Thirteen Phantasms (28 page)

A few years back, just for the hell of it, Lew Shiner and I drove out there on our way to the beach one morning. We talked doughnuts in the car, and I remember that I was going on about crumb doughnuts, and Lew was listening and nodding, letting me get it out of my system. When I’d played myself out, he told me, quite simply and earnestly, that the plain glazed doughnut was “the true quill,” and I’m humble enough to say that his words were evidently and profoundly right.

We pulled into Mrs. Chapman’s, and as I’d feared, the place had gone the way of all flesh. New management and renovation had wrecked it. An era had passed away and the juke boxes with it, all of it hauled away to the dump in the back of an old truck. The doughnut shop was still there on 7th Street, and with the same name, but the ghost of Mrs. Chapman had long since fled. We bought half a dozen sinkers to go—passable doughnuts at best—and once again I learned the sad lesson that you can’t go home again.

We headed on down to Huntington Beach, where it turned out that unlike the problem with doughnut whims, the ocean was happily indifferent to the “things of man,” to borrow a phrase from Hopkins. There were fairly good waves breaking at the end of Magnolia Street that morning—as there will be long after we’ve all eaten our last doughnuts in the shadow of the gravestone. In November, God willing, I’ll be in Honolulu again on Thanksgiving day: Diamond Head, off the lighthouse if it’s not blown out in the early morning; Kewalo Basin if it is; and on the way home, malasadas, Leonard’s Bakery, Kapahulu Street.

Jim Blaylock
Orange, California

I’m opposed to giving advice and making weighty statements on general principle; we’re wrong as often as not, and look like fools. But it’s safe to say this: ruination, utter ruination, might be as close to us now as is the proverbial snake, and but for the grace of the Deity and the cleverness of friends, we might at any moment find that by a slip of memory we’ve brought about the collapse of worlds.

I wouldn’t have thought it so. I’ve believed that there was room in our lives for casual error, that we could shrug and grin and suffer mild regret and the world would wag along for better or worse. Well, no more; recent events have proven me wrong. The slightest slip of the hand, the forgetting of the most trivial business, the uttering of an unremarkable bit of foolishness might plunge us, as Mr. Poe would have it, into the maelstrom. It fell out like this:

We’d been out on the Salisbury Plain—Professor Langdon St. Ives; his man Hasbro; and myself, Jack Owlesby—digging for relics. I haven’t got much taste for relics, but the company was good, and there
is
an inn that goes by the name of The Quarter Pygmy in Andover where I’ve eaten Cornish pasty that was alone worth the trip down from London.

St. Ives discovered, quite by accident one hot, desolate, fly-ridden afternoon, a cave beneath an isolated hillside, covered in shrub and lost to the world thousands of years ago. If you’ve been to Salisbury and ridden across the plain as a tourist in a coach-and-four, then you know how such a thing could be; there’s nothing there, for the most part, to attract anyone but an archeologist, and most of them are chasing down Druids. St. Ives was after fossils.

And he found them too; by the bushel-basketful. They littered the cave floor, dusty and dry, the femurs of megatheria, the tusks of wooly mammoths, the jawbones of heaven-knows-what sorts of sauria. St. Ives rather suspected they’d be there. He intended, he said, to make use of them.

The cave had been occupied in a distant age. Neanderthal man had lived there, or at least had come and gone. There was a cave painting, is what I’m trying to say, on the wall. I know nothing of the art of painting on cave walls, but I can tell you that this one was very nice indeed. It was the painting of a man, bearded and hairy-headed like an unkempt lion and barely decent with a loose covering of pelts. His countenance was bent into a thoughtful frown—a pensive cave man, if such a thing were possible. The painting was a self-portrait, and, said St. Ives, in quality it rivaled the famous bison painting from the cave of Altamira, Spain, or the reindeer drawings from the cavern of Aurignac. The artist had caught his own soul in berry-tinted oil, as well as his beetling brow and shaggy head.

This strikes you, I’m certain, as a weighty discovery. But you’d look in vain in the scientific journals for word of it. Our enterprises there fell out rather ill, as you might have judged from the tone of the first page of this account, and it’s only recently that I’ve been able to take up the pen and reveal the grim truth of it. In the months since our return from that cave on the Salisbury Plain I’ve invented reasons, any number of them, to cast a shadow over our enterprise. St. Ives and Hasbro, the two men who might have given me away, are gentlemen through and through, and have kept quiet on the score. But you might have read in the
Times
a week past news of an explosion—an “upheaval of the earth,” I believe they called it, in their uncomprehending, euphemistic way—which collapsed a section of countryside a bit north and west of Andover on the Salisbury Plain. They heard the explosion, no doubt, at the Pygmy. In fact, I know they did; I was there, and I heard it myself.

“An act of God!” cried the Royal Academy, and so unwittingly they paid the highest compliment, albeit it a trifling exaggeration, that they’ve paid yet to my mentor and friend, Langdon St. Ives. The business had his mark on it, to be sure, although I’ll insist that I myself had no hand in it. With the collapse of the bit of countryside, however, was buried forever the only known evidence of my abominable folly, and buried along with it were months of worry and guilt, which St. Ives no doubt grew weary and sorrowful for at long last.

I wish to heaven such were the end of it, but I can’t, of course, be entirely sure. I’m taking it on faith here. In matters involving the curiosities of traveling in time, and the complexities of meddling with the very structure of the universe itself, one must expect the odd surprise: the Neanderthal man in a hair piece, the Azilian mummy with a Van Dyke beard. One never knows, does one? It fell out like this:

When the volcano business was over with and St. Ives’s great nemesis, Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, had been swallowed by a frozen lake in Scandinavia, the professor had, for the first time in decades, the leisure time to pursue a study he’d gotten on to some ten years earlier. Time travel isn’t news anymore. Mr. H. G. Wells has put it to good use in a book which the casual reader would doubtless regard as a fiction. And perhaps it was. I, certainly, haven’t seen the wonderful machine, although I have met the so-called Time Traveler, or someone masquerading as the man, broken and teary-eyed at Lady Beech-Smythe’s summer house in Tadcaster. He was weeping into his ale glass—a man who had seen more than was good for him.

I have too, which is what I’m writing about here. Though to be more accurate, it wasn’t so much what I
saw
that has stayed my pen these past months as what I
did
. This, then, is a confessional as much as anything else, and if it’s wrath such a thing provokes, I’m your man to suffer it.

St. Ives, in a word, had cast upon a way to travel through time, quite independent of the methods of Wells’s hero. The professor had been studying iridium traces in fossil bone, and had developed theories about the decline of the prehistoric monsters. But it wasn’t entirely the scientific data that put him in the way of a method to leap through time, it was something
other
than that. I won’t say
more
than that, for there
is
no room here to drag in questions of a spiritual or mythologic nature.

Let it suffice that there is something
in
a fossil—in the stony little trilobite which, five hundred million years ago, crept along Devonian seabottoms; or, say the femur of a great toothed whale that shared Focene seas with fish lizards and plesiosaurs. St. Ives possessed, I remember, the complete skeletal remains of a pterodactyl, which reposed in mid-flight twelve feet above the floor of his vast library in Harrogate, as if the books and busts and scattered furniture of the room below were the inhabitants of a Cretaceous jungle clearing, and the thunder of the train rattling past toward Stoke Newington were the ebb and flow of prehistoric tides on a trackless beach.

There is enchantment in a fossil, is what I mean to say. St. Ives saw that straightaway It might well be enchantment that scientists of the graph-and-caliper variety would wave into nonexistence if they had a chance at it. But Haitian islanders, in their ignorance of modern science, can dissolve a man’s nose by splashing chicken blood into the face of a doll. I’ve seen it done. Hand the chicken blood and the doll—made of sticks and rags—to the president of the Royal Academy, and ask
him
to have a go at it. Your man’s nose will be safe as a baby.

There are forces at work, you see, that haven’t yet been quantified. They hover roundabout us in the air, like wraiths, and you and I are blind to them. But a man like St. Ives—that man carries with him a pair of spectacles, which, in a fit of sudden inspiration, he claps over his eyes. He frowns and squints. And there, winging it across the misty, cloud-drift sky, is—what? In this case it was a device which would enable him to travel through time. I don’t mean to say that the device
itself
‘could be seen winging it through the clouds. I was speaking figuratively there. I’m afraid, now that I’m pressed, that my discussion of his device must remain in that vague and nebulous level, for I’m no scientist, and I hadn’t a foggy notion on that morning when I stepped into the
device
and clutched the copper grips, whither the day’s adventure might take me. It was enough, entirely enough, that I had St. Ives’s word on the matter.

It wasn’t electricity, despite the copper, nor was it explosives that hurtled us backward through time. There was a shudder and a gust of faint wind that smelled like the first fall of rain on paving stones. The little collection of fossils that were heaped on a copper plate on the floor between us shook and seemed for the moment to levitate. I had the frightening sensation of falling a great distance, of tumbling head over heels through a ‘ black void. At the same time it seemed as if I were watching myself fall, as if somehow I were having one of those out-of-body experiences that the spiritualists rely upon. In short, I was both falling and hovering above my falling self at one and the same time. Then, after an immeasurable passage through the darkness, an orange and murky light began to dawn, and without so much as a sigh, the fossils settled and the falling rush abated. I was whole once more, and together we stepped out into the interior of that cavern on Salisbury Plain.

I’d seen the cavern before, of course, any number of times in a distant age, and so I was understandably surprised that the painting of the cave man was missing. On the wall were sketches of Paleolithic animals, freshly drawn, the oily paint still soft. I remembered them as a sort of background for the more intricately drawn human in the foreground. St. Ives immediately pointed out what I should have understood—that the artist had only begun his work, and that he would doubtless finish it in the days that followed.

If we had arrived an hour earlier or later, we might well have caught him at it. St. Ives was relieved that such a thing hadn’t happened. The cave artist mustn’t see us, said the Professor. And so adamant was he on the issue that he hinted, to my immense surprise, that if he
had
been there, laboring over the tail of an elephant, turning around in wonder to see us appear out of the mists of time, we mightn’t have any choice but to kill the man then and there—and not with the pistol in St. Ives’s bag, but we must crush his head with a stone and, God help us, finish his cave painting ourselves. St. Ives produced a sketch of it, accurate to the last hair of the man’s unkempt beard.

Traveling in time, it was to turn out, was a vastly more complicated business than I could have guessed. The curious talk of beaning the cave man with a stone was only the beginning of it. St. Ives had unearthed his fossils in that very grotto, and, in the years that followed, he had stumbled across two immeasurably sensible ideas: first, that the use of fossil forces as a means of time travel would impel one not just
anywhere
in prehistory, but to that time in prehistory from whence came the fossil. Second, one had to make very sure, when he disappeared from one age and appeared abruptly in another, that he didn’t, say, spring into reexistence in the middle of a tree or a hillside or, heaven help him, in the space occupied by some poor cave painter bent over his work. This last we had had to take our chances on.

St. Ives determined that by launching from the interior of the cave itself, utilizing fossils discovered at that precise spot—perhaps the gnawed bones of a Cro-Magnon feast—we would be guaranteed a landing, so to speak, in the very same cave thirty-five thousand years past, and not in an adjacent tree-thick forest. The reasoning was sound. It would have been much more convenient, of course, to have launched from the laboratory in Harrogate, and so have dispensed with the arduous task of secretly transporting the device and the fossils nearly three hundred kilometers across central England. But that wouldn’t have done at all. St. Ives assures me that a very grand and destructive explosion might have been the result, and the three of us reduced to atoms.

So there we were, three men from 1902, carrying Gladstone bags, scrutinizing a cave painting on which a real live Neanderthal man had been daubing paint a half hour earlier, utterly unaware that hurtling toward him through the depths of time was a machine full of spectacled men from the future. It would almost have been worth it to see his face when we winked into existence behind him. Well, not entirely worth it, I suppose; not if we’d had to beat him with a stone.