Thirteen Phantasms (13 page)

He sat most of the rest of the day in the café above the sea wall, watching the sun fall. He could see, from where he sat, the old studded door that opened into empty air, and he tried to convince himself that if he squinted sharply enough or turned his head just so, he could make out phantom shapes, figments, ghosts perhaps, fumbling around outside that door, carrying on.

He knew, he said, that he should be recording all this business about the keyhole—writing it down. In print, perhaps, the pieces would fall into order. He could look at it with an objective eye, get his bearings. The more he thought about it, the more necessary the task became, and late that evening he returned to his rooms, sat at his desk, and began to write. He scribbled feverishly, casting finished pages over his shoulder, littering the floor. He speculated and philosophized. As it grew later his ideas and the events that prompted them seemed to deepen in importance, as if the night was salting the affair with mystery. Some of it, he insisted, was shamefully maudlin—the sort of thing you write late at night and pitch into the trash in the light of day.

Early the next morning he found himself empty of ideas, seated at his, desk, dressed in his smoking jacket with the Peking dragons on the lapels. It was only then that the thought struck him—the idea that he was being watched through the keyhole, that he was watching himself.

“What does all this mean?” he cried, facing the studded door. There was, of course, no response. He snatched up a clean sheet of paper and a pen. “Write a message,” he wrote. “Roll it up and poke it through the keyhole.” He stood before the desk holding it up so that if indeed he were watching just then he’d get a good look at it. It was a brilliant idea. He waited for a bit but nothing happened. He stepped across and peeked through the keyhole and was rewarded with the sight of the ruined study. The little men had gone and had quite apparently taken his liquor with them. He tore off excess paper from around his note and rolled what was left into a tight little tube. Then he twisted it even tighter and threaded it through the keyhole, shoving it past the far side with the end of a coat hanger. When he peered into the keyhole again the study had vanished. He was exhausted, he told us, from the ordeal. He decided at first to sleep, not so much out of the need for it, as to be on hand if the little men appeared. But then he vowed that they wouldn’t hold him in thrall. He’d go about his business. Let them play their pranks! If he caught them at it he’d make it warm for them. They’d sing a sorry tune. He’d force them, he said, to take him along aboard the galleon. Just to play devil’s advocate he drank two quick fingers of his best Scotch—they wouldn’t have all of it—and he went out onto the street, locking the door behind him, and spent the better part of the day walking, one eye out for the gypsy girl with the pouty lips.

Some time around two in the afternoon he began to grow anxious. He remembered, suddenly, the sight of the hammer rising and falling beyond the armchair, and he cursed himself for not having slipped the paperweight into his pocket. There was nothing for it but to return at once—to make sure. His wandering about town had accomplished nothing anyway. If he was fated to find the dark woman, then he’d find her, or she him. He might as well be anywhere. He hurried along, and as he drew closer to home he became more certain of what he’d find. As it turned out, he was half correct.

His study was a mess. The tweed coat was a ruin, sprayed with soda water and crushed orange. His papers were reduced to snippings and his books littered the floor.
Mr. Brittling Sees It Through
was the sorriest of the lot. The liquor cabinet was empty but for a half bottle of crème de menthe from which the cap had been removed. He was furious. He stormed back and forth, nearly stumbling over the remains of the broken paperweight that had somehow been knocked under the sleeve of his soaked coat. It lay in two neat halves, the edges of several glass canes protruding through the broken sides like little pieces of Christmas candy. The hammer from the shelf in his closet lay beside it.

Kendal raged about, trying to think, waving the hammer over his head. He strode toward the door, understanding what it was he had to do. And it was then that he saw what he hadn’t expected to see: a little rolled and twisted bit of paper lying right at the edge of the carpet. He unrolled it, shaking. “Write a message,” it read. “Roll it up and poke it through the keyhole”

“By God!” he shouted “We’ll see!” And he began to pry out the nails that held the door shut. It wasn’t an easy thing. Not by a long sight. He had to rather beat the door up to get at them. But he was determined—he’d come to the end of his rope. One by one they squeaked loose. He paused after the fourth to peer through the keyhole, and there was the sun, the sky, a cloud. Below lay the sea, calm and glistening and dappled with sunlight, broken by a long rowboat in which sat five little men, one at the tiller and four more pulling on the oars, making away toward the setting sun and the galleon anchored offshore, heaving on the ground swell.

He wrenched at the nails. He tore at them. He knew it would do him no good to go to the windows. He couldn’t get at them through the windows. He peered through the keyhole again. The rowboat was a speck on the water. Finally the last of the nails pulled loose, and, shouting, he pushed the door outward on its hinges with such a rush of relief and anticipation that he nearly pitched out into the open air. He caught himself on the old jamb and hung on, searching the horizon for the galleon. There was nothing there. At the cafe below him, a dozen idlers gawked up, puzzled, wondering at his antics. He couldn’t be sure, he said, which world they occupied, so he searched for himself on the veranda, but didn’t seem to be there. Slamming the door shut, he hurried down and asked them about the elves in the rowboat, but the lot of them denied having seen anything. They winked at each other. A fat man with ruined shoes laughed out loud. Kendal raged at them. He knew their kind. Did they want to see what those filthy devils had done to his rooms? None of them did.

•

Kendal poked idly at his sea shells, stirring them around on their plate. He had calmed down a bit later, he told us, regretting his folly. The people in the cafe would think him a wildman, a lunatic. My wife shook her head at that. “Not at all,” she said, hoping to cheer him. He shrugged in resignation and emptied his coffee cup. From the pocket of his coat he pulled a crystal hemisphere, his antique paperweight, and he showed it to us very sadly, pointing out certain identifying marks: a peculiar pink rose, a glass rod with a date in it—1846 I believe it was. The top of the thing was spider-webbed with cracks where it had been struck with the hammer. It seemed to us that Kendal could hardly bear looking at it, but that he had it with him as a bit of circumstantial evidence.

After the shouted accusations in the cafe, he’d walked about town again, searching, and had ended up at the restaurant in our hotel, eating periwinkles. It was there that we’d found him.

He’d been fairly buoyant, wrestling with his shellfish and sipping wine, and, as I said, his discussion of the sunsets was engaging. By the time he’d come to the end of his tale, however, he was as deflated as a sprung balloon. He looked very much like a man who hadn’t slept in two days. We started in on another bottle of wine, and he toyed with the idea of eating more shellfish and spoke desultorily about his mystery, now and then breaking into rage or rapture. He seemed particularly enthralled by the possibility that the little men had heard him shout at them, could quite possibly have squirted soda water into his eye through the keyhole. It seemed to hint at connections, real connections. He had pretty well run himself down when on the sidewalk outside, in the glow of the lamps, a little knot of people hurried past. One was an olive complected woman with long black hair and deep, dark, round eyes and full lips. She looked in briefly (as did several of the others) as she walked past, disappearing quickly into the night.

Kendal sat for a moment, frozen, with a wild look in his eye. He jumped up. I wanted to protest. My wife clutched my arm, encouraging me, I suppose, to dissuade him. Enough was enough, after all. But I wasn’t at all sure that he hadn’t every reason to leap up as he did. He shouted his address to us as he raced out of the restaurant, forgetting entirely to pay his bill, which had amounted by then to about thirty-five francs. We settled it for him and rose to leave. There on the table, shoving out from beneath the cloth napkin, was the broken crystal paperweight with its little garden of glass flowers. I dropped it into the pocket of my coat.

I revealed to my wife, as we walked down the road toward the sea, Kendal’s youthful predilection for gazing down manhole covers. There had been other habits and peculiarities—rhinestone and marble treasures that he buried roundabout in his childhood, drawing up elaborate maps, hiding them away and stumbling upon them years later with wild excitement and anticipation. I recalled that he’d once gotten hold of an old telescope and spent hours each evening gazing at the stars, not for the sake of any sort of study, mind you, but just for the beauty and the wonder of it.

My wife, of course, began to develop suspicions about poor Kendal. I produced the broken paperweight and shrugged, but she pointed out, no doubt wisely, that a broken paperweight was hardly evidence of a magical keyhole and of little men coming and going across the sea in an old galleon that no one but John Kendal could see. I put the paperweight away.

Next day we were both in agreement about one thing—that we’d look Kendal up in his rooms. My wife affected the attitude of someone whose duty it was to visit a sick friend, but I still suspect that there was more to it than that; there certainly was for me. We decided, however, to wait until evening so as to give him a chance to sleep.

We found ourselves eating supper at the café that had figured so prominently in his story. We sat outdoors in a far corner of the terrace where we could see, quite clearly, Kendal’s studded door. I admit that I could perceive no evidence of any ruined balcony—no broken corbels, no cracked stone, no rusty holes in the wall where a railing might have been secured.

We finished our meal, left the café, and followed cobbled streets up the hill. Quite truthfully, I felt a little foolish, like a Boy Scout off on a snipe hunt or a person who suspects that the man he’s about to shake hands with is wearing a concealed buzzer on his palm. Part of me, however, not only believed Kendal’s story, but very much wanted it to be true.

We found his rooms quite easily, but we didn’t find Kendal. He wasn’t in. The door was ajar about an inch, and when I knocked against it, it creaked open even farther. “Hello!” I shouted past it. There was no response. “I’ll just tiptoe in to see if he’s asleep,” I told my wife. She said I was presuming a great deal to be sneaking into a man’s rooms when he was out, but I reminded her that at one time Kendal and I had been the closest of friends. And besides, he’d quite obviously been despondent that previous evening; it would be criminal to go off without investigating. That last bit touched her. But as I say, there was no Kendal inside, asleep or otherwise. There was quite simply a mess, just as he had promised.

He’d made some effort at straightening things away. Half the books had found their way haphazardly onto the shelves; the rest were stacked on the floor. The tweed coat lay in its heap, and I’ll admit that the first thing I did when I entered the room was to feel it. The top had dried in the air, but it was still wet beneath, and stiff with the juice and pulp of squashed orange. On the desk lay the copy of Wells’s
Mr. Brittling Sees It Through
, covered with the remains of a second orange. His liquor cabinet sat empty but for the uncapped bottle of crème de menthe. Half of the broken paperweight lay canted over atop the desk. Clothing littered the floor about the door of the closet. All of it bore out Kendal’s tale.

Protruding from the keyhole in the old door was a twisted bit of paper. My wife, as curious by then as I was, pulled the thing out and unrolled it. Written on it in block letters were the words, “I must speak to you.” In what time or space they’d come to be written, I can’t for the life of me say. It was impossible to know whether the message was coming or going.

My wife pushed open one of the big mullioned casement windows and I looked out at the setting sun. She called me over and pointed toward the tidepools below. There, among anemones and chitons and crabs, floated a half dozen bits of paper, some still twisted up, some relaxed and drifting like leaves. In another hour the tide would wash in and carry them away.

On impulse I bent over to have a look through that keyhole, a thrill of anticipation surging within me along with vague feelings of dread, as if I were about to tear open the lid of Pandora’s box or of the merchant Abudah’s chest. I certainly had no desire to have my tweed coat pulped with oranges, and yet if there were little men afoot, coming and going through magical doors… Well, suffice it to say that I understood Kendal’s quest in quite the same ethereal and instinctive way that I understood his peering down holes in the street forty years earlier.

So I had a look. Just touching the dark sea was a vast and red sun. Silhouetted against it were the spars and masts of a wonderful ship, looping up over the horizon, driving toward shore. And rowing out toward the ship, long oars dipping rhythmically, was a tiny rowboat carrying a man with dark, wild hair. On a thwart opposite sat the olive-skinned woman. I’m certain of it. That they were hurrying to meet the galleon there can be no doubt. They were already a long way from shore.

“Do you see it?” I cried.

“Yes,” said my wife, supposing that I was referring to the sunset. “Beautiful isn’t it?”

“The ship!” I shouted, leaping up. “Do you see the ship?” But of course she didn’t. Through the windows there was no ship to be seen. Nor was there any rowboat. ‘Through the keyhole!” I cried, “Quickly.”