by S. T. Joshi
Which was odd, you must admit, and it was stranger still that when he went out the door and I locked up after him I didn’t see any headlights or hear a car pull away—hard to imagine a big, fat guy like that walking for miles in the dark and the wet, no matter how well the books were wrapped in plastic. I didn’t even hear footsteps on the gravel driveway. Just sleet rattling against the glass. I almost expected him to come back in a minute, but he didn’t; which was, undeniably, at least mildly inexplicable, if not nearly as much so as the fact that his prediction or prophecy or whatever you want to call it actually came true.
YOU HAVE TO GIVE WALRUS CREDIT—YES, HE INSISTED that his closest friends, none of whom I ever met, really did fondly alter his first name Walter into Walrus; and sometimes his moustache and his girth did give that impression—he was a really good storyteller. The best I have ever known. The very next night, at precisely the same hour, he appeared in precisely the same manner (how did he get in past me, when I was sitting at the counter by the door?) and told me a perfectly fascinating story of how he’d met Shirley Jackson once and what she’d told him, which revealed a secret of her life that has evaded all biographers, and which changed his. And before I could think it through—wait a minute, she died in 1965, which would make him how old?—he merely said, “Of course I was quite a bit younger then.” Then he started talking about Paris, and some of the people he knew when he lived there. I almost thought he’d start telling me about Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, but, no, it was a very funny if disquieting story about getting drunk with Gore Vidal when he lived there. Did Vidal ever live in Paris? I’d have to look it up in the biography. Before I could even think about it, Walrus was right past me with something else. He had lots of stories like that. He told them supremely well. He kept me entertained for a lot of long evenings, well after closing.
He was independently wealthy, so it seemed, and very widely traveled. I will tell you that sometimes he disappeared for weeks at a time, and postcards arrived from very distant parts of the world, with real (sometimes) messages in his handwriting and real, foreign postage stamps. Yes, once I actually got one from Zamboanga. (I didn’t make that up; real place, in the Philippines. “The monkeys have no tails there,” he said obscurely.) But much of the time he showed up at the Headless Shakespeare. (“I think I know where the head is,” he told me once. “But it’s like the arms of the Venus de Milo. You don’t want ’em.”) You know, I don’t think I ever did see him come in through the front door. I’d just turn around and he’d be there. “Boo!” And I’d say “How the fuck did you do that?” and he’d just tell me a story. He was there so much that sometimes people I half knew would give me that look as if to say, Good for you Philip, you’ve finally found someone, but, no, it was not like that at all, it was never like that, even when we got very, very close, as it worked out, because in addition to his having been everywhere and met everyone, Walrus had the disconcerting habit of knowing everything about someone he met. I saw him do it to others. It really spooked them. He did it to me. He’d make a casual reference to an incident in my childhood, maybe something really painful, like, “That time you caught your sister stealing and she got you blamed for it, and you never forgave her, well maybe you should have because once she was dead it was too late.” And before I could say, “Wait a minute, I never told you that!” he would be on with some other anecdote (involving famous people, in exotic parts of the world) that illustrated in a very gentle, very real, very emotionally resonant manner why I should have forgiven her, because sometimes to get anywhere in the world you have to know when to let go and just let things happen, as if you’re a leaf floating in a stream.
“The Buddha said that,” he said.
Did he really? I wanted to ask him, but did not. How did you two get along? Before you had the falling out over Attila the Hun, I mean.
There were times when I just couldn’t believe a word of this, when I refused to believe, when what I thought were the remaining tatters of my reason told me that if someone tells you one remarkable story, it’s interesting, but when he tells you fifty, he must be a goddamn pathological liar. It’s like the difference between seeing a UFO and being abducted by aliens every week. But he always had an answer for me, even when I more or less openly challenged him. So why did he travel all over the world and use a dozen aliases and publish books under more pseudonyms than anybody could ever track down? “Are you a secret agent or something?” I wanted to know, and he merely smiled and replied, “If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret, now would it? No, I am not a secret agent. That’s only my cover.”
“So, if you’re some incredibly special muckety-muck whatever, why are you devoting all this attention to me?”
He actually looked a little hurt when I asked him that. “Because we are friends,” he said. “As I told you, I looked back on all this and saw that we had become fast friends. Like Damon and Pythias. David and Jonathan. Frodo and Sam. I thought you understood that. Well, I think it is time to change your perspective. To make things clearer for you.”
DID HE MAKE THINGS CLEARER? AS CLEAR AS THE view you might enjoy while taking a ride in a washing machine. Things got quickly weirder after that. Now I have said that one of the things that kept me fascinated, caught like a deer in headlights, is the way that he did somehow seem to know the most intimate things about my life, or lack of life really. He knew that I’d had literary ambitions myself as a young man and nothing had come of them, and that I’d been a nerd before nerds had become fashionable and never managed to ask a girl out, and I had more or less drifted through life to the age of fifty-three without really living any of it. I had absolutely no family, no future except more of the same until the grave, no one to pass on even my accumulations to. My customers used to say I owned more books than God, but God’s piles of clutter are probably to some purpose. Mine were just there.
I can’t deny he was good for me. He did know how to comfort and encourage, and he even got me writing again.
You know the results. Negligible, but undeniably published.
But I must digress into metaphysics. One evening in the store Walrus asked me if I had the Necronomicon in stock and I said only the paperback, that Simon thing. “That’s crap,” he said. “Never mind.” And he launched into his theory again, if you could call it that, that all reality, the universe, everything, was one vast palimpsest of texts, one written on top of the next. No, he wasn’t turning onto a deconstructionist on me, he said. Not like that at all. Reality itself was an immense cipher. You had to recognize the words, which could be anywhere, and if you could string them together and repeat them just right— and, yes, it did sound like chanting—then you could set up a vibration and—whatever.
“Did you ever wonder how sorcerers call up demons?” he said. “I mean, why should some extra-earthly being come streaking over light-years and through dimensions just because some human being on this tiny speck of dust said the magic words?”
That is, assuming there are such things as sorcerers and demons and the both of us were not certifiably insane at this point. I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
“Really good hearing?” I said feebly.
All this while he had been scribbling frantically on a notepad. He held up the result. There was a solid black circle in the middle, and all sorts of wiggly lines spreading out from it in all directions.
“What’s that?” I said. “The hairball that exploded?”
“Look—there.” He reached out and seemed to take hold of something in the air in front of my face, like a drifting hair or something. “Do you see that?”
I wasn’t going to admit I’d seen anything. Had I seen anything?
And he explained at great length and with remarkable clarity, enough to dampen down any doubts, skepticism, or remaining shreds of sanity, that the whole universe, the cosmos, the macrocosmos, the whole kablooey was filled with lines of touch, as he called them, force, energy, something like that, but none of those words quite desc
ribed it. Think of spiderwebs in the dark. Most people can’t see them, but some people, the very sensitive ones, the sort who become Ascended Masters or black magicians or whatever, can feel them as they walk through the world. The way you call a spirit from the vasty deep is to set up just the right vibration, which attracts the attention of something very far away, which comes skittering down the web or whatever it is.
“You mean the way a struggling fly attracts the spider?”
“Something like that,” he said.
“I don’t think I’d care to meet that kind of spider.”
“The trick is not getting stuck.”
So he decided that then and there I needed a practical demonstration, and that I was ready for it.
“Here, take this,” he said, reaching into the air for another drifting strand of nothing.
And I took it, and whether or not I actually saw something—like a hair, like a thread, like a line of fire scratched in the air—I cannot truly say; but he took it between his fingers and I took it between mine, and with his other hand he held my free hand very tightly. He was chanting something, which might have been in Greek, or might have been a mathematical formula, or a little bit of both, and then we were gone, falling in darkness for just a second. Then I came to a stop with a jerk and opened my eyes and saw that we were in a moving car, my car, only Walrus was driving. It was dark. A couple of farmhouses passed by. I thought I knew where we were, but not quite. Somewhere out in the country. Then we came to a little town and went along a street past white picket fences—even in the dark I could see this was all Norman Rockwell stuff, idyllic, perfectly maintained late Victorian houses—and we pulled into a driveway. Walrus pointed the porch light, to the front door.
“You just go up there and go in. Don’t even knock.”
“But I—”
“Go.”
I was enough under his spell by then, or completely crazy, or sufficiently convinced this was a dream, that I obeyed. I shuffled across the leaf-covered lawn, up to that door, and went in. There was a woman inside, wearing an apron. She’d just come from the kitchen. She looked surprised to see me, but not surprised as if a complete stranger had just burst into her house, but as if she knew me but had expected I’d be out shopping or something.
But before either one of us could say anything two little girls, maybe seven and four, came running into the room, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Come and see our Christmas tree!”
So I followed them into the living room and admired the Christmas tree, and then we were called into dinner and the woman who presumably took me for her husband and the mother of these children looked at me very strangely and asked guarded questions, and it was all I could do not to laugh out loud at the irony of my reply that I didn’t feel entirely myself today. After dinner I got up and nervously paced around the room, and back into the living room, noticing the pictures on the walls, some of which had me in them, and this woman, and these kids. I stopped before a cabinet filled with books, many of which had my name on the spine. I recognized my first (and, as far as I knew it, only) novel, Into the Abyss, but there were at least a dozen more, three of them sharing the byline with none other than Walter Stevens. One was a children’s book entitled The Walrus Came Back.
But before I could wrap my head around any of this the front door opened and there stood a man who looked exactly like a less shabbily dressed version of myself, holding a bundle of wrapped presents up to his chin. He dropped everything as he let out a gasp and half of a curse; and his eyes and mine met, and he knew. The wife screamed. I pushed my way out of the house, into the night. I couldn’t waste time wondering how they worked that one out, because in a minute I seemed to be falling again into darkness, and then I was in the speeding car with Walrus, and there was, very visibly, a fiber of some sort, like a luminous piece of string floating in the air in front of my face. It extended out through the windshield into infinity, or at least very, very far up into the sky, and before I knew what was what Walrus and I had both grabbed onto it, and we were both chanting something that was definitely not Om mani padme hum, I assure you, and then we were falling again, and we hit the dirt and rolled to a stop right at the edge of a cliff, before a hole in the ground the size of the Grand Canyon, only it was filled with fire down there, and there came a sound rising up, which might have been the wind or volcanic gases escaping or God knows what, but sure reminded me of a million voices screaming all at once in terror and pain.
“Ah Mephistopheles…” I whispered, and my voice was not my own. It was part of that rushing wind.
Or maybe he was going to play Virgil and lead me on a tour of the depths, all the way down to the frozen lake at the core of the world and safely out over the Devil’s butt, but I really doubted it, I really did; and I don’t know for certain if that was Hell at all, but I did notice that the air was foul and sulfurous and there were two huge suns glaring down at us through a murky orange sky.
Then, again, my friend and I were chanting, and grabbing hold of a thread that wove through the air, and falling in darkness, and once again we were in the speeding car. He had to swing the wheel wildly to avoid a head-on and get back into the lane while headlights blinded us and a truck’s horn blared deafeningly.
And again we were somewhere else, in a quiet, cold place, where we walked over an icy wasteland beneath a black and brilliant sky, toward a mountain that rose high above us, atop which a single, brilliant light gleamed like a baleful eye.
An infinity of worlds, he explained to me, not in the spaces we know, but between them, all of which opened up to the bold philosopher who had found the way into them, as he had.
Spiderwebs in the dark, leading everywhere and everywhen. When I asked him, again, Why me? Why had he singled out me for this revelation? he replied that he’d had many such protégés or apprentices in the course of his travels, but looking back from the future, he saw the already accomplished fact that he and I had become soulmates to a degree that surpasses understanding, and therefore, because it was already so, he came back and made it happen, materializing out of the air in the Classics section of the Headless Shakespeare Bookshop one wet wintry night, and the rest was, you might say, history.
An infinity of worlds, touch all times and places and possibilities. There was indeed a world in which my life had turned out very differently, and perhaps happily, and I had a family, and there was another in which mankind had never evolved on the Earth and organic life, if the term could even be applied to what dwelt there instead, was of a wholly different order.
There was an infinity in which Walrus Stephens really had been everywhere and met everybody and all his stories were true.
There was a world in which the two of us, not at all adequately dressed for conditions, were walking across the Cold Waste toward that very Kadath which is described in the Neconomicon—the real one, not that load of crap by Simon—and maybe in one variant of events we two froze to death before we got very far, and in another, perhaps, we were carried up to the summit by rubbery, faceless, winged things serving a master whose face is never seen; but before either of those things happened he and I caught hold of a thread of light in the air and spoke the words carefully attuned to its vibrations and found ourselves once more speeding along in the car, only this time I was driving and it was burning daylight outside and we were screeching bumpily along through a desert. I barely managed to brake before crashing into one boulder, then several, smashing in the whole front of the car, steam exploding from the fractured radiator, while I gaped down in terror at the realization that we were tottering on the edge of a canyon at least a mile deep, filled with fire and the screams of damned souls.
Now in one version of that reality, I am sure, the car tottered over with us in it, taking us to our deaths, but in another version I managed to scream and pound on Walrus with my fists and push him out the passenger door and crawl out after him before the car tottered over the edge and bounced again and again off outcroppings until it vanis
hed from sight amid the swirling smoke.
There was only one sun in the sky this time, but it damn near fried us both to a crisp as we crawled amid the rocks in a desperate search for shade. We could only wait till nightfall—the sky was filled with strange stars, no familiar constellations at all—and then we reached up to the golden, fiery threads drifting down out of that sky, and climbed them, up, between the angles, between the spaces, toward a kind of terrifying glory I cannot begin to put into words.
OF COURSE I WAS CERTAIN THAT I WAS COMPLETELY insane by that point, and I weep to think of it, to think that being crazy is not the easy answer you expect it to be, the handy escape from all your pains and terrors. You think of that mad clergyman on Monty Python, the one from St. Looney-Up-the-Cream-Bun-and-Jam who sings “Dee-dee-DEE-DEE-dee!”while smashing plates over his head. At least I think of him, and I weep, because I know it’s not as easy as that, though I have tried, God, I have tried, and maybe that’s why we only use paper plates here.
Because, you see, I have only just gotten to the really crazy part, which I would have to be insane to imagine. It may be true that somewhere amid the infinite possibilities of infinite worlds we two reached the center of mindless, nuclear chaos at the center of the universe and danced worshipfully with the blind pipers there. It may be true that we became lords of planets, dark wizards whose very words and gestures destroyed whole worlds and races, or raised them up and molded them to our whims. It is entirely possible that we two learned the secret of everything and wrote it down, in modern handwriting, in ballpoint, on a parchment that was buried in some ruined, non-human city for a million years before emerging again to drive the finder as mad as either one of us already were.
What is distinctly true is that we discovered that the lines of force, or threads, or spiderwebs in the dark, or whatever you want to call them are inhabited, or perhaps I should say infested with something which is not, I think, the originating species that spun out such structures, not the spiders that may come skittering down the vibrating web to snatch up their struggling prey, but some kind of vermin, cosmic lice that move along those lines, between those spaces, with an agenda of their own, quite, quite beneath the notice of the great Powers and Presences whose existence we but dimly perceive, but quite noticeable enough to similar vermin, such as ourselves, who might presume to pry into secrets we were never meant to know and which only the insane would ever attempt to discover.
