"Blaylock-CuriosityShop" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blaylock James P)

JAMES P. BLAYLOCK

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 1, 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 (Edna 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 fumed 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 fumed 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.

HERANG 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 Cafe 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
fount 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."

"Hap 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 to drift away, poor thing."

"The moon..." he said, not quite comprehending. The word "lunacy" leaped 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 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 to. She made herself
light. That's the only truth you'll find town 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 kill 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 Magnolia 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 be 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-bunked 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.

He heard footsteps inside, and the arched door opened slowly to reveal a
high-ceilinged room with stone floors and dark wood paneling. The man in the
doorway was tall and thin, with a stretched, Lincolnesque face and a rumpled
black suit. Jimmerson stepped into the room, which smelled of gardenias, and the
man swung the door shut against the rain.

"It's a hellish night," he said, and he nodded at Jimmerson. "I'm George
Gladstone."

"Doyle Jimmerson, Mr. Gladstone. I'm glad to meet you."

"I see. You must be Edna Jimmerson's...?"

"Husband." He felt like a fraud. "I was in Seattle when I heard. On business. I
drove straight down."

"I'm certain you got here as quickly as you could, Mr. Jimmerson, and welcome to
Angel's Flight." A long sideboard stood against the far wall of the room, and on
top of the sideboard was a bowl of floating gardenia blossoms and an iron clock.
The sound of the ticking clock filled the mausoleum. A gilt-framed painting hung
above the sideboard depicting a man and a woman dressed in robes, ascending into
heaven in defiance of gravity. An arched door stood open in the clouds, and the
Earth lay far below. Here and there above it more people were ascending, tiny
wingless angels rising into the sky against the blue of the ocean.

"Very nice picture," Jimmerson said. And he peered more closely at the door in
the clouds, at the light that shone from beyond it. There was something in the
spiral brush strokes that looked like eyes, hundreds of them, staring out from
heaven at the world of the living.

"We like to think of ourselves as a celestial depot, Mr. Jimmerson."

"That's a comforting thought." He fumed his back on the painting. I wonder if I
could see...Edna's grave. My wife. I realize it's late, and the weather and
all..."

"Yes, of course you can."

"You don't have to take any trouble. If you'll just show me the way... "

"No trouble at all, Mr. Jimmerson. Give me a moment and I'll see to the
equipage." Jimmerson followed him into an adjacent room, where a display of
coffins was laid out, the coffins set into niches along a stone wall, all of
them tilted up at the head end to better show them off. Light shone down on them
from candle-flame bulbs in iron chandeliers high above in the ceiling, but the
light was dim and the room full of shadows cast by the coffins and by the
complex framework of iron that supported them. Jimmerson looked them over,
vaguely and shamefully wondering which sort Edna had been buried in--nothing
expensive, probably.

They were apparently arranged in order of extravagance. A simple coffin-shaped
pine box lay nearest the door, the two-piece lid nailed tight on the bottom and
hinged open at the top to reveal a quilted satin lining within. There was a
fancier box next to it--some sort of exotic veneer with chrome hardware, and
next to that a white-lacquered box with gold handles and a round glass viewing
window. Jimmerson stepped across co it and looked in through the porthole, then
gasped and trod back when he saw that there was someone inside--a man, pale and
thin and with his coat collar too high on his neck.

He forced himself to take another look, and he saw this time that it was a
display dummy, its hair very neatly combed and its cheeks rouged. A fly had
gotten inside somehow and died, and it lay now on the white satin pillow
alongside the dummy's head. It occurred to him that he ought to point the fly
out to Gladstone, just for the sake of friendliness, but Gladstone had utterly
disappeared, and the mausoleum was silent but for the ticking of the entryway
clock. Jimmerson ran his hand over the polished ebony of the next casket, and
then walked along past a half dozen more--gold-leafed, inlaid, and carved and
with handles and hasps and doodads of silver and ivory. There was an Egyptian
sarcophagus, the lid thrown back and supported by a heavy-linked chain. The
raised image on the lid was of a pharaoh-looking robed man with a conical beard,
his arms crossed, his head turned to the side. In his hands he held a richly
painted ankh and a striped serpent, and within the casket, tilted against a
brass easel, lay an explanatory placard suggesting that instead of a pharaoh,
the image of your loved one might be fashioned on the lid, holding anything at
all in his hands--a favorite tie, a fountain pen, a golf club. The casket was
extra wide, the paneled sides fit with slots that contained a pair of decorative
flasks and a cut crystal tumbler. There were other slots left empty, book-size
cubbyholes and a sliding glass panel suitable for a framed photograph.

"All the comforts of home," Gladstone said, coming into the room. "Room at the
foot end for a companion as well. Mr. Hemming, the car dealer from Santa Ana,
was interred with his dog."

"They killed the dog?" Jimmerson asked, horrified.

"Oh heavens no. The dog died of grief. It's not at all uncommon. Dogs are
particularly sensitive that way." He stared at Jimmerson for a moment, as if he
intended the comment to make some sort of point, a not very obscure point, and
then he said, "Perhaps you'd like to see a little something." Jimmerson followed
him out of the room, back toward the rear of the mausoleum where their footsteps
echoed down a long corridor lit with flickering wall sconces. There were heavy
wooden doors in the stone walls on either side. Gladstone stopped at one of the
doors, removed a skeleton key from his pocket, and unlocked the bolt, swinging
it open on its hinges to reveal a room containing half a dozen steel tables. A
cord emerged from a slot at the bottom of one of the tables, and floating like a
helium balloon some few feet from the ceiling, tethered by its foot to the cord,
was what appeared to be a shroud-draped human corpse, its face and bare feet
exposed to the dim light of the room.

Jimmerson at first took it for another dummy, and he glanced at the ceiling,
expecting to see wires. There were none. He stared at it, uncomprehending, but
then with a growing certainty that the thing's pale flesh and stringy hair was
in fact the flesh and hair of a dead man. Gladstone stepped across and tugged on
the cord, which wound down into the table. The corpse descended a couple of feet
and then floated slowly upward again when he let go of the cord, its feet
swinging around in a clockwise direction, then back again. "He'll come down on
his own fairly soon," Gladstone said, seeing the look on Jimmerson's face.
"These cases always do. It takes about twelve hours for the spirit to flee the
body after death, and then the remains are earthbound once again. Often there's
nothing left but a paper shell, easily inflatable if the family wants an open
casket funeral."

"What...what on earth did he die of?"

"A broken heart, Mr. Jimmerson. I'll tell you that plainly. Medical science
calls it `voluntary dwindling' when they call it anything at all. Which they
don't, for the most part. It's utterly beyond the grasp of medicine. These are
matters of the spirit, by and large. And it's rare, I can assure you, that we
get two such advanced cases in a single week." He stared at Jimmerson again, who
suddenly remembered the restraints on Edna's deathbed. What had Mrs. Crandle
said about Edna's "drifting away"? Had she been speaking literally...?

"Was Edna...?"

Gladstone nodded slowly, and Jimmerson leaned against the plaster wall to steady
himself.

"She's out of harm's way now," Gladstone said, patting Jimmerson's arm. "Let's
have a look at her grave, shall we?"

He led the way down the corridor again, Jimmerson stumbling along after him,
until they came out into a sort of stone gardener's shed with a lean-to roof.
Mud-caked spades and shovels stood tilted against the wall, and a steel backhoe
scoop lay on the floor alongside the iron debris of a dismantled engine, greasy
pistons and bolts and hoses dumped haphazardly on the ground. Two yellow rain
slickers hung from hooks by the door, and Gladstone stepped over the engine
parts and took them down, handing one to Jimmerson. It had an attached hat with
a wide brim, and the coat itself hung to Jimmerson's knees. Gladstone passed him
a black umbrella, then opened the door and stepped out into the rain, which was
falling more lightly now.

Jimmerson followed him along a narrow stone path, hoisting his umbrella against
the mist and fuming it into the wind, which gusted through the trees, sweeping
down a litter of dead oak leaves that whirled away across the grounds. The night
smelled of wet leaves and clay, and the moon shone between the clouds, the
headstones casting long shadows on the grass. The path wound in a wide circle
toward the walnut grove, past a lily-choked fish pond and a cluster of mossy
concrete benches. Gladstone finally stopped at the edge of a small, gently
sloping hill where a rectangle of new turf covered a tiny grave. They stood
silently for a moment.

"It's awfully small," Jimmerson whispered at last.

Gladstone nodded. "It's not uncommon," he said, "that a dwindler can fit into a
casket the size of shoe box, once the spirit has flown. And it's not without its
advantages, I suppose, when all is said and done. Very conservative burial,
specially speaking."

"Will there be a headstone?" Jimmerson asked. "I guess it's up to me to order
one."

"One should arrive from the stonecutters late next week, actually. It was paid
for by a Mr. des Laumes, I believe the name was. French gentleman. You must have
known him." Gladstone gave him a sidewise glance, then looked quickly away.

"Cancel the order," Jimmerson told him.

"It's too late for that," Mr. Jimmerson. "The work's underway. Very elaborate,
too."

"I don't want elaborate. I want simple. This Frenchman's got no right to order a
headstone. Who gave him permission to shove his oar in?"

"Permission, Mr. Jimmerson? In the absence of any other offering..." He shrugged
helplessly. "Of course, now that you've resumed..."

"That's right. Now that I've come home Mr. des Laumes's headstone can go to
hell. If the work's already started, then I'll pay for it. Mr. des Laumes can
have it back with interest, too-on top of his head."

"As you wish, sir," Gladstone said. "It only has to snow once before I get the
drift." He nodded and winked, shook Jimmerson's hand, and then moved off down
the path again, heading back toward the mausoleum. Jimmerson stayed by the
graveside, forcing himself to simmer down. By God, he wouldn't let this
Frenchman give him another moment of grief, not one more moment--especially not
here at Edna's grave.

It struck him suddenly that he ought to have brought flowers, something...a
keepsake of some sort. His boxes of stuff were still in the Mercury, and he
looked out across the hundred yards of rainy night toward the shadowy station
wagon, picturing the clusters of quartz crystals they'd brought home from Death
Valley and the pair of conical ceramic tornadoes from Edna's family reunion back
in Kansas.

But what would he do with them?--scatter salt and pepper shakers across the
grave like amulets? He knelt in the grass and ran his hand over the wet squares
of turf fitted over the grave, and he felt the freshening rain patter against
his slicker. He didn't bother with the umbrella now, but pulled the hat brim
down over his forehead, closed his eyes, and tried to pray.

Prayer didn't come easily. He tried again, trying to concentrate, to focus, but
almost at once he doubted his own sincerity, and the prayer fell to pieces. His
father had told him years ago that a man couldn't pray when he was drunk, and
although Jimmerson wasn't a drinking man, he had enough experience to take his
meaning. Now it seemed to him that a guilty man had an even more precarious time
praying than a drunken man, and for a long time his mind went round and round
with partly formed apologetic phrases, half of them addressed to Edna, half
addressed to the sky, until finally he shoved the hat back off his head and
knelt in the rain with his forehead in his hands, utterly defeated.

He looked up finally to find the moon high in the sky, free of the walnut grove
now. Down by the fish pond there was the shadow of Gladstone waiting patiently
in his yellow slicker on one of the concrete benches. Jimmerson rose to his
feet, his knees creaking beneath him, and walked carefully downhill to the path,
where he looked back at Edna's grave.

She wouldn't speak to him. She couldn't. She had gone on.

Jimmerson stood once again in the room with the clock and the flowers, where he
had just signed the work order for Edna's headstone- her true headstone, a
simple granite slab: loving wife of Doyle Jimmerson, marriage date as well as
birth and death. Jimmerson had contracted for the plot adjacent to hers, too,
and paid for a twin-headstone for himself.

"I'm afraid I still don't entirely understand Edna's death," he said, standing
finally in the open doorway.

"No less than I do, perhaps," Gladstone told him. "These deaths are always a
mystery--the secret of the deceased, you know. I'm familiar with the physical
manifestations at the end, of course, but the progress of the disease itself is
not in my province."

Jimmerson nodded. "So it's not a virus? It's not something she caught?"

"Caught?" He shook his head. "No more than you'd say that a fish catches a
baited hook. Rather the other way around."

"Hook? What do you mean?"

"Let's just say that voluntary dwindling isn't entirely voluntary, Mr.
Jimmerson. It's voluntary in the main, of course. As I understand it, no one
dwindles unless he chooses to dwindle. But the process can be.. .facilitated,
perhaps. Suggested."

"Facilitated how?" The Frenchman's face leaped into his mind again, complete
with the fact of Mrs. Crandle's apparently despising the man. He had been
right!--the man was a cad; although the knowledge of having been right looked
like damnation to him. Had he left Edna to some sort of murderer?

"I'm rather at a loss," Gladstone said. "It's my policy to know nothing more
than it pays me to know. I might be able to help you, though, although the word
`help'...." He shook his head.

"I'd appreciate that, Mr. Gladstone. Anything you can do for me."

Gladstone stared at him again, narrowing his eyes. "You recall the man in the
embalming room, tethered to the cord...?"

"Yes, of course."

"He told me much the same thing once, not so very long ago. Death of an old
friend, in his case. They'd had some kind of sad falling out and hadn't spoken
in years. So I'll caution you to be particularly careful of what you learn, Mr.
Jimmerson. And I'll tell you that Mr. des Laumes teas purchased more than one
headstone in his day."

WITH THE HELP of Gladstone's Jimmerson found the curiosity shop downtown. It was
near the Plaza, and from the sidewalk the shop was apparently empty. The
linoleum floor was cracked and buckled, scattered with yellowed newsprint and
empty White Rock and Nehi soft drink bottles that hadn't been sold in grocery
stores for years. The windows were hung with cobweb, and the broad sills were
covered with a heavy layer of dust and dead bugs and a litter of old business
cards. Jimmerson and Edna hat often remarked on the shop when they'd walked
downtown. Leases near the Plaza were at a premium, yet the shop had gone
untenanted since either of them could remember.

As he stood outside, looking in at the window, it seemed to him that the place
had a curious perspective to it. He couldn't quite tell how deep it was. The
walls were hung with mirrors, dim with dust, and the hazy reflections, depending
upon where he stood, made the store appear sometimes to be prodigiously deep,
sometimes to be a space so narrow that it might have been one-dimensional,
cleverly painted on the window glass. The front door, weathered and
paint-scaled, was nailed shut, and a number of envelopes had been dumped through
the brass mail slot over the years, many of them with long out-of-date postage
stamps.

Gladstone's map led him around the comer, past a Middle Eastern deli and a shop
selling Italian antiques. The day was windy, the sky full of tearing clouds, and
Jimmerson pulled his coat tightly around him, turning another comer and heading
north now, searching for the mouth of the alley that Gladstone had assured him
lay at the back of the old buildings. There was the smell of Turkish coffee in
the air, end of wet sidewalks and open Dumpsters, and he walked straight past
the alley before he knew it. It wasn't really an alley as suck' but was a
circular doorway in the brick facade of the buildings, and it opened into a sort
of courtyard, a patch of gray sky showing far overhead. Jimmerson peered into
the dimly lit recess before stepping over the high curb and into the sheltered
twilight. The courtyard was utterly silent, the walls blocking even the traffic
noise on the street. He walked hesitantly along the wall, trailing his right
hand, and watching to see if there was anyone about. He felt as if he were
trespassing, and he was ready to apologize and get the hell out if he were
challenged at all. But the courtyard was empty, the brick pavers up in weeds as
if no one had walked there for an age.

A row of high, shuttered windows with an iron balcony looked down from the
second story; the lower story was nothing but weathered brick, uninterrupted
except for a single deeply set door with a heavy brass knocker and a tiny
peephole. Jimmerson stood looking for a moment at the door. Gladstone had
described it to him, and, seeing it now, he felt as if he were at the edge of
something, as if something were pending, as if opening it would change things
irreversibly and forever.

A gust of wind blew into the courtyard, kicking up a little wind devil of leaves
and trash and dust, and Jimmerson ducked into the doorway recess, out of the
turmoil. He put his hand on the door knocker, but the door was apparently
unlatched, and it immediately slammed open, propelled by the wind. Jimmerson
slipped inside, pressing the door shut behind him, and stood for a moment in the
quiet darkness, letting his eyes adjust. He heard sounds now, the shuffling of
paper and a noise that sounded like the muted cawing of a crow, and he stepped
carefully along down the hallway toward what was clearly the back door of a shop
that fronted on the Plaza, the door's wavy glass window dimly lighted from the
other side. Hesitantly, he rapped on the glass, ready to convince himself that
there was nobody there, that Gladstone was a lunatic. The floating corpse might
as easily have been a clever balloon. And Mrs. Crandle was so stupefyingly
obscure that...

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

"Come in," someone said, and Jimmerson fumed 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 famished 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 comer 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 pullet 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, ant 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 collars' 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 theatrically. "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 far 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 being 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.

"My advice is simply to take the candy dish, Mr. Jimmerson. Tomorrow's another
day. Tomorrow's always another day."

Jimmerson climbed heavily to his feet, steadying himself against the counter. He
took the dish and nodded his thanks, and Pillbody picked his penny up off the
counter and dropped it into a slot cut into the back of the fish lamp. Jimmerson
plodded heavily toward the door. He had the curious feeling that he was falling,
that he was so monstrously heavy he was plummeting straight through the center
of the Earth and would shoot feet first out the far side. He reached unsteadily
for the doorknob, yanked the door open, and stepped into the dim hallway, where,
as if from a tremendous distance, he heard the dull metallic clang of the penny
finally hitting the bottom of the brass fish. There was the sound of an
avalanche of tumbling coins, and then silence when the door banged shut behind
him.

He felt the wind in his face now, the corridor stretching away in front of him
like an asphalt highway, straight as an arrow, its vanishing point visible in
the murky distance. Moss-hung trees rushed along on either side of him, and he
knew he was on the road again, recognized the southern Louisiana landscape, the
road south of New Orleans where he and Edna had found a farmhouse bed and
breakfast. The memory flooded in upon him, and he gripped the candy dish,
pressing it against his chest as the old Pontiac bounced along the rutted road,
past chickens and low-lying swampland, weathered hovels and weedy truck patches.
Edna sat silently beside him, gazing out the window. Neither of them had spoken
for a half an hour.

She had bought the candy dish from an antique store along the highway --late
yesterday afternoon? It seemed like a lifetime ago. It seemed as if everything
he could remember had happened to him late yesterday afternoon, his entire past
rolling up behind the Pontiac like a snail shell. The memory of their argument
-- his argument -- was abruptly clear in his mind. He heard his own voice,
remembered how clever it had been when he had called her a junkaholic, and
talked about how she shouldn't spend so much of their money on worthless trash.
He saw the two of them in that little wooden room with the sloped ceiling, the
four-poster bed: how after giving her a piece of his mind, he had knocked the
candy dish onto the floor and broken it in two. She had accused him of knocking
it off on purpose, which of course he said he hadn't, and he had gotten sore,
and told her to haul the rest of the junk she'd bought out of its bags and boxes
-- the ceramics and glassware, the thimbles and postcards and knickknacks -- and
he'd cheerfully fling the whole pile of it into the duck pond.

He shut his eyes, listening to the tires hum on the highway. Had he knocked the
dish onto the floor on purpose? Certainly he hadn't meant to break it, to hurt
Edna. It was just that.... Damn it, he couldn't remember what it was. All
justification had vanished. His years-old anger looked nutty to him now. What
damned difference did it make that Edna wanted a pink glass candy dish? He
wished to God he had bought her a truckload of them. His cherished anger had
been a bottomless well, but now that she was gone, now that the whole issue of
candy dishes was a thing of the irretrievable past, he couldn't summon any anger
at all. It was simply empty, that well.

He glanced out the car window at a half dozen white egrets that stood
stilt-legged in a marsh, and he reached across the seat and tried to pat her
leg, but he couldn't reach her. She sat too far away from him now. He
accelerated, pushing the car over a low rise, the sun glaring so brightly on the
highway ahead that he turned his face away. He held the dish out to her, but she
ignored him, watching the landscape through the window, and the sorrow that
hovered in the air around her like a shade was confused in his mind with the
upholstery smell of their old pink and gray Pontiac. The car had burned oil -- a
quart every few days -- but they had driven it through forty-two states, put a
lot of highway behind them, a lot of miles.

"Take it," he whispered.

But even as he spoke it seemed to him that she was fading, slipping away from
him. There was the smell of hot oil burning on the exhaust manifold, and the sun
was far too bright through the windshield, and the tires hummed like a swarm of
bees, and the candy dish slipped out of his hand and fell into two pieces on the
gray fabric of the car seat.

When he came to himself he was outside again, standing in the wind, the door
that led to the curiosity shop closed behind him. He searched the paving stones
for the broken candy dish, but it was simply gone, vanished. He tried the door,
but it was locked now. He banged the door knocker, hammering away, and the sound
of the blows rang through the courtyard, echoing from the high brick walls.

THE CAFE DES LAUMES lay two blocks west of the Plaza, near the old train
station. It shared a wall with I Tubbs Cordage Company, and across the street
lay a vacant lot strewn with broken concrete from a long-ago demolished
building. In the rainy evening gloom the cafe looked tawdry and cheerless
despite the lights glowing inside. There was no sign hanging outside, just an
address in brass numbers and a menu taped into the window. He watched the cafe
door from the Mercury, not quite knowing what he wanted, what he was going to
do. He opened the glove box and looked again at the .38 that lay inside, and
then he gazed for a moment through the windshield, his mind adrift, the rain
falling softly on the lamplit street. He shut the glove box and climbed tiredly
out of the car, walking across the street and around the side of the building,
its windows nearly hidden by overgrown bushes.

He was alone on the sidewalk, the cordage company closed up, the nearest
headlights three blocks away on the boulevard. He ducked in among the bushes,
high-stepping through a tangle of ivy and parting the branches of an elephant
ear so that he could see past the edge of the window. The cafe was nearly empty
-- just an old man tiredly eating a cutlet at a comer table and two girls with
bobbed hair huddled deep in conversation over a tureen of mussels. Jimmerson saw
then that there was a third table occupied, a private booth near the kitchen
door. It was des Laumes himself, his curled hair brushed back, a bottle of wine
on the table in front of him. His plate was heaped high with immense snails, and
he probed in one of them with a long-tined fork, dragging out a piece of yellow
snail meat and thrusting it into his mouth, wiping dripped sauce away with a
napkin. His chin whiskers worked back and forth as he chewed, and the sight of
it made Jimmerson instantly furious. He thought of going back out to the car,
fetching the .38 out of the glove box, and giving the sorry bastard a taste of a
different sort of slug....

But then he recalled the broken candy dish, and somehow the anger vanished like
a penny down a storm drain, and when he searched his mind for it, he couldn't
find it. To hell with des Laumes. He hunched out of the bushes again and walked
up the sidewalk to where an alley led along behind the cafe. The building was
deeper than it had appeared to be, a warren of rooms that ran back behind the
cordage company. It was an old building, too -- hard to say how old, turn of the
century, probably, perhaps an old wooden flophouse that had been converted to a
cafe. There were a couple of windows aglow some distance along the wall, and
beyond them a door with a little piece of roof over it. Jimmerson tried the
door, but it was locked, bolted from the inside. He spotted a pile of wooden
pallets farther up the alley, and he hurried toward them, pulling one of the
pallets off the pile and dragging it along the asphalt until he stood beneath
the window. He tilted it gingerly against the wall and climbed up the rungs
until he could see in over the sill.

A high-ceilinged room lay beyond the window, a table in the corner, a row of
beds along one long wall, a big iron safe near the door, some packing crates and
excelsior piled in a heap on the floor. The beds rose one atop the other like
bunks in an opium den. Each of the beds had a small shelf built at the foot end,
with a tiny wineglass hanging upside down in a slot, and a small decanter of
greenish liquid, possibly wine, standing on the shelf. Three of the beds were
hidden by curtains, and Jimmerson wondered if there were sleepers behind them,
like dope fiends on the nod. He heard a rhythmic sighing on the air of the alley
around him -- what sounded like heavy, regular breathing, a somnolent, lonely
sound that reminded him somehow of Edna's deathbed. A man entered the room now;
it was the old cutlet eater from inside the cafe. He moved haltingly, as if he
were half asleep, and without a pause to so much as take off his shoes, he
climbed into one of the bunks and pulled the curtain closed.

Another of the curtains moved, pushing out away from the bed hidden behind it,
and as Jimmerson watched, a man in a wrinkled suit and stubble beard rolled out
from beneath the curtain and balanced precariously on the side rail of the bunk,
apparently still asleep. Jimmerson braced himself, expecting him to tumble off
onto the floor, but instead he tilted slowly back and forth, as if buoyed up by
whatever strange currents circulated in the room. He muttered something
inaudible, and the muttering dissolved into a muffled sob. And then he tilted
forward again so that he seemed to cling to the bed with a knee and an elbow.
There was the sudden crash of something hitting the wooden floorboards directly
beneath him, and at that instant he lofted toward the ceiling like Gladstone's
dead man. But there was a tether tied to his ankle, the other end of the tether
affixed to an iron ring bolted to the bed frame, and the man leveled off and
floated peacefully just below the ceiling.

The object on the floor was clearly a teddy bear, or at least the replica of a
teddy bear, and from where Jimmerson stood it appeared to have been contrived
with uncanny verisimilitude -- apparently out of rusty cast iron. It looked worn
from years of handling, its nose pushed aside, one of its eyes missing, a clump
of stuffing like steel wool shoving out of a tear in its leg.

Along the wall opposite stood an open cabinet divided into junk-filled
cubbyholes, much of it reminiscent of the stuff in Pillbody's shop --bric-a-brac
mostly, travel souvenirs and keepsakes. Jimmerson made out what appeared to be
an old letterman's sweater, a smoking pipe, a caned seashell, a tiny abacus, a
copper Jell-o mold in the shape of a child's face, an exquisitely detailed
statue of a nude woman, her face downcast, her hands crossed demurely in front
of her. He saw then that there were name placards on each of the cubbyholes,
hung on cup hooks as if for easy removal.

He stepped backward off his makeshift ladder, his hands trembling, and started
back down the alley toward the street, although he knew straightaway that he
wasn't going anywhere. Gladstone had warned him about this, so it wasn't any
vast surprise. He had largely come to understand it, too -- what Pillbody's
curiosities amounted to, what it was that Edna had sold, why she had grown more
and more vacant as the months had slipped past. He thought about the odds and
ends on her bedside table, the medicinal-smelling bottle with the green stain,
the liqueur glass, and he wondered if one of these narrow beds had been hers, a
sort of home away from home.

Retracing his steps to the pallet, he climbed back up to the lighted window and
forced himself to read the names one by one, spotting Edna's right away, he
third cubbyhole from the left. He could see that there was something inside,
pushed back into the shadows where it was nearly hidden from view, something
that caught the light. He strained to make it out -- a perfume bottle? A glass
figurine? He searched his memory, but couldn't find such an object anywhere.

The door opened at the far end of the room now, and an old woman walked in,
followed by des Laumes. Her hair was a corona of white around her head, and she
was wrinkled enough to be a hundred years old. The floating man had descended
halfway to the floor, as if he were slowly losing buoyancy, and the old woman
grabbed his shoe and a handful of his coat and steered him toward his bed again,
pushing him past his curtain so that he was once again hidden from view. She
bent over to pick up the thing on the floor, but des Laumes had to help her with
it, as if it were incredibly heavy. Together they shoved it into a cubbyhole
marked "Peterson." She fumed and left then, without a word.

Des Laumes remained behind, looking around himself as if suspicious that
something was out of order. He appeared to be sniffing the air, and he held a
hand up, extending his first finger as if gauging the direction of the wind.
Jimmerson moved to the comer of the window, hiding himself from view. A moment
later he peered carefully past the window casing again.

The Frenchman held the statue of the woman in his hand now, scrutinizing it
carefully. Then he peeked inside one of the cubbyholes and retrieved a glass
paperweight that appeared to Jimmerson to be packed with hundreds of tiny glass
flowers. Des Laumes held it to the light, nodded heavily, and walked across to
the safe, spinning the dial. He swung the door open, placed the statue and the
paperweight inside, and shut the door.

Jimmerson climbed down again and set off up the alley. His thinking had narrowed
to a tiny focus, and his hands had steadied. Within a few seconds he had the .38
out of the glove compartment. He slipped the gun into his trousers pocket, then
walked straight across the street, up the flagstone path to the cafe. The door
opened and the two girls with the bobbed hair came out, arguing heatedly now,
neither one of them looking happy. Jimmerson slipped past them through the open
door, face to face with des Laumes himself, who stood there playing the host
now. The Frenchman reached for a menu, gestured, and moved off toward a table
before realizing who Jimmerson was. He turned around halfway across the empty
cafe, a look of theatrical surprise on his face. "What a pleasure," he said.

"Can I have a word with you somewhere private?" Jimmerson spoke to him in the
tone of an old and indebted friend.

"It's very private here," the man said to him. "How can I help you?" His face
was bloated and veined, as if corrupted from years of unnameable abuse, and he
reeked of cologne, which only half hid a ghastly odor reminiscent of the stink
in Pillbody's "parlor room."

"Help me?" Jimmerson asked, hauling the gun out of his pocket and pointing at
the Frenchman's chest. "Better to help yourself. I'll follow you into the back."
He gestured with the gun.

"I've been shot before," des Laumes told him, shrugging with indifference, and
Jimmerson pulled the trigger, aiming high, blowing the hell out of a brass wall
sconce with a glass shade. The sound of the gun was crashingly loud, and
startled horror passed across des Laumes's face as he threw his hands up.

Someone peered out of the kitchen -- the chef apparently -- and Jimmerson waved
the pistol at him. "Get the hell out of here, " he shouted, and the man ducked
back into the kitchen. There was the sound of a woman's voice then, and running
feet. A door slalomed, and the kitchen was silent. "Let's go," Jimmerson said,
aiming the gun with both hands at the Frenchman's stomach now. The man turned
and headed back through the cafe, past the kitchen door, down a hallway and into
the room with the beds. Keeping the pistol aimed at des Laumes, Jimmerson
reached into Edna's cubbyhole and pulled out the trinket inside -- a glass
replica of what appeared to be the old Pontiac.

He hesitated for a moment before slipping it into his pocket, steeling himself
for the disorienting shift into the past, into the realm of Edna's memory.
Probably he would lose des Laumes in the process. The Frenchman would simply
take the pistol away from him, maybe shoot him right then and there....

But nothing happened. He might as well have dropped his car keys into his
pocket. "The safe, " Jimmerson said.

Des Laumes shrugged again. "What is it that you want?" he asked, turning his
palms up. "Surely..."

"What I want is to shoot you to pieces, " Jimmerson told him. "I don't know what
you are -- some kind of damn vampire I guess. But I don't have one damn thing to
lose by blowing the living hell out of you right now. You should know that,
you...stinking overblown bearded twit." He stepped forward, closing in with the
pistol as if he would shove it up the Frenchman's nose. The man fell back a
step, putting up his hands again and shaking his head. "Now open the safe,"
Jimmerson told him.

The Frenchman spun the dial and opened the safe door, then stepped aside and
waved at it as if he were introducing a circus act. "Clean it out," Jimmerson
told him. "Put everything into the boxes." He picked up a packing crate and set
it on the floor in front of the safe, and des Laumes took objects out one by one
and laid them in, packing the excelsior around them.

"This is common theft," the Frenchman said, shaking his head sadly.

"That's right," Jimmerson told him. "And it'll be a common hole in the head for
the good Pierre if he doesn't hurry the hell up. That's it, monsieur, the
statue, too. Now the stuff in the cabinet. Fill those boxes." He thought about
the chef, the rest of them that had fled through the back door. Would they go to
the police? He made up his mind right there on the spot: if he heard sirens, if
the door flew open and des Laumes was saved, Jimmerson would shoot the man dead
before he handed over the gun.

Des Laumes filled a second packing crate and then a third, until every last
piece of bric-a-brac lay in the crates. Except for the glass automobile,
Jimmerson hadn't recognized any of it as Edna's. And even if des Laumes knew the
source of the things in the safe, he wouldn't tell Jimmerson the truth about
them. The man was an end-to-end lie, with nothing at all to recommend him but
his idiotic beard like a runover tar brush. Jimmerson was heartily sick of the
sight of it, and with the .38 he motioned des Laumes against the wall, away from
the sleeping people on the beds. He easily pictured killing the man, shooting
the hell out of him, leaving him dead and bloody on the ground.

But somehow the taste of it was like dust in his mouth. How would there be any
satisfaction in it' He could as easily picture Gladstone shaking his head sadly,
and the idea filled him with shame. More trouble, more pain -- anger like a
drug, like alcohol, like lunacy, having its way with him again.

There were no sirens yet, no need to hurry.

"Sit down," he said, and des Laumes, his face white now, slumped obediently
against the wall. Holding the gun on him, Jimmerson removed one of the
liqueur-filled decanters from its niche in the shelf above an empty bed. "Drink
it like a good boy," he said, handing it to him, and he held the pistol against
the man's ear.

De Laumes stared at him, as if he were making up his mind. He shook his head
feebly and started to speak. And then, as if suddenly changing his mind, he
heaved a long sigh, shrugged, and drank off the contents of the decanter.

"That's it," Jimmerson said. "Down the hatch." He fetched out another decanter,
and forced him to drink that one, too, and then a third and a fourth. All in all
there must have been two quarts of the stuff, and the room reeked with the
camphor and weeds smell of it.

Des Laumes's face had rapidly taken on a green pallor, and he looked around
himself now, a growing bewilderment and horror in his eyes. He clutched his
expanding stomach and slowly began to rock forward and backward, his head
bouncing with increasing force off the wall behind, his eyes jerking upward in
their sockets, a green scum at the comers of his mouth. Jimmerson backed away in
case the man got sick, watching as the rocking intensified and des Laumes began
to jackknife at the waist like a mad contortionist, his forehead driving
impossibly against the floorboards, a piglike grunting issuing from somewhere
deep inside him.

Jimmerson awakened the four sleepers, two women and two men -- the old cutlet
eater and poor Peterson. The women, both of whom still clutched their handbags,
were surprisingly young and bedraggled, and they looked out from their beds,
blinking their eyes, growing slowly aware of des Laumes's thrashing on the
floor. One by one Jimmerson helped them down, untethering them from the beds,
unbolting the back door and letting them out into the alley. Mr. Peterson walked
like a man on the moon, high-stepping through the puddle, and it occurred to
Jimmerson to offer him back his cast-iron teddy bear for ballast, but he saw
that it wouldn't be a kindness to him. Soon enough he'd be heavy again.

When the four of them had reached the street, Jimmerson hauled the packing
crates out into the night and then headed around the cafe to where the Mercury
was parked. He climbed inside, fired it up, and swung around the corner into the
alley, letting the engine idle while he loaded the crates into the rear of the
car along with his own boxes of junk.

There was a noise from inside the cafe like rocks hitting the walls, and
Jimmerson looked in through the door, which was partly blocked by des Laumes
himself. The Frenchman had levitated a couple of feet off the floor, and his
body spasmed in midair like a pupating insect in a cocoon. The room roundabout
him was strewn with unidentifiable junk --rusty iron and dirty glass and earthy
ceramic objects, misshapen and stinking. Jimmerson pulled the door shut and
climbed into the Mercury, slamming the car door against the sounds of knocking
and grunting and moaning, and backed away down the alley, swinging out into the
street and accelerating toward home as the rain began to fall again. He reached
into his pocket and took out the glass Pontiac, which he set carefully on the
top of the dashboard so that it caught the rainy glow of passing headlights, and
it was then that it dawned on him that he should have left des Laumes a penny.

He had needed every cubic inch of the big rental truck in order to clean out
Pillbody's shop. The dwarf had made him sign a release, and had talked obscurely
about Jimmerson's "aim being true." "On the up and up," he had said. "Solid
copper wiring. No imperfections." But he had taken the thousands of pennies
happily enough, although he had refused to drop them into the brass fish until
Jimmerson had packed up what he wanted and driven away. Jimmerson had wanted it
all, and Pillbody had worked alongside him, running wheelbarrows full of
curiosities out the back and across the courtyard to where Jimmerson had backed
the truck up to the circular brick doorway of the courtyard.

The truck crept east along Maple Street now, the engine laboring, the overload
springs jammed flat, the tires mashed against the rims, the truck bed heaving
ominously from side to side. Jimmerson sat hunched in the driver's seat, which
sagged beneath his weight, and he fought to see the road in front of him as bits
and pieces of arcane and exotic imagery stuttered through his mind like
subliminal messages, almost too rapidly to comprehend. His skin twitched and
jerked with competing emotions: dark fears rising into euphoric happiness,
dropping away again into canyons of sadness, soaring to heights of lunatic glee.
Somewhere in the depths of his mind he heard the clatter of pennies cascading
and was dimly aware of the howling of the truck engine and the smell of hot oil
and burning rubber. There was the sound of a hose bursting, and a wild cloud of
steam poured out from under the hood, and in the swirling vapors a startling
array of faces appeared and disappeared. Edna's face came and went, and he
recognized the face of the bearded man with the bloody neck, and felt a stab of
vicious and shameless satisfaction for the duration of a blink of an eye, and
then one face was replaced by another and another and another, a dozen at a
time, a hundred -- a tide of shifting visages soaking away into the sands of his
ponderous and overloaded memory.

Now and then he came to himself, heard the truck creaking and groaning, saw that
he had made his way some few feet farther up the road, felt the seat springs
burrowing against his thighs, the cramping of muscles, the pressure on his bones
and his teeth. His breath rasped in and out of his lungs and his head pounded
and the truck engine steamed and roared. Edna's face appeared before him time
and again now, and he was swept with her memories -- the memory of a fire in a
hearth on a rainy night, the two of them in easy chairs, an atmosphere of utter
contentment that he squirreled away in his mind, holding fast to it, and yet at
the same time crippled by the thought that she had given this memory away too,
that joy might have become as great a burden to her as sorrow....

He saw that he was nearly at Oak Street, nearly home, and he cranked the
steering wheel around to the right, felt the weight of the load shift
ponderously, the truck tilting up onto two wheels. For a moment he thought he
was going over, and in that impossibly long moment the pennies continued to fall
into Pillbody's brass fish, and the faces whirled in the steam in wild
profusion, and Jimmerson felt himself crushed like a lump of coal by a vast,
earth-heavy pressure.

HE OPENED his eyes when he felt the sun on his face next morning. He lay slumped
on the seat in the cab of the truck, and he moved his arms and legs gingerly,
testing for breaks and strains. His jaws ached, and his joints felt stiff and
sore, as if he were recovering from a flu. He sat up and looked out the window.
Somehow he had made it home, alive, although he had only the vaguest
recollection of arriving -- the truck shutting down with a metal-breaking clank,
hard rain beating on the roof off and on through the night.

He opened the door and stepped down onto the street, seeing that he had driven
the passenger side of the truck right up over the curb, and the wheels were sunk
now in the wet lawn. Most of the paint was gone from the truck body, apparently
shivered off, and the tires were flayed to pieces. The truck bed was nearly
emptied, scattered with just a few odds and ends of bric-a-brac. Late yesterday
evening Pillbody had finally given up counting pennies and purchases, but even
so they must have come awfully close to square in the transaction if this was
all that had been left unpaid for. Jimmerson climbed heavily up onto the bed and
filled a crate with the leftovers, then climbed down again and hauled it into
the garage where he had taken des Laumes's three crates yesterday morning. He
set about methodically smashing each object to fragments with a sledgehammer,
making sure that none of them could ever be sold, not even for a penny.
Peterson's iron bear took the most work, but finally it too crumbled into a
hundred chunky little fragments that Jimmerson dumped into a pickle jar and
capped off. And now, with Pillbody's stuff either consumed or broken, and des
Laumes's cafe cleaned out, the whole lot of it was once again a memory, a thing
of the past.

He went inside where he showered and shaved and changed into fresh clothes, and
then he hauled the single bed outside and threw it onto the back of the truck,
replacing it in the bedroom once again with the double bed from out by the
garage. Edna's remembrances -- the paperweight, the postcard, the silver spoon,
and the glass Pontiac -- he put into the curio cabinet in the living room. He
would never know what they meant, and their presence in the house would remind
him of that. He opened the windows finally, to let the air in, and then went out
through the front door, climbed into the Mercury, and drove downtown.

The curiosity shop was emptied out, no longer a mystery. The old storefront,
with its dusty litter, its confusing mirrors, and its nailed-shut door had been
swept clean, and he could see through the window into the rear of the shop now,
clear back into Pillbody's parlor room where workmen were rolling fresh paint
onto the walls. He got back into the Mercury and headed west. The Cafe des
Laumes had collapsed on itself, the windows shattered, the walls fallen in, the
roof settled over the wreck like a tilted hat. Jimmerson wondered if des Laumes
himself was in there, under the rubble, whether the man had simply imploded in
the end. To hell with him. It didn't matter anymore.

He swung a U-turn, rested his arm along the top of the seat, and drove back
south toward the cemetery, where he would try once again to pray.




JAMES P. BLAYLOCK

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 1, 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 (Edna 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 fumed 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 fumed 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.

HERANG 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 Cafe 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
fount 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."

"Hap 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 to drift away, poor thing."

"The moon..." he said, not quite comprehending. The word "lunacy" leaped 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 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 to. She made herself
light. That's the only truth you'll find town 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 kill 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 Magnolia 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 be 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-bunked 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.

He heard footsteps inside, and the arched door opened slowly to reveal a
high-ceilinged room with stone floors and dark wood paneling. The man in the
doorway was tall and thin, with a stretched, Lincolnesque face and a rumpled
black suit. Jimmerson stepped into the room, which smelled of gardenias, and the
man swung the door shut against the rain.

"It's a hellish night," he said, and he nodded at Jimmerson. "I'm George
Gladstone."

"Doyle Jimmerson, Mr. Gladstone. I'm glad to meet you."

"I see. You must be Edna Jimmerson's...?"

"Husband." He felt like a fraud. "I was in Seattle when I heard. On business. I
drove straight down."

"I'm certain you got here as quickly as you could, Mr. Jimmerson, and welcome to
Angel's Flight." A long sideboard stood against the far wall of the room, and on
top of the sideboard was a bowl of floating gardenia blossoms and an iron clock.
The sound of the ticking clock filled the mausoleum. A gilt-framed painting hung
above the sideboard depicting a man and a woman dressed in robes, ascending into
heaven in defiance of gravity. An arched door stood open in the clouds, and the
Earth lay far below. Here and there above it more people were ascending, tiny
wingless angels rising into the sky against the blue of the ocean.

"Very nice picture," Jimmerson said. And he peered more closely at the door in
the clouds, at the light that shone from beyond it. There was something in the
spiral brush strokes that looked like eyes, hundreds of them, staring out from
heaven at the world of the living.

"We like to think of ourselves as a celestial depot, Mr. Jimmerson."

"That's a comforting thought." He fumed his back on the painting. I wonder if I
could see...Edna's grave. My wife. I realize it's late, and the weather and
all..."

"Yes, of course you can."

"You don't have to take any trouble. If you'll just show me the way... "

"No trouble at all, Mr. Jimmerson. Give me a moment and I'll see to the
equipage." Jimmerson followed him into an adjacent room, where a display of
coffins was laid out, the coffins set into niches along a stone wall, all of
them tilted up at the head end to better show them off. Light shone down on them
from candle-flame bulbs in iron chandeliers high above in the ceiling, but the
light was dim and the room full of shadows cast by the coffins and by the
complex framework of iron that supported them. Jimmerson looked them over,
vaguely and shamefully wondering which sort Edna had been buried in--nothing
expensive, probably.

They were apparently arranged in order of extravagance. A simple coffin-shaped
pine box lay nearest the door, the two-piece lid nailed tight on the bottom and
hinged open at the top to reveal a quilted satin lining within. There was a
fancier box next to it--some sort of exotic veneer with chrome hardware, and
next to that a white-lacquered box with gold handles and a round glass viewing
window. Jimmerson stepped across co it and looked in through the porthole, then
gasped and trod back when he saw that there was someone inside--a man, pale and
thin and with his coat collar too high on his neck.

He forced himself to take another look, and he saw this time that it was a
display dummy, its hair very neatly combed and its cheeks rouged. A fly had
gotten inside somehow and died, and it lay now on the white satin pillow
alongside the dummy's head. It occurred to him that he ought to point the fly
out to Gladstone, just for the sake of friendliness, but Gladstone had utterly
disappeared, and the mausoleum was silent but for the ticking of the entryway
clock. Jimmerson ran his hand over the polished ebony of the next casket, and
then walked along past a half dozen more--gold-leafed, inlaid, and carved and
with handles and hasps and doodads of silver and ivory. There was an Egyptian
sarcophagus, the lid thrown back and supported by a heavy-linked chain. The
raised image on the lid was of a pharaoh-looking robed man with a conical beard,
his arms crossed, his head turned to the side. In his hands he held a richly
painted ankh and a striped serpent, and within the casket, tilted against a
brass easel, lay an explanatory placard suggesting that instead of a pharaoh,
the image of your loved one might be fashioned on the lid, holding anything at
all in his hands--a favorite tie, a fountain pen, a golf club. The casket was
extra wide, the paneled sides fit with slots that contained a pair of decorative
flasks and a cut crystal tumbler. There were other slots left empty, book-size
cubbyholes and a sliding glass panel suitable for a framed photograph.

"All the comforts of home," Gladstone said, coming into the room. "Room at the
foot end for a companion as well. Mr. Hemming, the car dealer from Santa Ana,
was interred with his dog."

"They killed the dog?" Jimmerson asked, horrified.

"Oh heavens no. The dog died of grief. It's not at all uncommon. Dogs are
particularly sensitive that way." He stared at Jimmerson for a moment, as if he
intended the comment to make some sort of point, a not very obscure point, and
then he said, "Perhaps you'd like to see a little something." Jimmerson followed
him out of the room, back toward the rear of the mausoleum where their footsteps
echoed down a long corridor lit with flickering wall sconces. There were heavy
wooden doors in the stone walls on either side. Gladstone stopped at one of the
doors, removed a skeleton key from his pocket, and unlocked the bolt, swinging
it open on its hinges to reveal a room containing half a dozen steel tables. A
cord emerged from a slot at the bottom of one of the tables, and floating like a
helium balloon some few feet from the ceiling, tethered by its foot to the cord,
was what appeared to be a shroud-draped human corpse, its face and bare feet
exposed to the dim light of the room.

Jimmerson at first took it for another dummy, and he glanced at the ceiling,
expecting to see wires. There were none. He stared at it, uncomprehending, but
then with a growing certainty that the thing's pale flesh and stringy hair was
in fact the flesh and hair of a dead man. Gladstone stepped across and tugged on
the cord, which wound down into the table. The corpse descended a couple of feet
and then floated slowly upward again when he let go of the cord, its feet
swinging around in a clockwise direction, then back again. "He'll come down on
his own fairly soon," Gladstone said, seeing the look on Jimmerson's face.
"These cases always do. It takes about twelve hours for the spirit to flee the
body after death, and then the remains are earthbound once again. Often there's
nothing left but a paper shell, easily inflatable if the family wants an open
casket funeral."

"What...what on earth did he die of?"

"A broken heart, Mr. Jimmerson. I'll tell you that plainly. Medical science
calls it `voluntary dwindling' when they call it anything at all. Which they
don't, for the most part. It's utterly beyond the grasp of medicine. These are
matters of the spirit, by and large. And it's rare, I can assure you, that we
get two such advanced cases in a single week." He stared at Jimmerson again, who
suddenly remembered the restraints on Edna's deathbed. What had Mrs. Crandle
said about Edna's "drifting away"? Had she been speaking literally...?

"Was Edna...?"

Gladstone nodded slowly, and Jimmerson leaned against the plaster wall to steady
himself.

"She's out of harm's way now," Gladstone said, patting Jimmerson's arm. "Let's
have a look at her grave, shall we?"

He led the way down the corridor again, Jimmerson stumbling along after him,
until they came out into a sort of stone gardener's shed with a lean-to roof.
Mud-caked spades and shovels stood tilted against the wall, and a steel backhoe
scoop lay on the floor alongside the iron debris of a dismantled engine, greasy
pistons and bolts and hoses dumped haphazardly on the ground. Two yellow rain
slickers hung from hooks by the door, and Gladstone stepped over the engine
parts and took them down, handing one to Jimmerson. It had an attached hat with
a wide brim, and the coat itself hung to Jimmerson's knees. Gladstone passed him
a black umbrella, then opened the door and stepped out into the rain, which was
falling more lightly now.

Jimmerson followed him along a narrow stone path, hoisting his umbrella against
the mist and fuming it into the wind, which gusted through the trees, sweeping
down a litter of dead oak leaves that whirled away across the grounds. The night
smelled of wet leaves and clay, and the moon shone between the clouds, the
headstones casting long shadows on the grass. The path wound in a wide circle
toward the walnut grove, past a lily-choked fish pond and a cluster of mossy
concrete benches. Gladstone finally stopped at the edge of a small, gently
sloping hill where a rectangle of new turf covered a tiny grave. They stood
silently for a moment.

"It's awfully small," Jimmerson whispered at last.

Gladstone nodded. "It's not uncommon," he said, "that a dwindler can fit into a
casket the size of shoe box, once the spirit has flown. And it's not without its
advantages, I suppose, when all is said and done. Very conservative burial,
specially speaking."

"Will there be a headstone?" Jimmerson asked. "I guess it's up to me to order
one."

"One should arrive from the stonecutters late next week, actually. It was paid
for by a Mr. des Laumes, I believe the name was. French gentleman. You must have
known him." Gladstone gave him a sidewise glance, then looked quickly away.

"Cancel the order," Jimmerson told him.

"It's too late for that," Mr. Jimmerson. "The work's underway. Very elaborate,
too."

"I don't want elaborate. I want simple. This Frenchman's got no right to order a
headstone. Who gave him permission to shove his oar in?"

"Permission, Mr. Jimmerson? In the absence of any other offering..." He shrugged
helplessly. "Of course, now that you've resumed..."

"That's right. Now that I've come home Mr. des Laumes's headstone can go to
hell. If the work's already started, then I'll pay for it. Mr. des Laumes can
have it back with interest, too-on top of his head."

"As you wish, sir," Gladstone said. "It only has to snow once before I get the
drift." He nodded and winked, shook Jimmerson's hand, and then moved off down
the path again, heading back toward the mausoleum. Jimmerson stayed by the
graveside, forcing himself to simmer down. By God, he wouldn't let this
Frenchman give him another moment of grief, not one more moment--especially not
here at Edna's grave.

It struck him suddenly that he ought to have brought flowers, something...a
keepsake of some sort. His boxes of stuff were still in the Mercury, and he
looked out across the hundred yards of rainy night toward the shadowy station
wagon, picturing the clusters of quartz crystals they'd brought home from Death
Valley and the pair of conical ceramic tornadoes from Edna's family reunion back
in Kansas.

But what would he do with them?--scatter salt and pepper shakers across the
grave like amulets? He knelt in the grass and ran his hand over the wet squares
of turf fitted over the grave, and he felt the freshening rain patter against
his slicker. He didn't bother with the umbrella now, but pulled the hat brim
down over his forehead, closed his eyes, and tried to pray.

Prayer didn't come easily. He tried again, trying to concentrate, to focus, but
almost at once he doubted his own sincerity, and the prayer fell to pieces. His
father had told him years ago that a man couldn't pray when he was drunk, and
although Jimmerson wasn't a drinking man, he had enough experience to take his
meaning. Now it seemed to him that a guilty man had an even more precarious time
praying than a drunken man, and for a long time his mind went round and round
with partly formed apologetic phrases, half of them addressed to Edna, half
addressed to the sky, until finally he shoved the hat back off his head and
knelt in the rain with his forehead in his hands, utterly defeated.

He looked up finally to find the moon high in the sky, free of the walnut grove
now. Down by the fish pond there was the shadow of Gladstone waiting patiently
in his yellow slicker on one of the concrete benches. Jimmerson rose to his
feet, his knees creaking beneath him, and walked carefully downhill to the path,
where he looked back at Edna's grave.

She wouldn't speak to him. She couldn't. She had gone on.

Jimmerson stood once again in the room with the clock and the flowers, where he
had just signed the work order for Edna's headstone- her true headstone, a
simple granite slab: loving wife of Doyle Jimmerson, marriage date as well as
birth and death. Jimmerson had contracted for the plot adjacent to hers, too,
and paid for a twin-headstone for himself.

"I'm afraid I still don't entirely understand Edna's death," he said, standing
finally in the open doorway.

"No less than I do, perhaps," Gladstone told him. "These deaths are always a
mystery--the secret of the deceased, you know. I'm familiar with the physical
manifestations at the end, of course, but the progress of the disease itself is
not in my province."

Jimmerson nodded. "So it's not a virus? It's not something she caught?"

"Caught?" He shook his head. "No more than you'd say that a fish catches a
baited hook. Rather the other way around."

"Hook? What do you mean?"

"Let's just say that voluntary dwindling isn't entirely voluntary, Mr.
Jimmerson. It's voluntary in the main, of course. As I understand it, no one
dwindles unless he chooses to dwindle. But the process can be.. .facilitated,
perhaps. Suggested."

"Facilitated how?" The Frenchman's face leaped into his mind again, complete
with the fact of Mrs. Crandle's apparently despising the man. He had been
right!--the man was a cad; although the knowledge of having been right looked
like damnation to him. Had he left Edna to some sort of murderer?

"I'm rather at a loss," Gladstone said. "It's my policy to know nothing more
than it pays me to know. I might be able to help you, though, although the word
`help'...." He shook his head.

"I'd appreciate that, Mr. Gladstone. Anything you can do for me."

Gladstone stared at him again, narrowing his eyes. "You recall the man in the
embalming room, tethered to the cord...?"

"Yes, of course."

"He told me much the same thing once, not so very long ago. Death of an old
friend, in his case. They'd had some kind of sad falling out and hadn't spoken
in years. So I'll caution you to be particularly careful of what you learn, Mr.
Jimmerson. And I'll tell you that Mr. des Laumes teas purchased more than one
headstone in his day."

WITH THE HELP of Gladstone's Jimmerson found the curiosity shop downtown. It was
near the Plaza, and from the sidewalk the shop was apparently empty. The
linoleum floor was cracked and buckled, scattered with yellowed newsprint and
empty White Rock and Nehi soft drink bottles that hadn't been sold in grocery
stores for years. The windows were hung with cobweb, and the broad sills were
covered with a heavy layer of dust and dead bugs and a litter of old business
cards. Jimmerson and Edna hat often remarked on the shop when they'd walked
downtown. Leases near the Plaza were at a premium, yet the shop had gone
untenanted since either of them could remember.

As he stood outside, looking in at the window, it seemed to him that the place
had a curious perspective to it. He couldn't quite tell how deep it was. The
walls were hung with mirrors, dim with dust, and the hazy reflections, depending
upon where he stood, made the store appear sometimes to be prodigiously deep,
sometimes to be a space so narrow that it might have been one-dimensional,
cleverly painted on the window glass. The front door, weathered and
paint-scaled, was nailed shut, and a number of envelopes had been dumped through
the brass mail slot over the years, many of them with long out-of-date postage
stamps.

Gladstone's map led him around the comer, past a Middle Eastern deli and a shop
selling Italian antiques. The day was windy, the sky full of tearing clouds, and
Jimmerson pulled his coat tightly around him, turning another comer and heading
north now, searching for the mouth of the alley that Gladstone had assured him
lay at the back of the old buildings. There was the smell of Turkish coffee in
the air, end of wet sidewalks and open Dumpsters, and he walked straight past
the alley before he knew it. It wasn't really an alley as suck' but was a
circular doorway in the brick facade of the buildings, and it opened into a sort
of courtyard, a patch of gray sky showing far overhead. Jimmerson peered into
the dimly lit recess before stepping over the high curb and into the sheltered
twilight. The courtyard was utterly silent, the walls blocking even the traffic
noise on the street. He walked hesitantly along the wall, trailing his right
hand, and watching to see if there was anyone about. He felt as if he were
trespassing, and he was ready to apologize and get the hell out if he were
challenged at all. But the courtyard was empty, the brick pavers up in weeds as
if no one had walked there for an age.

A row of high, shuttered windows with an iron balcony looked down from the
second story; the lower story was nothing but weathered brick, uninterrupted
except for a single deeply set door with a heavy brass knocker and a tiny
peephole. Jimmerson stood looking for a moment at the door. Gladstone had
described it to him, and, seeing it now, he felt as if he were at the edge of
something, as if something were pending, as if opening it would change things
irreversibly and forever.

A gust of wind blew into the courtyard, kicking up a little wind devil of leaves
and trash and dust, and Jimmerson ducked into the doorway recess, out of the
turmoil. He put his hand on the door knocker, but the door was apparently
unlatched, and it immediately slammed open, propelled by the wind. Jimmerson
slipped inside, pressing the door shut behind him, and stood for a moment in the
quiet darkness, letting his eyes adjust. He heard sounds now, the shuffling of
paper and a noise that sounded like the muted cawing of a crow, and he stepped
carefully along down the hallway toward what was clearly the back door of a shop
that fronted on the Plaza, the door's wavy glass window dimly lighted from the
other side. Hesitantly, he rapped on the glass, ready to convince himself that
there was nobody there, that Gladstone was a lunatic. The floating corpse might
as easily have been a clever balloon. And Mrs. Crandle was so stupefyingly
obscure that...

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

"Come in," someone said, and Jimmerson fumed 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 famished 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 comer 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 pullet 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, ant 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 collars' 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 theatrically. "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 far 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 being 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.

"My advice is simply to take the candy dish, Mr. Jimmerson. Tomorrow's another
day. Tomorrow's always another day."

Jimmerson climbed heavily to his feet, steadying himself against the counter. He
took the dish and nodded his thanks, and Pillbody picked his penny up off the
counter and dropped it into a slot cut into the back of the fish lamp. Jimmerson
plodded heavily toward the door. He had the curious feeling that he was falling,
that he was so monstrously heavy he was plummeting straight through the center
of the Earth and would shoot feet first out the far side. He reached unsteadily
for the doorknob, yanked the door open, and stepped into the dim hallway, where,
as if from a tremendous distance, he heard the dull metallic clang of the penny
finally hitting the bottom of the brass fish. There was the sound of an
avalanche of tumbling coins, and then silence when the door banged shut behind
him.

He felt the wind in his face now, the corridor stretching away in front of him
like an asphalt highway, straight as an arrow, its vanishing point visible in
the murky distance. Moss-hung trees rushed along on either side of him, and he
knew he was on the road again, recognized the southern Louisiana landscape, the
road south of New Orleans where he and Edna had found a farmhouse bed and
breakfast. The memory flooded in upon him, and he gripped the candy dish,
pressing it against his chest as the old Pontiac bounced along the rutted road,
past chickens and low-lying swampland, weathered hovels and weedy truck patches.
Edna sat silently beside him, gazing out the window. Neither of them had spoken
for a half an hour.

She had bought the candy dish from an antique store along the highway --late
yesterday afternoon? It seemed like a lifetime ago. It seemed as if everything
he could remember had happened to him late yesterday afternoon, his entire past
rolling up behind the Pontiac like a snail shell. The memory of their argument
-- his argument -- was abruptly clear in his mind. He heard his own voice,
remembered how clever it had been when he had called her a junkaholic, and
talked about how she shouldn't spend so much of their money on worthless trash.
He saw the two of them in that little wooden room with the sloped ceiling, the
four-poster bed: how after giving her a piece of his mind, he had knocked the
candy dish onto the floor and broken it in two. She had accused him of knocking
it off on purpose, which of course he said he hadn't, and he had gotten sore,
and told her to haul the rest of the junk she'd bought out of its bags and boxes
-- the ceramics and glassware, the thimbles and postcards and knickknacks -- and
he'd cheerfully fling the whole pile of it into the duck pond.

He shut his eyes, listening to the tires hum on the highway. Had he knocked the
dish onto the floor on purpose? Certainly he hadn't meant to break it, to hurt
Edna. It was just that.... Damn it, he couldn't remember what it was. All
justification had vanished. His years-old anger looked nutty to him now. What
damned difference did it make that Edna wanted a pink glass candy dish? He
wished to God he had bought her a truckload of them. His cherished anger had
been a bottomless well, but now that she was gone, now that the whole issue of
candy dishes was a thing of the irretrievable past, he couldn't summon any anger
at all. It was simply empty, that well.

He glanced out the car window at a half dozen white egrets that stood
stilt-legged in a marsh, and he reached across the seat and tried to pat her
leg, but he couldn't reach her. She sat too far away from him now. He
accelerated, pushing the car over a low rise, the sun glaring so brightly on the
highway ahead that he turned his face away. He held the dish out to her, but she
ignored him, watching the landscape through the window, and the sorrow that
hovered in the air around her like a shade was confused in his mind with the
upholstery smell of their old pink and gray Pontiac. The car had burned oil -- a
quart every few days -- but they had driven it through forty-two states, put a
lot of highway behind them, a lot of miles.

"Take it," he whispered.

But even as he spoke it seemed to him that she was fading, slipping away from
him. There was the smell of hot oil burning on the exhaust manifold, and the sun
was far too bright through the windshield, and the tires hummed like a swarm of
bees, and the candy dish slipped out of his hand and fell into two pieces on the
gray fabric of the car seat.

When he came to himself he was outside again, standing in the wind, the door
that led to the curiosity shop closed behind him. He searched the paving stones
for the broken candy dish, but it was simply gone, vanished. He tried the door,
but it was locked now. He banged the door knocker, hammering away, and the sound
of the blows rang through the courtyard, echoing from the high brick walls.

THE CAFE DES LAUMES lay two blocks west of the Plaza, near the old train
station. It shared a wall with I Tubbs Cordage Company, and across the street
lay a vacant lot strewn with broken concrete from a long-ago demolished
building. In the rainy evening gloom the cafe looked tawdry and cheerless
despite the lights glowing inside. There was no sign hanging outside, just an
address in brass numbers and a menu taped into the window. He watched the cafe
door from the Mercury, not quite knowing what he wanted, what he was going to
do. He opened the glove box and looked again at the .38 that lay inside, and
then he gazed for a moment through the windshield, his mind adrift, the rain
falling softly on the lamplit street. He shut the glove box and climbed tiredly
out of the car, walking across the street and around the side of the building,
its windows nearly hidden by overgrown bushes.

He was alone on the sidewalk, the cordage company closed up, the nearest
headlights three blocks away on the boulevard. He ducked in among the bushes,
high-stepping through a tangle of ivy and parting the branches of an elephant
ear so that he could see past the edge of the window. The cafe was nearly empty
-- just an old man tiredly eating a cutlet at a comer table and two girls with
bobbed hair huddled deep in conversation over a tureen of mussels. Jimmerson saw
then that there was a third table occupied, a private booth near the kitchen
door. It was des Laumes himself, his curled hair brushed back, a bottle of wine
on the table in front of him. His plate was heaped high with immense snails, and
he probed in one of them with a long-tined fork, dragging out a piece of yellow
snail meat and thrusting it into his mouth, wiping dripped sauce away with a
napkin. His chin whiskers worked back and forth as he chewed, and the sight of
it made Jimmerson instantly furious. He thought of going back out to the car,
fetching the .38 out of the glove box, and giving the sorry bastard a taste of a
different sort of slug....

But then he recalled the broken candy dish, and somehow the anger vanished like
a penny down a storm drain, and when he searched his mind for it, he couldn't
find it. To hell with des Laumes. He hunched out of the bushes again and walked
up the sidewalk to where an alley led along behind the cafe. The building was
deeper than it had appeared to be, a warren of rooms that ran back behind the
cordage company. It was an old building, too -- hard to say how old, turn of the
century, probably, perhaps an old wooden flophouse that had been converted to a
cafe. There were a couple of windows aglow some distance along the wall, and
beyond them a door with a little piece of roof over it. Jimmerson tried the
door, but it was locked, bolted from the inside. He spotted a pile of wooden
pallets farther up the alley, and he hurried toward them, pulling one of the
pallets off the pile and dragging it along the asphalt until he stood beneath
the window. He tilted it gingerly against the wall and climbed up the rungs
until he could see in over the sill.

A high-ceilinged room lay beyond the window, a table in the corner, a row of
beds along one long wall, a big iron safe near the door, some packing crates and
excelsior piled in a heap on the floor. The beds rose one atop the other like
bunks in an opium den. Each of the beds had a small shelf built at the foot end,
with a tiny wineglass hanging upside down in a slot, and a small decanter of
greenish liquid, possibly wine, standing on the shelf. Three of the beds were
hidden by curtains, and Jimmerson wondered if there were sleepers behind them,
like dope fiends on the nod. He heard a rhythmic sighing on the air of the alley
around him -- what sounded like heavy, regular breathing, a somnolent, lonely
sound that reminded him somehow of Edna's deathbed. A man entered the room now;
it was the old cutlet eater from inside the cafe. He moved haltingly, as if he
were half asleep, and without a pause to so much as take off his shoes, he
climbed into one of the bunks and pulled the curtain closed.

Another of the curtains moved, pushing out away from the bed hidden behind it,
and as Jimmerson watched, a man in a wrinkled suit and stubble beard rolled out
from beneath the curtain and balanced precariously on the side rail of the bunk,
apparently still asleep. Jimmerson braced himself, expecting him to tumble off
onto the floor, but instead he tilted slowly back and forth, as if buoyed up by
whatever strange currents circulated in the room. He muttered something
inaudible, and the muttering dissolved into a muffled sob. And then he tilted
forward again so that he seemed to cling to the bed with a knee and an elbow.
There was the sudden crash of something hitting the wooden floorboards directly
beneath him, and at that instant he lofted toward the ceiling like Gladstone's
dead man. But there was a tether tied to his ankle, the other end of the tether
affixed to an iron ring bolted to the bed frame, and the man leveled off and
floated peacefully just below the ceiling.

The object on the floor was clearly a teddy bear, or at least the replica of a
teddy bear, and from where Jimmerson stood it appeared to have been contrived
with uncanny verisimilitude -- apparently out of rusty cast iron. It looked worn
from years of handling, its nose pushed aside, one of its eyes missing, a clump
of stuffing like steel wool shoving out of a tear in its leg.

Along the wall opposite stood an open cabinet divided into junk-filled
cubbyholes, much of it reminiscent of the stuff in Pillbody's shop --bric-a-brac
mostly, travel souvenirs and keepsakes. Jimmerson made out what appeared to be
an old letterman's sweater, a smoking pipe, a caned seashell, a tiny abacus, a
copper Jell-o mold in the shape of a child's face, an exquisitely detailed
statue of a nude woman, her face downcast, her hands crossed demurely in front
of her. He saw then that there were name placards on each of the cubbyholes,
hung on cup hooks as if for easy removal.

He stepped backward off his makeshift ladder, his hands trembling, and started
back down the alley toward the street, although he knew straightaway that he
wasn't going anywhere. Gladstone had warned him about this, so it wasn't any
vast surprise. He had largely come to understand it, too -- what Pillbody's
curiosities amounted to, what it was that Edna had sold, why she had grown more
and more vacant as the months had slipped past. He thought about the odds and
ends on her bedside table, the medicinal-smelling bottle with the green stain,
the liqueur glass, and he wondered if one of these narrow beds had been hers, a
sort of home away from home.

Retracing his steps to the pallet, he climbed back up to the lighted window and
forced himself to read the names one by one, spotting Edna's right away, he
third cubbyhole from the left. He could see that there was something inside,
pushed back into the shadows where it was nearly hidden from view, something
that caught the light. He strained to make it out -- a perfume bottle? A glass
figurine? He searched his memory, but couldn't find such an object anywhere.

The door opened at the far end of the room now, and an old woman walked in,
followed by des Laumes. Her hair was a corona of white around her head, and she
was wrinkled enough to be a hundred years old. The floating man had descended
halfway to the floor, as if he were slowly losing buoyancy, and the old woman
grabbed his shoe and a handful of his coat and steered him toward his bed again,
pushing him past his curtain so that he was once again hidden from view. She
bent over to pick up the thing on the floor, but des Laumes had to help her with
it, as if it were incredibly heavy. Together they shoved it into a cubbyhole
marked "Peterson." She fumed and left then, without a word.

Des Laumes remained behind, looking around himself as if suspicious that
something was out of order. He appeared to be sniffing the air, and he held a
hand up, extending his first finger as if gauging the direction of the wind.
Jimmerson moved to the comer of the window, hiding himself from view. A moment
later he peered carefully past the window casing again.

The Frenchman held the statue of the woman in his hand now, scrutinizing it
carefully. Then he peeked inside one of the cubbyholes and retrieved a glass
paperweight that appeared to Jimmerson to be packed with hundreds of tiny glass
flowers. Des Laumes held it to the light, nodded heavily, and walked across to
the safe, spinning the dial. He swung the door open, placed the statue and the
paperweight inside, and shut the door.

Jimmerson climbed down again and set off up the alley. His thinking had narrowed
to a tiny focus, and his hands had steadied. Within a few seconds he had the .38
out of the glove compartment. He slipped the gun into his trousers pocket, then
walked straight across the street, up the flagstone path to the cafe. The door
opened and the two girls with the bobbed hair came out, arguing heatedly now,
neither one of them looking happy. Jimmerson slipped past them through the open
door, face to face with des Laumes himself, who stood there playing the host
now. The Frenchman reached for a menu, gestured, and moved off toward a table
before realizing who Jimmerson was. He turned around halfway across the empty
cafe, a look of theatrical surprise on his face. "What a pleasure," he said.

"Can I have a word with you somewhere private?" Jimmerson spoke to him in the
tone of an old and indebted friend.

"It's very private here," the man said to him. "How can I help you?" His face
was bloated and veined, as if corrupted from years of unnameable abuse, and he
reeked of cologne, which only half hid a ghastly odor reminiscent of the stink
in Pillbody's "parlor room."

"Help me?" Jimmerson asked, hauling the gun out of his pocket and pointing at
the Frenchman's chest. "Better to help yourself. I'll follow you into the back."
He gestured with the gun.

"I've been shot before," des Laumes told him, shrugging with indifference, and
Jimmerson pulled the trigger, aiming high, blowing the hell out of a brass wall
sconce with a glass shade. The sound of the gun was crashingly loud, and
startled horror passed across des Laumes's face as he threw his hands up.

Someone peered out of the kitchen -- the chef apparently -- and Jimmerson waved
the pistol at him. "Get the hell out of here, " he shouted, and the man ducked
back into the kitchen. There was the sound of a woman's voice then, and running
feet. A door slalomed, and the kitchen was silent. "Let's go," Jimmerson said,
aiming the gun with both hands at the Frenchman's stomach now. The man turned
and headed back through the cafe, past the kitchen door, down a hallway and into
the room with the beds. Keeping the pistol aimed at des Laumes, Jimmerson
reached into Edna's cubbyhole and pulled out the trinket inside -- a glass
replica of what appeared to be the old Pontiac.

He hesitated for a moment before slipping it into his pocket, steeling himself
for the disorienting shift into the past, into the realm of Edna's memory.
Probably he would lose des Laumes in the process. The Frenchman would simply
take the pistol away from him, maybe shoot him right then and there....

But nothing happened. He might as well have dropped his car keys into his
pocket. "The safe, " Jimmerson said.

Des Laumes shrugged again. "What is it that you want?" he asked, turning his
palms up. "Surely..."

"What I want is to shoot you to pieces, " Jimmerson told him. "I don't know what
you are -- some kind of damn vampire I guess. But I don't have one damn thing to
lose by blowing the living hell out of you right now. You should know that,
you...stinking overblown bearded twit." He stepped forward, closing in with the
pistol as if he would shove it up the Frenchman's nose. The man fell back a
step, putting up his hands again and shaking his head. "Now open the safe,"
Jimmerson told him.

The Frenchman spun the dial and opened the safe door, then stepped aside and
waved at it as if he were introducing a circus act. "Clean it out," Jimmerson
told him. "Put everything into the boxes." He picked up a packing crate and set
it on the floor in front of the safe, and des Laumes took objects out one by one
and laid them in, packing the excelsior around them.

"This is common theft," the Frenchman said, shaking his head sadly.

"That's right," Jimmerson told him. "And it'll be a common hole in the head for
the good Pierre if he doesn't hurry the hell up. That's it, monsieur, the
statue, too. Now the stuff in the cabinet. Fill those boxes." He thought about
the chef, the rest of them that had fled through the back door. Would they go to
the police? He made up his mind right there on the spot: if he heard sirens, if
the door flew open and des Laumes was saved, Jimmerson would shoot the man dead
before he handed over the gun.

Des Laumes filled a second packing crate and then a third, until every last
piece of bric-a-brac lay in the crates. Except for the glass automobile,
Jimmerson hadn't recognized any of it as Edna's. And even if des Laumes knew the
source of the things in the safe, he wouldn't tell Jimmerson the truth about
them. The man was an end-to-end lie, with nothing at all to recommend him but
his idiotic beard like a runover tar brush. Jimmerson was heartily sick of the
sight of it, and with the .38 he motioned des Laumes against the wall, away from
the sleeping people on the beds. He easily pictured killing the man, shooting
the hell out of him, leaving him dead and bloody on the ground.

But somehow the taste of it was like dust in his mouth. How would there be any
satisfaction in it' He could as easily picture Gladstone shaking his head sadly,
and the idea filled him with shame. More trouble, more pain -- anger like a
drug, like alcohol, like lunacy, having its way with him again.

There were no sirens yet, no need to hurry.

"Sit down," he said, and des Laumes, his face white now, slumped obediently
against the wall. Holding the gun on him, Jimmerson removed one of the
liqueur-filled decanters from its niche in the shelf above an empty bed. "Drink
it like a good boy," he said, handing it to him, and he held the pistol against
the man's ear.

De Laumes stared at him, as if he were making up his mind. He shook his head
feebly and started to speak. And then, as if suddenly changing his mind, he
heaved a long sigh, shrugged, and drank off the contents of the decanter.

"That's it," Jimmerson said. "Down the hatch." He fetched out another decanter,
and forced him to drink that one, too, and then a third and a fourth. All in all
there must have been two quarts of the stuff, and the room reeked with the
camphor and weeds smell of it.

Des Laumes's face had rapidly taken on a green pallor, and he looked around
himself now, a growing bewilderment and horror in his eyes. He clutched his
expanding stomach and slowly began to rock forward and backward, his head
bouncing with increasing force off the wall behind, his eyes jerking upward in
their sockets, a green scum at the comers of his mouth. Jimmerson backed away in
case the man got sick, watching as the rocking intensified and des Laumes began
to jackknife at the waist like a mad contortionist, his forehead driving
impossibly against the floorboards, a piglike grunting issuing from somewhere
deep inside him.

Jimmerson awakened the four sleepers, two women and two men -- the old cutlet
eater and poor Peterson. The women, both of whom still clutched their handbags,
were surprisingly young and bedraggled, and they looked out from their beds,
blinking their eyes, growing slowly aware of des Laumes's thrashing on the
floor. One by one Jimmerson helped them down, untethering them from the beds,
unbolting the back door and letting them out into the alley. Mr. Peterson walked
like a man on the moon, high-stepping through the puddle, and it occurred to
Jimmerson to offer him back his cast-iron teddy bear for ballast, but he saw
that it wouldn't be a kindness to him. Soon enough he'd be heavy again.

When the four of them had reached the street, Jimmerson hauled the packing
crates out into the night and then headed around the cafe to where the Mercury
was parked. He climbed inside, fired it up, and swung around the corner into the
alley, letting the engine idle while he loaded the crates into the rear of the
car along with his own boxes of junk.

There was a noise from inside the cafe like rocks hitting the walls, and
Jimmerson looked in through the door, which was partly blocked by des Laumes
himself. The Frenchman had levitated a couple of feet off the floor, and his
body spasmed in midair like a pupating insect in a cocoon. The room roundabout
him was strewn with unidentifiable junk --rusty iron and dirty glass and earthy
ceramic objects, misshapen and stinking. Jimmerson pulled the door shut and
climbed into the Mercury, slamming the car door against the sounds of knocking
and grunting and moaning, and backed away down the alley, swinging out into the
street and accelerating toward home as the rain began to fall again. He reached
into his pocket and took out the glass Pontiac, which he set carefully on the
top of the dashboard so that it caught the rainy glow of passing headlights, and
it was then that it dawned on him that he should have left des Laumes a penny.

He had needed every cubic inch of the big rental truck in order to clean out
Pillbody's shop. The dwarf had made him sign a release, and had talked obscurely
about Jimmerson's "aim being true." "On the up and up," he had said. "Solid
copper wiring. No imperfections." But he had taken the thousands of pennies
happily enough, although he had refused to drop them into the brass fish until
Jimmerson had packed up what he wanted and driven away. Jimmerson had wanted it
all, and Pillbody had worked alongside him, running wheelbarrows full of
curiosities out the back and across the courtyard to where Jimmerson had backed
the truck up to the circular brick doorway of the courtyard.

The truck crept east along Maple Street now, the engine laboring, the overload
springs jammed flat, the tires mashed against the rims, the truck bed heaving
ominously from side to side. Jimmerson sat hunched in the driver's seat, which
sagged beneath his weight, and he fought to see the road in front of him as bits
and pieces of arcane and exotic imagery stuttered through his mind like
subliminal messages, almost too rapidly to comprehend. His skin twitched and
jerked with competing emotions: dark fears rising into euphoric happiness,
dropping away again into canyons of sadness, soaring to heights of lunatic glee.
Somewhere in the depths of his mind he heard the clatter of pennies cascading
and was dimly aware of the howling of the truck engine and the smell of hot oil
and burning rubber. There was the sound of a hose bursting, and a wild cloud of
steam poured out from under the hood, and in the swirling vapors a startling
array of faces appeared and disappeared. Edna's face came and went, and he
recognized the face of the bearded man with the bloody neck, and felt a stab of
vicious and shameless satisfaction for the duration of a blink of an eye, and
then one face was replaced by another and another and another, a dozen at a
time, a hundred -- a tide of shifting visages soaking away into the sands of his
ponderous and overloaded memory.

Now and then he came to himself, heard the truck creaking and groaning, saw that
he had made his way some few feet farther up the road, felt the seat springs
burrowing against his thighs, the cramping of muscles, the pressure on his bones
and his teeth. His breath rasped in and out of his lungs and his head pounded
and the truck engine steamed and roared. Edna's face appeared before him time
and again now, and he was swept with her memories -- the memory of a fire in a
hearth on a rainy night, the two of them in easy chairs, an atmosphere of utter
contentment that he squirreled away in his mind, holding fast to it, and yet at
the same time crippled by the thought that she had given this memory away too,
that joy might have become as great a burden to her as sorrow....

He saw that he was nearly at Oak Street, nearly home, and he cranked the
steering wheel around to the right, felt the weight of the load shift
ponderously, the truck tilting up onto two wheels. For a moment he thought he
was going over, and in that impossibly long moment the pennies continued to fall
into Pillbody's brass fish, and the faces whirled in the steam in wild
profusion, and Jimmerson felt himself crushed like a lump of coal by a vast,
earth-heavy pressure.

HE OPENED his eyes when he felt the sun on his face next morning. He lay slumped
on the seat in the cab of the truck, and he moved his arms and legs gingerly,
testing for breaks and strains. His jaws ached, and his joints felt stiff and
sore, as if he were recovering from a flu. He sat up and looked out the window.
Somehow he had made it home, alive, although he had only the vaguest
recollection of arriving -- the truck shutting down with a metal-breaking clank,
hard rain beating on the roof off and on through the night.

He opened the door and stepped down onto the street, seeing that he had driven
the passenger side of the truck right up over the curb, and the wheels were sunk
now in the wet lawn. Most of the paint was gone from the truck body, apparently
shivered off, and the tires were flayed to pieces. The truck bed was nearly
emptied, scattered with just a few odds and ends of bric-a-brac. Late yesterday
evening Pillbody had finally given up counting pennies and purchases, but even
so they must have come awfully close to square in the transaction if this was
all that had been left unpaid for. Jimmerson climbed heavily up onto the bed and
filled a crate with the leftovers, then climbed down again and hauled it into
the garage where he had taken des Laumes's three crates yesterday morning. He
set about methodically smashing each object to fragments with a sledgehammer,
making sure that none of them could ever be sold, not even for a penny.
Peterson's iron bear took the most work, but finally it too crumbled into a
hundred chunky little fragments that Jimmerson dumped into a pickle jar and
capped off. And now, with Pillbody's stuff either consumed or broken, and des
Laumes's cafe cleaned out, the whole lot of it was once again a memory, a thing
of the past.

He went inside where he showered and shaved and changed into fresh clothes, and
then he hauled the single bed outside and threw it onto the back of the truck,
replacing it in the bedroom once again with the double bed from out by the
garage. Edna's remembrances -- the paperweight, the postcard, the silver spoon,
and the glass Pontiac -- he put into the curio cabinet in the living room. He
would never know what they meant, and their presence in the house would remind
him of that. He opened the windows finally, to let the air in, and then went out
through the front door, climbed into the Mercury, and drove downtown.

The curiosity shop was emptied out, no longer a mystery. The old storefront,
with its dusty litter, its confusing mirrors, and its nailed-shut door had been
swept clean, and he could see through the window into the rear of the shop now,
clear back into Pillbody's parlor room where workmen were rolling fresh paint
onto the walls. He got back into the Mercury and headed west. The Cafe des
Laumes had collapsed on itself, the windows shattered, the walls fallen in, the
roof settled over the wreck like a tilted hat. Jimmerson wondered if des Laumes
himself was in there, under the rubble, whether the man had simply imploded in
the end. To hell with him. It didn't matter anymore.

He swung a U-turn, rested his arm along the top of the seat, and drove back
south toward the cemetery, where he would try once again to pray.