Thirteen Phantasms (12 page)

Out of sudden curiosity he peered once again through the keyhole, but there was only the sea and the sky lying placidly, one atop the other.

He had suspicions, he said, about the keyhole, suspicions that had been fostered years before. He half felt as if the keyhole had been waiting there for him, impossible as that sounds on the face of it, and he determined, quite literally, to keep an eye on it.

His determination faded, however, as he became once again involved in his studies. He was standing at the window late the following afternoon thinking about the sunset and toying with the idea of going down to the cafe for a cup of coffee. He felt a bit of a fool, he said, for his suspicions about the keyhole, and he decided that it was time to lay them to rest. So he crouched before it and peered through, seeing, to his wild surprise, not ocean and sky and sailing boats, but a study, his own study: the littered desk between cases of books, the rose-colored armchair beside a tobacco stand, the ungainly pole lamp standing like an impossible stilt-legged flamingo with a hat on. He determined to keep watch, not to look away and so lose it like he had lost the incredible ship. He’d wait, he said, until something happened, anything.

But then he began to wonder at the odds and ends heaped on the desk. They were all familiar; nothing was there that shouldn’t have been. But he couldn’t be sure—he couldn’t swear that the millefiori paperweight, an old French globe that was the only thing of real value he owned, wasn’t in the wrong spot. There it was on the left of the desk, sitting atop a copy of
Mr. Brittling Sees It Through
. Yet he was almost sure that behind him it lay next to a bowl of oranges on the right. He could picture it in his mind. It sat opposite Mr. Brittling, not atop it.

It began to irritate him, like an itch that he couldn’t quite reach. He had to know about the paperweight, and yet he was sure that if he turned, even for an instant, his mysterious keyhole study would sail off in the wake of the disappearing galleon. When he finally gave up and looked away, it seemed to him that he saw, just out of the corner of his eye, the study door begin to swing open as if someone were pushing in through it. But the momentum of rising carried him off, and when he peered through again, after just the slip of an instant, there was the tranquil sea, broken just a bit by little wind waves, and the blue expanse of sky interrupted by the rag-tag end of a fleeing cloud.

He’d been right about the paperweight. He was possessed thereafter with wonder at the nature of that keyhole. You and I would have been concerned with the nature of our minds, with our sanity, but not John Kendal. Just the opposite was the case. For a week he crouched there, spending long hours, squinting until he got a headache, seeing nothing but sea and sky and, in the evening, the setting sun. He’d sneak up on it. He’d act nonchalant, as if he were bending over before it to pick up a dropped pencil or a bit of lint from the carpet. But the keyhole, he said, couldn’t be fooled. He even tried whistling in a cheerful and foolish manner to add credence to his air of unconcern. At night there was nothing but darkness beyond, darkness and a little cluster of stars. Later yet a glint of moonlight shone through maddeningly, only perceptible if the room were dark and if he stood just so, somewhere near the northeast corner of the study.

Bits of fleeting doubt began to surface toward the end of the week, the suspicion, perhaps, that he’d been the victim of a particularly vivid dream brought on by an overabundance of periwinkles, which, apparently, he ate by the bushel basketful. It occurred to him that his compulsion was very much like that of a peeping torn, and that his studies were woefully neglected. Finally he simply grew tired of it. He resolved late one Saturday night that he’d had enough, that he’d made a fool of himself and that he’d quite simply put the matter to rest by having nothing more to do with it. He’d shove a wad of chewing gum into the thing if he had to, buy a key and leave it in the hole so as to block the little cylinder of sunlight that filtered in. It was the sunlight, after all, that set him off. It was all very clear to him. Psychology could explain it. He was searching for that same sunlight he’d become so familiar with as a child. Well, he’d have no more of it.

So he sat there, pretending to be reading in his chair, but thinking, of course, of the keyhole—knowing that he was thinking about it and denying it at the same time. He wondered suddenly, irrationally, if the keyhole knew he was thinking about it, and if he hadn’t ought to lazy along over toward it and have one last peek—just to put the issue to rest, to dash it to bits. He could see just the faintest silver thread of watery moonbeam slanting in, vaguely illuminating that bit of carpet.

He rushed at the door, casting his book down onto the armchair, pulling his pipe out of his mouth. He’d been tormented long enough. He’d have one last look, just to satisfy himself once and for all; then he’d stuff it full of something, anything—wet paper, perhaps, or a wad of sticky tape. Through the keyhole once again was his study. His book lay on the armchair. The telltale paperweight wasn’t on the desk at all. It was in the hand of a woman with whom he was utterly unfamiliar. She had the complexion of a gypsy, he said, and the most amazing black hair and dark eyes. She was watching someone, that much was certain, smiling at someone—at him?—in a pouty sort of way. It was maddening. He shouted through the keyhole at her, something which must have sounded amazing and lunatic to his neighbors. A moment later there was a shuffling outside his study door, as if someone had come to investigate and was working up the courage to knock. He looked up quickly, cursing, fearing the disturbance that didn’t come. And when he returned to his keyhole a moment later, there was, of course, nothing but the dark sea and sky and a few cold stars around a gibbous moon. The study and the gypsy were gone.

He was quite convinced that they weren’t in any true sense gone; that they were real couldn’t be argued. He became possessed by the idea that if the contents of his study existed on both sides of that door, then the dark woman with her pouty smile did also. It was merely a matter of time, he was sure of it, before he’d turn a corner on his way to the café or the railway station and catch sight of her. It wouldn’t surprise him if he bumped into her at the market. He could picture it very plainly; her packages scattering, he apologizing, scooping them up, she with a look of vague recognition on her face, wondering at him, at their chance meeting. Dinner, perhaps, would follow. Or more likely she’d go along on her way Then, a week later, a month later, he’d board the bus for Mont St. Michelle and there she’d be, beside an empty seat. It would be fate and nothing less.

At the time of our chance meeting over periwinkles, of course, fate hadn’t yet played its hand. She never reentered either of the two studies. Kendal, however, spent more time than ever at his keyhole. He had no more misgivings. And he was rewarded for his faith, mostly by the sight of an empty, book-scattered room.

Once, early one morning, he peeped through and, with a thrill of strange apprehension, saw himself at work at his desk, writing madly, scribbling things down. Papers lay on the floor. His hair was tousled. He wore his salmon colored smoking jacket, the one with Peking dragons on the lapels, and it appeared as if he’d been up all night—assuming, of course, that the of world the keyhole operated according to the same clock time as our world. But then who could say that it wasn’t our world? Kendal wondered at first what in the devil he was working on with such wild abandon. It seemed to be going very well indeed, if the thirty or forty pages on the floor weren’t scrap.

He watched himself write for a time, hoping, he said, for the return of the dark woman. He was possessed by the idea that she was his lover. His manic writing paused and he sat back in his chair and tamped a bit wearily at his pipe, blowing first through the stem to clear it out. He swiveled round, bent over, closed one eye, and peered, to Kendal’s sudden horror, at the keyhole. In a fit of determination he slammed his pipe into an ashtray, rose, and strode across toward the old door, bending and peering, his eye hovering not three inches from the eye of his shellfish-loving counterpart. For one strange moment, said Kendal, he didn’t know absolutely who he was, or which study he occupied. He pinched himself, trite as it sounds, and convinced himself that he, at least, was no figment. “Hello!” he shouted. “There is someone here! You’re not imagining things!” It felt good to reassure himself. “You’re perfectly sane!” he shouted a bit louder. The eye disappeared. There was a knocking at his study door which nearly tumbled him over backward. For one sudden moment he’d been certain that the knocking had come from the door into the other study. But it hadn’t. There was another knock, and when he opened the door and looked out into the hallway, there was his landlady, giving him the glad eye. She looked past him into the empty room, nodding to him, asking him some contrived question about the rent. He shook his head and was brusque with her, he said, which was unfortunate, because in truth she was a friendly sort. Her concern was justifiable. He hurried her away and bent back across to his keyhole.

The study beyond was empty. The papers on the floor had been gathered into a heap that lay beside the desk. Obviously they weren’t trash. It had been a productive night, the sort that gave him a great deal of satisfaction, a sense of well-being. He watched the empty study for an hour, waiting there, and was surprised to see, suddenly, a widening patch of sunlight playing out quickly across the floor, as if someone were opening a door and a quick rush of daylight were flooding in. Just as suddenly it was cut off. It wasn’t the study door that had opened in the room beyond; he could see the edge of it quite clearly off to the left of the desk. And it wasn’t curtains being drawn; he hadn’t any curtains. No, a door had been opened, that much was sure, and there could be no doubt which door it was.

•

He paused in the telling of his story and filled his glass. He’d worked himself into a state. His hand trembled. My wife raised her eyebrows at me, but Kendal didn’t see it. He was lost in his tale. He ordered coffee and heaped sugar into it, begging us not to assume that he’d gone mad.

“Of course not,” said my wife. “Of course not.”

“What I saw,” he continued, gazing into his coffee, “were little men.”

My wife choked on her wine. It wasn’t hard to guess why, but she made a grand effort to make it seem otherwise. Kendal held up a knowing hand and shook his head quickly, as if he were satisfied with her disbelief.

I put on a serious face. “Little men?” I said. “Midgets, do you mean?”

He shrugged.

•

What he had seen at first were the shadows of whoever had come through the old door. He wondered, straight off, where they had come from. After all, he had been peering through a keyhole in the door in question. There was, it seemed, a door beyond the door, and perhaps others beyond that—countless others—a veritable mirrored hallway of reflected doors with little men creeping about down the corridors, and dark women stealing out of one door and through another, and doors creaking open to reveal the wave-tossed galleon slanting in toward a rocky shore. Kendal saw endless possibility, but he hadn’t enough time right then to be anything but mystified by it.

One of the little men, as he insisted on calling them, began to haul volumes out of the bookcases, tossing them around onto the floor. Another picked up the piled papers, rummaged in the desk drawer for a scissors, and began cutting paper dolls—strings and strings of them. Another wrestled several pages away, found a pencil, and set out to doctor up the manuscript, chewing the end of his pencil, laughing and scribbling away. Yet another appeared, to Kendal’s horror, opening the liquor cabinet and yanking out bottles, examining labels, nodding over them with a satisfied air. Pieces of clothing flew into sight, tossed, no doubt, from the closet by a fifth and unseen vandal. His favorite tweed coat shot out, folding over the shade of the pole lamp and hanging there sadly as the liquor cabinet elf squirted at it with the soda water siphon. It was a sad state of affairs. Any possible humor in the scene was dashed by the certain fact that it was his rooms being ransacked, that it was his tweed jacket that lay now in a sodden heap on the floor beside the overturned lamp. One of the devils juggled the paperweight along with two oranges. He was wonderfully dexterous. Kendal held his breath. The one who had been at his clothes wandered in with a hammer. He snatched one of the oranges from the juggler, set it atop Mr. Brittling, and smashed it to pulp. Then he made a grab for the paperweight. Kendal was stupefied. The juggler dropped both the weight and the orange and they rolled out of sight behind the armchair. A struggle ensued, one elf poking the other in the eye and yanking at his hair, the other threatening with his hammer, fending the first off. They collapsed onto the carpet and went scrambling out of view. Kendal watched in futile horror the head and upper handle of the hammer rise and fall three times above the back of the chair. He shouted into the keyhole, screamed into it, whacked his fist against the door. There was a general pause within. He’d been heard. He was quite sure of it. The elf with the soda water bottle hunched over, squinting toward him, stepping across on tiptoe as if he were the soul of secrecy, and with a mad grin he aimed the siphon at the keyhole.

Kendal leapt to his feet. He wouldn’t, he said, stand the indignity of it. He felt as if he were a character in a foolish play, as if a crowd of people were watching, laughing at his expense. (My wife pinched me under the table.) He waited for a moment, fully expecting soda water to splatter through the keyhole. Nothing happened. He was sure, he said, that they were hovering there, that when he looked again they’d all be waiting, laughing, would squirt him in the eye. But when he could stand it no longer, he peeked through and saw no little men, no study, no gypsy temptress—only the sea and the sky and, to his amazement, the old galleon, sails reefed, riding on the calm water a half mile off shore.