Thirteen Phantasms (22 page)

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

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

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

“What’s going on here?”

“It’s mighty heavy, isn’t it?”

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

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

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

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

“How?” Jimmerson said. “I don’t …”

Pillbody shrugged 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 for some place to sit down. He thought he heard the floorboards groaning, the very foundation creaking, and there was the sound of things settling roundabout him: the crinkle of old paper, the sigh of what sounded like air brakes, a grainy sound like sand shoveled into a sack, the witch fires leaping and dying …

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

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

“‘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 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 Café de Laumes lay two blocks west of the Plaza, near the old train station. It shared a wall with 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 café 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 café 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 café was nearly empty—just an old man tiredly eating a cutlet at a corner 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 café. 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 café. 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, the old cutlet eater from inside the café. 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.