Thirteen Phantasms

by James P. Blaylock

  He heard a voice from beyond the door, and he knocked again, harder this time.

  “Come in,” someone said, and Jimmerson turned the knob and pushed the door open, looking past it at the interior of a cluttered curiosity shop. He nearly tripped over an elephant’s-foot umbrella stand that held a dozen dusty umbrellas, some of them so old and shopworn that their fabric was like dusty lace. There were thousands of books stacked on open shelves, tilting against the walls, piled in glass-fronted cases alongside crystal wineglasses and flasks and decanters. There was a tarnished silver ice bucket with S.S. Titanic inscribed on the front, and fishbowls full of marbles, and no end of salt and pepper shakers—grinning moon men and comical dogs and ceramic renditions of characters out of ancient comic strips. The skeleton of a bird hung from the ceiling, and beneath it stood propped-open trunks full of doilies and tablecloths and old manuscripts. A painting of an ape and another of a clipper ship reclined against a long wooden counter scattered with boxes of old silverware and candlesticks and hinges and dismantled chandeliers. The silver seemed to shimmer where it lay, and there appeared above it a brief crackling of flame, like a witch fire, that died out again with a whoosh of exhalation.

  He noticed a crow on a high perch, staring down at him, its head tilted sideways. The crow hopped along the perch, clicking its beak, and then said, “Come in,” three times in succession. Beyond the crow’s perch, back past the clutter of collectibles and curiosities, lay more rooms full of stuff. He could make out toasters and fans and other pieces of electrical gadgetry, old clothes and musical instruments and coffee mugs and articles of wooden furniture, most of it apparently thrift store junk. Back in the shadows something rose slowly into the air and then descended again, and there was the brief sound of moaning from somewhere deep in the shop, and another gleam of witch fire that ran along the tops of the books leaving a ghostly trail behind it that drifted lazily to the ceiling.

  There was a movement behind the counter, and Jimmerson saw that a man sat back there on a tall stool. He was a small man with compressed features, possibly a dwarf, and he read a heavy book, his brow furrowed with concentration, as if he were unaware that Jimmerson had come into the shop.

  A sign on the counter read, “Merchandise taken in pawn. Any items left over thirty days sold for expenses.” Another sign read, “All items a penny. No refunds.” Jimmerson looked around again, this time in growing astonishment. The shop was packed with collectibles, some of them clearly valuable antiques. A suit of armor in the corner appeared to be ancient—a museum piece—and there was a glass case of jewelry that sparkled like fireflies even in the dim shop light. The all-items-a-penny sign must be some sort of obscure, lowball joke.

  “Selling or buying?” the dwarf asked him suddenly, and Jimmerson realized that he had put the book down and leaned forward on his stool. There was a lamp on the counter, a great brass fish that illuminated half his face. The other half remained in shadow, giving him a slightly sinister appearance. “Lucius Pillbody,” the dwarf said, extending his hand.

  “Doyle Jimmerson,” Jimmerson told him. “I guess I’m really just … curious.”

  “People who are just curious can’t find me,” Pillbody said. “So don’t be coy. Either you’ve got something to sell to me or else you’re looking to buy”

  “I’d simply like to ask you a couple of questions, if I could. My wife died recently. Her name was Edna Jimmerson.”

  “That Jimmerson! Of course. Wonderful woman. Very good customer.”

  “She bought a good deal, then?” He could easily imagine Edna buying almost any of this stuff, taking it home by the bagful—although he hadn’t seen any evidence of it in the house aside from the odds and ends on the bedside table.

  “I can’t recall that she bought anything,” Pillbody said. “But then that’s hardly surprising. Why would she?”

  “Well … A penny? Why wouldn’t she?”

  “Because, Mr. Jimmerson, like most of our customers she was interested in lightening ship, throwing the ballast overboard, you know, unencumbering herself.”

  “I guess I don’t know. I’ve been away.”

  “I mean to say that she pawned a goodly number of her own possessions,” He waved his hand, gesturing at the lumber of stuff in the shop. “Heaven knows how much of this was hers. I don’t keep books, Mr. Jimmerson. I used to separate things out a bit—Mr. Jones on the east wall and Mr. Smith on the west wall, figuratively speaking, which worked well enough if Smith and Jones were willing to let go of a great deal of merchandise. But what about Mr. so-and-so, who came in with a single item and never returned?”

  Jimmerson shook his head helplessly.

  “Well, I could tag it, of course, and arrange it on a shelf, alphabetically, say. But there were a hundred Mr. so-and-sos and I was always losing track. Tags would fall off. I’d have a busy week and have to find a second shelf to handle the overstock. In thirty days, of course, the merchandise would come off that shelf and find its way onto yet another shelf. And nobody ever claims their pawn, Mr. Jimmerson. In all my years in the business only a couple of resolute customers have changed their mind and asked for their merchandise back. Possessions, Mr. Jimmerson, are a great weight to most people, and I’m afraid that your wife was no exception, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”

  Jimmerson nodded blankly. Apparently he knew far less about Edna than he thought he did. He had never really paid attention, never tried to see the world the way she saw it. He had always been too caught up in his own point of view, in his own way of seeing things. Even with this damned Frenchman. Edna obviously found something in the man that she couldn’t find in Doyle Jimmerson. What was it? Jimmerson had never asked, never even thought about it.

  “Anyway, now there’s no order to things,” Pillbody said. “Smith and Jones are scattered far and wide. I made some effort—when was it? mid-century, I guess—to order things according to type, but to tell you the truth, that didn’t work out very well either. A certain amount of the merchandise is—what do you call it? Off color, perhaps. Obscene is nearer the mark. I’m talking about the product, let’s say, of a particularly disturbed mind, of the human id at its darker levels: your murderer, your pervert. You’d be astonished at what you’d find in here, Mr. Jimmerson. Objective tokens of murder and rape. Illicit sex. The sort of trash that you or I would repress, you know, hide away from the light. Does that astonish you?”

  “I don’t know,” Jimmerson said. “I guess I am astonished.”

  “All of it went into the room back in the southeast corner, what I used to call the parlor room. Full to overflowing, I can assure you. Now and then a customer would come in, feigning interest in books or jewelry or what have you, but by and by he’d disappear into the parlor room, and I knew what sort of thing he was really after, groping around back there in the dark. There was one man, a Mr. Ricketts, who frequented the parlor room. One of my best customers, if you want to define the word purely in terms of copper coins, which none of us do. Mint?”

  “Pardon me?” Jimmerson asked. He was utterly baffled now. Murder? Perversion in the parlor room? No wonder this place was hidden away.

  The man held out a small bowl of white mints. Jimmerson shook his head, and the man shrugged. “Looks just like Depression glass, doesn’t it?”

  He tilted the bowl, allowing Jimmerson to get a better look at it. It was pink, and had a sort of repeating pineapple pattern on it. There was something not quite symmetrical about the bowl, though, as if it had gotten hot and partly collapsed of its own weight, and it had a heavy seam down the center of it, as if it had broken and been welded back together. In each of the pineapples there was a depiction of the same human face, vaguely angry, its eyes half shut.

  The face looked remarkably familiar to Jimmerson. The bowl too, for that matter, although he couldn’t for the life of him place it. The dwarf set it down carefully.

  “What finally happened,” Pillbody said, “was that the parlor room began to stink. Even now
you’ve noticed a certain smell on the air.” He squinted seriously, as if Jimmerson might dispute this somehow, but Jimmerson nodded in agreement. He had gotten a whiff of it now and then, an undefinable smell of rot. “It was almost poetic. Artistic you might say. The smell would draw this man Ricketts the way rotten meat draws flies, not to put too fine a point on it. Well, I simply couldn’t stand it any longer. I have to work here. If I had my way, I’d throw all of it out, straight into the bin. But then of course I don’t have my way, do I? Which of us does? So finally I fell upon the idea of scattering the stuff throughout the store, an item here, another item there, and when they weren’t any longer in close proximity, they stank a good deal less, although it took years for them to really settle down. Meanwhile I moved—how shall I put it?—a more pleasant selection of merchandise into the parlor room. Much of what we receive here is not altogether unpleasant, after all, at least to you or I. The problem was essentially solved, aside from the telltale remnants surfacing here and there. Too much order, I said to myself, and you start to breed problems. Things start to stink. Unfortunately, one can still detect the odor back there in the parlor room, especially on a rainy day, when the air is heavy. It’s like spilled perfume that’s soaked into the floorboards. And of course I still get the same sort of customer nosing his way back there, although Mr. Ricketts has been dead these twenty years. Killed by his own filthy habits, I might add.”

  Jimmerson nodded blankly, then picked up the candy dish again and looked hard at the pattern in the glass, at the unpleasant repeated face. …

  It was his own face.

  He was suddenly certain of it, and the realization nearly throttled him. He looked in surprise at Pillbody, who merely shrugged.

  “As you’ve no doubt realized, that was one of your wife’s items, Mr. Jimmerson.”

  “Can I buy it?” He hardly knew what he meant by asking. If it had belonged to Edna, though, he wanted it, no matter what it cost. No matter how strange and inexplicable.

  “I’m afraid that raises a fairly delicate question, Mr. Jimmerson.”

  “What question? If I know the answer …” He gestured helplessly.

  “Has Mrs. Jimmerson … passed on?”

  “Last week.”

  “Then the bowl’s for sale. Let me find something else to put the mints in.” He rummaged around under the counter, finally drawing out what looked like a tin basin. “I got this from a barber’s wife,” he said. “Take a look.” He held the basin up so that Jimmerson looked into the bottom side, which was highly polished, almost a mirror. Instead of his own reflection Jimmerson saw a man with a beard looking back out at him, his throat cut from ear to ear, blood running down into the white cloth tied around his neck. He recoiled from the sight of it, and Pillbody set it down on the counter.

  “Doesn’t affect the flavor of the mints at all,” he said, and he dumped the candy out of Edna’s bowl and into the basin. “That’ll be a penny.” He held out his hand.

  “Just a penny?”

  “Just one. Everything’s a penny. But I’ll warn you. If you try to return it, you’ll pay considerably more to get rid of it than you paid to possess it. Could be entirely impossible, out of the question, unthinkable.”

  “I don’t want to return it,” Jimmerson said, and he dug in his pocket for a penny. The dwarf took the coin from him and set it on the counter. Jimmerson looked around then, suddenly certain that he could find more of Edna’s things, and straightaway he saw a familiar pair of salt and pepper shakers—ceramic tornadoes, one of them grinning and the other looking like the day of judgment.

  “Were these … ?” Jimmerson started to ask.

  “Those too. Only two weeks ago.”

  This was uncanny. Jimmerson had the same shakers in his box in the back of the Merc. Except his were smaller, he was sure of it now, and the faces not so clearly defined. One of these had the unmistakable appearance ‘ of Edna’s dead Aunt Betsy, and the ceramic platform that they stood on was divided by a piece of picket fence that recalled the rickety fence around the Kansas farm where Edna had grown up. His own salt and peppers had no such fence.

  “You’re certain these were hers?” Jimmerson asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “I don’t recall that she owned any such thing. We bought a similar pair years ago, in the Midwest, but they’re different from these. They’re in my car, in fact, parked out front.” He waved his hand, but realized that he no longer had any idea where “out front” was. His shoulders ached terribly, and he felt as if he had been carrying a heavy pack on his back for hours. His ears were plugged, too, and he wiggled his jaw to clear them.

  “These were very recent acquisitions,” Pillbody said. “Mrs. Jimmerson brought them to me along with the candy bowl. It’s not surprising that you were unaware of them.”

  Jimmerson fished out another penny. “All right, then. I’ll take these, too,” he said.

  Pillbody shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Mr. Jimmerson.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “One thing at a time, sir. You’ll overload your circuitry otherwise. You’d need heavy gauge wiring. Good clean copper. The best insulation.”

  “Circuitry? Insulation? By God then I guess I’ll take the whole shebang,” Jimmerson said, suddenly getting angry. What a lot of tomfoolery! He gestured at the counter, at the books in the wall behind it, taking it all in with a wave of his hand. He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and found a twenty-dollar bill. “Start with the jewelry,” he said, slapping the money down, “and then we’ll move on to this collection of salt shakers. We’ll need boxes, because I’ve got more money where this came from. I’ll clean this place out, Mr. Pillbody, if that’s what it takes to get Edna’s merchandise back, and if my money’s no good here, then we’ll take it up with the Chamber of Commerce and the Better Business Bureau this very afternoon.”

  Pillbody stared at him. “Let me show you a little something,” he said quietly, echoing Gladstone’s words, and he reached down and pulled aside a curtain in the front of the counter. Inside, on a preposterously heavy iron stand, sat what appeared to be a garden elf or a manlike gargoyle, perhaps carved out of stone, its face had a desperate, constricted look to it, and it squatted on its hams, its head on its knees and its hands pressed against the platform it sat on. “Go ahead and pick it up,” Pillbody said. “That’s right. Get a grip on it.”

  Baffled, Jimmerson bent over, put his hands on the statue, and tried to lift it, but the thing was immovable, apparently epoxied to the platform on which it sat. Seen up close, its face was stunningly lifelike, although its features were pinched and distorted as if by some vast gravity of emotion. Jimmerson stepped away from it, appalled. “What the hell is it?” he asked.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “It’s mighty heavy, isn’t it?”

  “This is some kind of trick,” Jimmerson said.

  “Oh, it’s no trick,” Pillbody said. “It’s a dead man. He’s so shatteringly compressed that I guarantee you that a floor jack wouldn’t lift him. A crane might do the trick, if you could get one in through the door.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jimmerson said, all the anger gone now. He was sure somehow that Pillbody wasn’t lying, any more than Gladstone had been lying about the floating corpse. “Does this have something to do with Edna, with the dwindling that Mr. Gladstone mentioned?”

  “The dwindling?” Pillbody said. “After a fashion I suppose it does. This was a gentleman who quite simply spent too much money. I don’t have any idea what he thought he was buying, but he endeavored, much like yourself, to purchase several hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise all at once. He was, how shall I put it? A parlor room client, perhaps. In my own defense, I’ll say that I had never had any experience along those lines, and I quite innocently agreed to sell it to him. This was the result.” He gestured at the garden elf.

  “How?” Jimmerson said. “I don’t …”

  Pillbody shrugged t
heatrically. “I didn’t either. The man was simply crushed beneath the weight of it, piled on top of him suddenly like that. Surely you can feel it, Mr. Jimmerson, the terrible pressure in this shop?”

  “Yes,” Jimmerson said. His very bones seemed to grind together within him now, and he looked around for some place to sit down. He thought he heard the floorboards groaning, the very foundation creaking, and there was the sound of things settling roundabout him: the crinkle of old paper, the sigh of what sounded like air brakes, a grainy sound like sand shoveled into a sack, the witch fires leaping and dying …

  “It’s like the sea bottom,” Pillbody whispered. “The desperate pressures of the human soul, as heavy and as poisonous as mercury when they’re decocted. Our gentleman was simply crushed.” He shook his head sadly. “I can’t tell you how much work it was to get him up onto the iron plinth here. We had to reinforce the floor. Here, let me get you a chair, Mr. Jimmerson.”

  He dragged a rickety folding chair from behind the counter now and levered it open, then drew the drape across the front of the thing in the counter cubbyhole. Jimmerson sat down gratefully, but immediately there was the sound of wooden joints snapping, and the seat of the chair broke loose from the legs and back, and Jimmerson slammed down onto the wooden floor where he sat in a heap among the broken chair parts, trying to catch his breath.