Darkness pooled at the fringes of the room, and while some of the children chattered among themselves, others of a more imaginative bent plumbed that darkness with wide eyes, wondering if something more than the dim shapes of armchairs and tables were gathered there.
“Look,” cried one of the children, pointing to the shadows behind the stage. As all eyes turned that way, the darkness took shape and a tall lean figure strode forward onto the stage. As he approached the table, he snapped his fingers in the direction of the candelabrum. Instantly, the wicks atop the dozen candles danced with flame.
He stood silently in the candlelight and ran his eyes over the group of children seated on the carpet. Half a dozen parents and a serving maid stood uneasily by the door as his eyes drifted over them. He wore a black swallowtail coat over a stiff white shirt with a turndown collar, and a white cravat with a gleaming silver pin.
“Good evening,” he said, as he slowly began to remove the white gloves he wore. “I am Professor Mephisto. And you are about to witness an evening of wonders such as you have never seen.”
His voice was deep and melodious, and though he spoke quietly, the words reverberated off the walls like something echoing from the bottom of a well. His eyes glowed with a strange intensity and fixed on those who met them with such force that it was as if he could see into their very souls.
The children sat transfixed as he worked the gloves off his hands, one finger at a time. In the candlelight, his face appeared as pale as chalk, his lips as red as blood, his hair as dark as a raven’s wing. He looked every bit a gentleman, yet there was something about him that sent a shiver down the spine.
The gloves removed, he tossed them into the air. And they were miraculously transformed into a pair of white doves. They swooped and circled the room, while the children craned their necks to follow their flight. Finally, they settled in the shadows at the rear of the stage.
“Now,” said the magician, his eyes coming to rest on the parents gathered at the door, “it seems we have some very large children back there.”
The children laughed as they turned to look. “Those aren’t children!” one of them shouted. “They’re parents.”
“Parents? Really?” said the magician. “Well, that’s very strange. I thought this was to be a children’s show, was it not?”
“Yes!” shouted the children delightedly.
“Well, then, it seems we have two choices. Either we can ask the parents politely to leave, or, for my next trick, I could transform them all into children. Wouldn’t that be a treat?”
“Yes!” shouted the children again, while the parents hung sheepishly by the door.
The magician lightly clapped his hands, and out from the shadows where the doves had disappeared flew two large black birds. They swooped menacingly low over the parents’ heads. Finally, one of the adults opened the door and they filed out, glancing back nervously at the smiling figure onstage.
Then, with another light clap of his hands, the door shut with a resounding thud, the birds settled to either side of the stage, and, in the silence that followed, the show began.…
4
Ofound herself walking through a deep ravine. It was unlike any place she’d ever been, the vegetation so thick it was junglelike, the dense green canopy of trees all but shutting out the sun. She picked her way along the bank of a stream, scanning the shadows on either side for the presence she could feel lurking there.
“Caledon. Next stop, Caledon.”
The voice came from a long way off, woven in with the distant drone of traffic in the dream. Someone touched her lightly on the arm, jolting her awake.
“Excuse me, Miss. I believe this is your stop.” Opening her eyes, she saw the cute young steward with the French accent smiling down at her.
“Thanks,” she said, quickly wiping away a trail of drool that had trickled down her chin and plucking the inflatable pillow from around her neck.
The traveler’s pillow had been a going-away present from her father. It was designed to keep your head immobile while you slept sitting up. It came folded in its own little matching pouch. When you needed it, you simply blew it up like a beach toy until it took the shape of a giant donut with a big bite out of it. There was just one little drawback: you looked like a total idiot with it wrapped around your neck.
The first night on the train she’d resisted using it, but every time she drifted off, her head would snap forward and jolt her awake. By the time the second night rolled around, the trip had taken on a surreal quality, and she was more than ready for the traveler’s pillow. She waited until everyone around her had passed out, then she took it out of its pouch and blew it up. Slipping it around her neck, she sat there feeling like a complete fool. But her head didn’t bob as she began to drift off, and she dropped into an exhausted sleep that brought with it the strange dream of the ravine.
Now, half-awake, she fumbled her bag down from the rack above the seat. It was still dark outside, and everyone in the coach was sound asleep. She squeezed past stray limbs dangling into the aisle and retrieved her suitcase from the storage area at the rear of the car.
Caledon was definitely not a major tourist destination. No one else was getting off but her. The train screeched slowly to a halt. The sleepy-eyed conductor, his hat slightly askew, opened the door and put down the step. As he was helping her down with her luggage, a voice called out behind her, “Excuse me, Miss.” It was the cute young French steward, no doubt come to wish her a passionate good-bye. “You forgot this,” he said and handed her the traveler’s pillow she’d left on the seat.
“Thanks,” she muttered, taking it from him and stepping down onto the deserted platform.
Twenty minutes dragged by. A halfhearted drizzle started up. She shuffled her suitcase and bag over to a bench under the wide overhang of the station roof, flipped open the valve on the traveler’s pillow, and sat down on it to squeeze out the air. It made a sad whooshing sound that perfectly mirrored her mood. Clearly, Aunt Emily had forgotten she was coming, or Father had told her the wrong arrival time. Whatever the explanation, she had definitely been abandoned.
After walking the length of the wet platform, she made a quick circuit of the station building, just in case Aunt Emily might be waiting there. No sign of a living soul. The place had all the grim desolation of one of those film noir movies her father adored. It would have made a great place for a murder.
Soon the first rays of dawn began to brighten the sky. It didn’t do the station any favors. As the darkness lifted, she saw weeds growing waist-high between the ties of a second set of tracks, on the far side of the platform. A rusty old luggage cart languished in the shadows at one end of the station building beside a broken vending machine. What had once been the waiting room was now a storage area, chock-full of railroad junk. The door was chained and padlocked, just in case rusty railroad junk was your thing.
The only part of the building still in service was a ticket window facing onto the platform close by the bench. A sign in the window said it was open between nine and five, three days a week. This wasn’t one of those days. There was no rest room, no phone, no clock – nothing but the damp bench and the boarded building. Welcome to Caledon!
Someone called her name. For an instant it didn’t register that it was her name, for apart from people who absolutely didn’t know her, no one ever called her Ophelia anymore. People who knew her just called her O. It was a long story.
She turned to see a figure approaching from the far end of the platform, wearing a long loose trench coat, a broad-brimmed hat, and black rubber boots. Even before she glimpsed the familiar face peering out from under the floppy brim, she knew it could be no one but Aunt Emily.
“Ophelia,” said her aunt as she hurried up to her. “Forgive me for being late. I’m afraid I dozed off. My, I’d hardly know you! You’ve grown so.” They greeted one another with a peck on the cheek and an awkward embrace.
“Where’s your luggage?”
“Over there by the bench,” said O.
They chatted as they walked with the luggage to the parking lot beside the station. There was only one car in the lot, an ancient station wagon that looked as if it had escaped from an automobile museum. Aunt Emily opened the rear door and lifted the heavy suitcase in with a grunt. She slid into the front seat and leaned over to lift the latch on the passenger side. With one fluid motion, she pitched a pile of books and papers from the passenger seat onto the backseat.
“There,” she said, turning on the ignition as O climbed in. The ashtray was full of crumpled butts, and the car smelled of cigarette smoke. O rolled down her window. The smell of cigarettes made her sick. She got the window down about two inches, when the crank came off in her hand.
“Don’t worry. That happens all the time,” said her aunt as she put the car in gear and backed out of the space.
Soon they were creeping down the sleepy streets of Caledon. Her aunt drove hunched over the wheel, her eyes riveted to the road, as if she thought it might leap up unexpectedly and take a sudden twist. Reaching over with her free hand, she flicked on the car stereo, and the sound of jazz filled the interior of the car. O looked around for a place to put the window crank.
“Just leave it on the dash,” said her aunt, with a sideways glance. “I’ll take care of it later.” A plastic statue of the Virgin, with a suction-cup base, was stuck to the dashboard. She surveyed the interior of the car with sad eyes and hands folded in prayer. It would take a good deal of praying to save this car, thought O, as she set the crank down beside the little lady.
While they were stopped at a light, Aunt Emily reached up and plucked off her hat. She sailed it into the backseat –where all unwanted things appeared to go. As she hummed along to the music, she tucked some stray hairs into the bun at the nape of her neck. O noticed there was a hollowness about her cheeks, slack pouches under her eyes, a general frailty that had not been there the last time she’d seen her.
She watched with alarm as her aunt fished a cigarette from a pack in her coat pocket and tucked it between her lips. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?” It was more a statement than a question.
“Actually –” O started to say, but then the light changed and the car lurched into life, and somehow the words went unsaid.
“How’s your father doing?”
“Fine. Getting ready to go to Italy.”
“So I understand. Preparing to spill yet more ink on poor old Ezra Pound.”
There didn’t seem to be much to say to that. As the car filled with smoke, O glued her face to the window and sucked fresh air through the narrow gap. She was going to have to do something about this –and soon.
There was a tension to her aunt that she hadn’t noticed when they met at the station – something in the set of her chin, the way her thin veined hands gripped the steering wheel as she drove. O had the strange feeling that she was not sitting with the Aunt Emily she remembered, but with some smaller, frailer, more fretful creature, who wore Aunt Emily’s skin on her like an oversized sweater.
Something more than the smoke billowing through the car balled her stomach into a tight knot. She felt she might be sick.
“Are you all right?” asked her aunt as she turned onto a side street and began trolling for a parking space. “You look a little green around the gills.”
“Stomach’s just a bit queasy. I’ll be fine once I get some sleep.”
Aunt Emily stubbed out her cigarette and rolled down her window. The car cleared of smoke as the wind blew around the interior of the car, rustling the papers in the backseat.
For one crazy moment, O felt as if there were another passenger in the car with them, some infinitely fluid shape composing itself from the random papers rustling around behind them. At the same time, she saw Aunt Emily glance nervously in the rearview mirror.
“There’s one!” cried her aunt as she swung the car into a free space at the side of the road. They climbed out of the car, and Aunt Emily hauled the suitcase out of the backseat. A very ordinary seat, cluttered with very ordinary books and papers.
“Push down the door latch and hold in the button on the handle while you close it,” said her aunt. “Otherwise it won’t lock.”
They began walking along the deserted street. Aunt Emily lugged the suitcase, while O carried the bulging bag on her back. She hoped they didn’t have far to walk.
When they got to the end of the block, Aunt Emily put down the suitcase, glanced up at the street sign, and muttered the names of the intersecting streets. She looked back to where the car was parked, then picked up the suitcase and begin walking again, still muttering.
She noticed O looking at her. “No, I’m not going mad. At least, no more than usual. It’s just that, last week, I forgot where I’d parked the blasted car, and it took me an hour to find it.”
O thought that losing the car might not be such a bad idea. “That suitcase is heavy,” she said. “Let me carry it for a while.”
“Actually, it is pretty heavy. It must be that gold brick you brought as a present for your dear aunt. You really shouldn’t have. I’ll tell you what, why don’t we trade off? You take it for a block, and then I’ll take it for a block.”
They’d made the exchange twice, and there was still no sign of the bookshop. The strain of carrying the luggage had put an end to any small talk. They turned off the residential street and shuffled silently along a wide street lined with darkened storefronts. The occasional car slid by on silent wheels.
O was so tired, it was all she could do to put one foot in front of the other. It was like one of those dreams where you’re trying desperately to move, but your feet feel rooted to the ground. She dragged them along for one more block, and then Aunt Emily stopped and set down the suitcase.
“Here we are,” she said.
O glanced up and caught her first glimpse of the Green Man.
5
He leaned out from the old wooden sign like someone leaning from a window to look down at her. His green face was fissured with age, and the corners of his mouth were stretched wide by two thick green vines that sprang from them. The carved vines curled upward around his head and wound along the edge of the sign, until they met below and branched into the letters that spelled the name of the shop – The Green Man.
The sign swayed in the wind. As it swayed, it creaked. To O’s sleepy mind, the creaking sounded like an ancient voice, struggling to speak. She stood transfixed beneath the sign while Aunt Emily searched for her keys.
O had never seen anything like it before. What could such a strange thing mean? she wondered. It frightened and yet fascinated her. There was something deeply human in the grotesque figure, something that touched her despite the green stalks spilling from his mouth.
It was almost as if he were trying to tell her something. She stared up into the ancient face, trying to make out words in the creaking voice.
“I see you’ve met my friend.”
O jumped about a foot in the air.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you,” said her aunt, looking up at the sign. “It was he who first drew me into this shop. I look on him as a sort of guardian spirit, watching over me.
“There,” she said as she opened the door. “Welcome to the Green Man.”
Even in the faint light of day, there seemed something magical about the shop. It was as if it had wandered from a different time and place and set itself down here, on a street corner in Caledon.
O picked up her suitcase and hauled it inside. The smell of dust and old books greeted her as she stood in the deep shadows just inside the door, while her aunt wandered off to turn on the lights.
“Don’t move,” Aunt Emily warned her. Then the lights came on and O saw why.
Books were everywhere. The outer walls were lined with shelves of them from floor to ceiling. Two freestanding ranges of books ran the length of the shop, each of them six feet high and crowned with spires of still more books. The two rang
es divided the shop into three narrow aisles, one running down the center and two along the sides.
The narrow aisles were made narrower still by box upon box of books stacked at the base of the shelves along each aisle. Some of the boxes were open, their loose flaps like vines launching across a tenuous jungle path, threatening to reclaim it as part of itself. Others had split like ripe pods and spilled their contents onto the floor.
Aunt Emily flicked on another light at the rear of the shop, revealing even more unpacked boxes ranged around an enormous wooden desk, crowned with precarious piles of books.
O could see now what the Green Man was trying to tell her in his creaky, vine-choked voice: “Turn around, girl. Go home! You don’t want to go in there.”
She picked up the suitcase and threaded her way down the center aisle, toward the back of the shop.
“Things have gotten a little out of hand,” said her aunt sheepishly, as they stood and looked back at the chaos of the shop. “Don’t tell your father.”
Turning from the desk, she walked toward the book-lined wall beside it. She reached up under a shelf, and, as if by magic, a door swung open in the wall of books, revealing a narrow set of stairs that launched up steeply to the second floor.
Aunt Emily flicked a light switch. Nothing happened. “Can you manage that suitcase by yourself?” she called back over her shoulder as she started up the stairs.
Drifts of books were piled at the sides of stairs all the way up – books in the process of making their way up or down. Halfway up, her aunt sidestepped one of the stairs.
“Must you always sit on the steps?” she muttered.
“Pardon me?”
“Oh, not you, my dear. It’s Mallarmé. He insists on sitting on the stairs. Not a thing I can do about it.”
There was no one there, but O sidestepped the stair anyway.
Aunt Emily opened the door at the head of the stairs, and they entered a kitchen. A lean white cat was up on the table, licking milk from the bottom of a cereal bowl. It took one look at the stranger, launched off the table, and disappeared down a hall.
The Green Man Page 2