless, no good to poor Edna, who was already dead and buried. …

  Of course Mrs. Crandle hadn’t sent him a letter. He wasn’t worth a letter. He wondered if the old woman was watching him through the window right now, and he bent over and looked at the front of her house. There she was, a shadow behind the drapery, peering out at him. He could picture her face, pruned up like one of those dolls they make out of dried fruit. He waved at her, and then, before he got out of the car, he opened the glove compartment and looked for a moment at the blue steel .38 that lay atop the road maps and insurance papers and old registrations. The gun appeared to him to be monumentally heavy, like a black hole in the heart of the old Mercury.

  He shut the glove compartment door, climbed stiffly out of the car, and took a look at the house and yard. The dichondra lawn was up in dandelions and devil grass, and the hibiscus were badly overgrown, dropping orange blossoms onto the grass and walkway. The house needed paint. He had been meaning to paint it when he’d left, but he hadn’t. Things had happened too fast that morning. Let the Frenchy paint it, he had told Edna before he had walked out.

  He headed up along the side of the house, where a litter of throwaway newspapers and front-porch advertisements lay sodden with rain, hidden in front of Edna’s Dodge. Someone, probably Mrs. Crandle, had been tossing them there. The right front tire of the Dodge was flat, and it looked like it had been for a long time. Instantly it occurred to him that Edna must have been sick for some time, that she hadn’t been able to get around, but he pushed it out of his mind and continued toward the back door, only then spotting the box springs and mattress tilted against the fence by the garage. Someone had covered it with a plastic dropcloth to save it from the weather, but the sight of it there behind the cloudy plastic was disorienting, and he felt as if he had been away forever.

  The house was closed up now, the curtains drawn, and he had to jiggle his key in the lock to turn the bolt. The door creaked open slowly, and he stepped in onto the linoleum floor after wiping his feet carefully on the mat. At once he felt the emptiness of the house, as if it were hollow, reverberating with his footsteps. He walked as silently as he could through the service porch and into the kitchen, where the tile counter was empty of anything but a glass tumbler still partly full of water. He reached for it in order to pour it into the sink, but then let it alone and went out into the dining room, straightening a chair that was out of place at the table. The old oriental carpet was nearly threadbare outside the bedroom door (Ed
na had always wanted him to step past it, so as not to wear it out before its time) and seeing it now, that footworn patch of rug, he felt the sorrow in the house like a weight.

  He listened at the bedroom door and allowed himself to imagine that even now she sat inside, reading in the chair by the window, that he could push the door open and simply tell her he was sorry, straighten things out once and for all. If only he had a chance to explain himself! He reached for the doorknob, hesitated, dizzy for a moment with the uncanny certainty that all the emptiness in the house was drifting out from within that single room, wafting under the door, settling on the furniture, on the carpets, on the lampshades and books like soot in a train yard.

  Setting his teeth, he turned the knob and pushed open the door, peering carefully inside. Very nearly everything was as he remembered: the chairs by the window, the long bookcase on the wall, their bird’s-eye maple chests, the cedar trunk at the foot of the bed. He walked in, crossing the floor to the bedside table. On top of it lay a glass paperweight, a silver spoon, and a faded postcard with a picture of a boardwalk on it—Atlantic City? Jimmerson almost recognized it. He had been there before, he and Edna had. He picked up the paperweight and looked into its translucent glass, clouded by milky swirls. He could almost see a face in the swirls, but when it occurred to him that it was Edna’s face, he set it down again and turned to the bottom shelf of the table. A liqueur glass sat there. There was a greenish residue in the bottom, an oily smear, which smelled vaguely of camphor and juniper and weeds. He set the glass down and forced himself to look at the bed.

  It was a single bed now, and although it wasn’t a hospital bed, there were cloth and Velcro restraints affixed to the frame—wrist and ankle restraints both.

  •

  He rang Mrs. Crandle’s doorbell, then stood back a couple of steps so as not to push her. She opened the door wide—no peering through the crack—and the look on her face held loathing and indifference both. “So you’ve come back,” she said flatly. Her white hair hung over her forehead in a wisp, and her house smelled of cabbage and ironing.

  “I’ve come back.”

  “Now that Edna’s dead you’ve come back to take her things.” She nodded when she said this, as if it stood to reason.

  “Our things, Mrs. Crandle,” he said unwisely.

  “You have no claim,” she said, cutting him off. “You walked out on that poor woman and left her to that … parlor rat. You might as well have killed her yourself. You did kill her. As sure as you’re standing here now, Doyle Jimmerson, you took the breath of life right out of that poor woman.” She stared at him, and for a moment he thought she was going to slam the door in his face.

  “I didn’t kill her, Mrs. Crandle. After forty years of marriage she chose another man, and I …”

  “She chose nothing,” Mrs. Crandle said. “She met a man who was a conversationalist, unlike some men I could name, a man of culture and breeding, and you flew off the handle. What did she want for herself but some of the finer things in life?—a nice dinner now and then at the French Café instead of once a month at the Steer Inn. You’re beer and skittles, Doyle Jimmerson, but a little bit of Edna wanted a glass of champagne. That’s all she wanted, Mr. Jimmerson, if you’re capable of taking my meaning. And when she stood up for herself, you walked out, as if she was having some kind of affair.”

  “A conversationalist? That’s what he was? I can think of a couple of other terms that aren’t half as polite. Even you called him a parlor rat. Him and his stinking chin whiskers, his damned champagne. I couldn’t stand it. I told her what I’d do before I’d stand it.” But even when he said it he knew it was false. Anyone can stand anger. He could simply have thrown his anger out with the bath water. Loneliness and betrayal were another matter, not so easy to throw out. What had Edna suffered? The question silenced him.

  “Yes, I did call him a rat,” Mrs. Crandle said evenly. “And I’ll just remind you that you abandoned your wife to that creature, even though you knew what he was. You couldn’t take him, so you left Edna to take him. And she found out too late, didn’t she? All of us did. Now she’s dead and you’ve come down here to gloat. You won the war. To the victor go the spoils, eh?”

  “I’m not the victor, Mrs. Crandle. I didn’t win.”

  “No, you didn’t, Mr. Jimmerson. You lost something more than you know.”

  He nodded his agreement. He couldn’t argue with that. “What do you mean she found out ‘too late’? Did the Frenchman have anything to do with … ”

  “Nothing and everything, I guess you could say. No more nor less than you had.”

  “Help me out here, Mrs. Crandle. Edna … she wouldn’t tell me much.”

  “Well I’ll tell you a thing or two. You went inside that house just now, that house where you yourself should have been living this last long year. And so maybe you’ve seen the room where she died. I was with her there in the last couple of weeks. I stayed by her.”

  “I thank you for that.”

  She looked at him in silence for a moment, as if she were tired of him. “You saw the bed?”

  “I saw the bed, Mrs. Crandle. I saw the restraints.”

  “There was almost nothing left of her there at the end. That’s all I can tell you. And I mean nothing. She was empty, Mr. Jimmerson, like something made out of sea foam. Any gust of wind might have blown her into the sky. At night, when the moon was overhead, she … she would start drifting away, poor thing.”

  “The moon … ” he said, not quite comprehending. The word “lunacy” crept into his mind. He pictured that lonely bed again, Mrs. Crandle sitting in Edna’s seat by the window, knitting and knitting while Edna drifted away, strapped to the bed frame, their old double bed out in the driveway going to bits in the weather. “She … When she called the last couple of times she sounded a little confused. Like she had lost track of things, you know. She even forgot who I was, who she had called. I guess I just didn’t didn’t grasp that.”

  “That’s a crying shame.”

  “Worse than that. I was pretty sure of myself, Mrs. Crandle—sure that I was in the right. What I mean is that I was so damned self-righteous that I put top spin on everything she said. Heaven help me I even twisted what she didn’t say. She can tell me all about the Frenchman, was what I thought at the time, but she doesn’t know her own damned husband of forty years. Hell,” he said, and he rubbed his face tiredly, conscious now that rain was starting to fall again, pattering against the porch roof. “I guess I thought she was trying to get my goat.”

  “And so you got mad again. You hung up the phone.”

  “I did. I got mad. I was a damned fool, Mrs. Crandle, but there’s not a thing that I can do about it now.”

  “Well you’re right about that, anyway, if it’s any consolation to you.”

  “Tell me about it, then. Was it Alzheimer’s?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. I’m not certain it was in the medical books at all. It was a wasting disease. That’s all I can tell you. Sorrow did it. Sorrow and abandonment. Gravity weighed too heavily upon her, Mr. Jimmerson, and when it looked like it would crush her, she did what she had to do. She made herself light. That’s the only truth you’ll find down here. I can’t tell you anything more than that.” Mrs. Crandle swung the door nearly shut now, and he shoved his foot against the jamb to block it.

  “Where is she, Mrs. Crandle? You can tell me that much.”

  “Over at Angel’s Flight,” she said through the nearly closed door. “They buried her last week. No service of course, except for the Father from up at the Holy Childhood. He said a few words alongside the grave, but it was just me and a couple of the others from the old bridge club. I suppose you can get over there tonight and make your peace if you want to. Or leastwise you can try to make your peace. I hope you can find the words.” She shut the door firmly now, against his shoe, and then opened it long enough for him to jerk his foot out before slamming it shut again.

  He hadn’t gotten
anything out of her except bitterness, which was as much as he deserved. He headed down the porch steps, realizing that he hadn’t really wanted to know about the bed restraints. What he wanted to know was what had gone through her mind while he was sitting full of self-pity up in Seattle. What she had thought about him, about the long years that they were married, what her loneliness felt like. He had lost her for a year, and he wanted that year back, along with all the rest that he hadn’t paid any attention to. No matter that it was bound to be a Pandora’s box, full of sorrow and demons, and perhaps without Hope at the bottom, either.

  •

  Evening had fallen, with big clouds scudding across the sky in a wild race, the rain falling steadily now. He headed up Lemon Street through the downpour. The street lamps were on, haloed by the misty rain, and the gutters already ran with water. Living rooms and front porches were lighted, and he saw a man and a woman looking out through a big picture window at the front of one of the houses, watching the rain the way people sit and watch a fire in a fireplace. He thought of where he would sleep tonight and knew that it wouldn’t be among the dusty ghosts in the house; the back of the Mercury would be good enough for him, parked in the driveway, despite what Mrs. Crandle would think and what it would do to his back.

  Where Lemon dead-ended into Marigold, he turned up through the big wrought iron gates of the cemetery, and drove slowly toward the stone building nearly hidden in the shade of a cluster of vast trees. Vines climbed the walls of the three-story granite mausoleum, and light shone out from within a deep lamp-lit portico in the tower that served as an entry. There was a second high tower at the rear of the building, lit by lamps hidden on the mausoleum roof. This second tower was clearly a columbarium, the hundreds of wall niches set with tiny doors. A stone stairway spiraled upward around it, and rainwater washed down the stairs now as if it were a mountain cataract. Beyond the tower lay a hundred feet of lawn strewn with headstones, and beyond that a walnut grove stretched away into the darkness, the big white-trunked walnut trees mostly empty of leaves. Above the shadowy grove the moon shone past the edge of a cloud. Jimmerson angled the Mercury into a parking stall, cut the engine, and sat watching for another moment as an owl flew out of the grove and disappeared beneath the eaves of the tower. He got out of the car, slammed the door, and hunched through the rain, ducking in under the portico roof where he rang the bell.