Thirteen Phantasms

by James P. Blaylock

  The aquarium seemed to me to be prodigiously deep, a trick, perhaps, of reflection and light and the clever arrangement of rocks and water-plants. But it suggested, just for a moment, that the shadowed water within was somehow as vast as the sea bottom or was a sort of antechamber to the driftwood and pebble floor of a tropical river. Other aquaria flanked it. Gobies peered up at me from out of burrows in the sand. An enormous compressiceps, flat as a plate, blinked out from behind a tangle of crypto-coryne grasses. Leaf fish floated amid the lacey brown of decaying vegetation, and a hovering pair of golfball-sized puffers, red eyes blinking, tiny pectoral fins whirring like submarine propellers, peered suspiciously from beneath a ledge of dark stone. There was something utterly alien about that room full of fishes, existing in manufactured amber light, a thousand miles removed from the dusty gravel of the yard outside, from the roaring freeway traffic not sixty feet distant. I stood staring, oblivious to the time, until the door swung open in a flood of sunlight and my father peeked in. In the sudden illumination the odd atmosphere of the room seemed to decay, to disperse, and it reminds me now of what must happen to a forest glade when the sun rises and dispels the damp enchanted pall summoned each night by moonlight from the roots and mulch and earth of the forest floor.

  One dimmed tank was lit briefly by the sunlight, and in it, crouched behind a tumble of dark stone, was an almost hidden creature with an enormous head and eyes, the eyes of a squid or a spaniel, eyes that were lidded, that blinked slowly and sadly past the curious scattered decorations of its tank: a half dozen agate marbles, a platoon of painted lead soldiers, a brass sheriff’s star, and a little tin shovel angling from a bucket half full of tilted sand and painted in tints of azure and yellow, a scene of children playing along a sunset beach.

  I was old enough and imaginative enough to be struck by the incongruity of the contents of that aquarium. I wasn’t, though, well enough schooled in ichthyology to remark on the lidded eyes of the creature in the tank—which is just as well. I was given over to nightmares as it was. A year passed before I had occasion to visit the shop beside the freeway again, and I can recall bicycling along wet streets through intermittent showers, hunched over in a yellow, hooded slicker, my pantlegs soaked from the knees down, rewarded finally with the sight of no shop at all, but of a vacant lot, already up in weeds, the concrete foundation of the clapboard house and garage brown with rainwater and mud.

  Here it was nearly midnight, thirty years later, and something was stirring on my front porch. Wind out of the west shuffled the foliage, and I could hear the sighing of fronds in the queen palms along the curb. I stood in shadow, wafered against a tilted bookcase, peering past the edge of the casement at nothing. There was a rustling of bushes and swaying shadow. Something—what was it?—was skulking out there. I was certain. Hairs prickled along the back of my neck. A low, mournful boom of distant thunder followed a windy clatter of raindrops. The wet, ozone smell of rain on concrete washed through the room, and I realized with a start that a window had blown open behind me. I turned and pushed it shut, crouching below the sill so as not to be seen, thinking without meaning to of wandering in the rain across the ruins of the tropical fish shop, searching in the weeds for nothing I could name and finding only shards of broken glass and a ceramic fishbowl castle the color of an Easter egg. I slipped tight the bolt on the window and crept across to my bookcase, peering once again out into the seemingly empty night where the branches of hibiscus with their drooping pink flowers danced in the wind and rain.

  In San Francisco, in Chinatown, in an alley off Washington, lies the second of the three aquarium shops. I was a student at the time. I’d eaten a remarkable dinner at a restaurant called Sam Wo and was wandering along the foggy evening street, looking for a set of those compressed origami flowers that bloom when dropped into water, when I saw a sign depicting Chinese ideographs and a lacey looking tri-colored koi. I slouched down a narrow alley between canted buildings, the misty air smelling of garlic and fog, barbecued duck and spilled garbage. Through a slender doorway veiled with the smell of musty sand sounded the familiar hum of aquaria.

  The shop itself was vast and dark beneath low ceilings. Dim rooms, lost in shadow, stretched away beneath the street, scattered aquarium lights glowing like misty distant stars. Flat breeding tanks were stacked five deep on rusted steel stands below a row of darkened transom windows that fronted the alley. Exotic goldfish labored to stay afloat, staring through bubble eyes, their caudal fins so enormously overgrown that they seemed to drag the creatures backward. One of the fish, I remember, was the size and shape of a grapefruit, a stupendous freak bred for the sake of nothing more than curiosity. Illogically perhaps because of my having stumbled years earlier upon that shed full of odd fish along the freeway, it occurred to me that the more distant rooms would contain even more curious fish, so I hesitantly wandered deeper, under Washington, I suppose, only to discover that yet farther rooms existed, that rooms seemed to open onto others through arched doors, the ancient plaster of which was so discolored and mossy from the constant humidity that it appeared as if the openings were chipped out of stone. Vast aquaria full of trailing waterweeds sat bank upon bank, and in them swam creatures that had, weeks earlier, lurked in driftwood grottoes in the Amazon and Orinoco.

  There was something about the place that brought to mind the shovel and bucket, the promise of pending mystery, perhaps horror. Each aquarium with its shadowy corners and heaped stone and lacey plants seemed a tiny enclosed world, as did the shop itself, utterly adrift from the noisy Chinatown alleyways and streets above, which crisscrossed in a foggy tapestry of a world alien to the hilly sprawl of San Francisco, each successive layer full of wonder and threat. There was something in my reaction to it akin to the attraction Professor Aronnax felt to the interior of the Nautilus with its library of black-violet ebony and brass, its twelve thousand books, its luminous ceilings and pipe organ and jars of mollusks and sea stars and black pearls larger than pigeons’ eggs and its glass walls through which, as if from within an aquarium, one had a night and day view of the depths of the sea.

  I was confronted on the edge of the second chamber by a tiny Oriental man, his face lost in shadow. I hadn’t heard him approach. He held in his hand a dripping net, large enough to snare a sea bass, and he wore rubber boots as if he were in the habit of clambering into aquaria to pursue fish. His sudden appearance startled me out of a peculiar frame of mind that accounted for, I’m certain, the curious idea that in the faint, pearl-like luminosity of aquarium light, the arm and hand that held the net were scaled. I found my way to the street. He hadn’t said anything, but the slow shaking of his head had seemed to indicate that I wasn’t entirely welcome there, that it was a hatchery, perhaps, a wholesale house in which casual strollers would find nothing that would interest them.

  And it was nothing, years later, that I found on the front porch. The wind blew rain under the eaves and against the panes of the window. Water ran along them in rivulets, distorting even further the waving foliage on the porch, making it impossible to determine whether the dark places were mere shadow or were more than that. I returned to my couch and book and fireplace, piling split cedar logs atop burned down fragments, and blowing on the embers until the wood popped and crackled and firelight danced on the walls of the living room. It must have been two o’clock in the morning by then, a morbid hour, it seems to me, but somehow I was disinclined toward bed, and so I sat browsing in my book, idly sipping at my glass, and half listening to the shuffle and scrape of things in the night and the occasional rumble of far away thunder.

  I couldn’t, somehow, keep my eyes off the door, although I pretended to continue to read. The result was that I focused on nothing at all, but must have fallen asleep, for I lurched awake at the sound of a clay flower pot crashing to bits on the porch outside, the victim, possibly, of a rainy gust of wind. I sat up, tumbling Jules Verne to the rug, a half-formed dream of tilted pier pilings and dark, stone pools of placid water diss
olving into mist in my mind. A shadow loomed beyond the door. I snatched at the little pull-chain of the wall sconce overhead and pitched the room into darkness, thinking to hide my own movements as well as to illuminate those of the thing on the porch.

  But almost as soon as the light evaporated, leaving only the orange glow of the settled fire, I switched the light back on. It was futile to think of hiding myself, and as for whatever it was that lurked on the threshold, I hadn’t any monumental desire to confront it. So I sat trembling. The shadow remained, as if it watched and listened, satisfied to know that I knew it was there.

  There had been another tropical fish store, in San Pedro in a dockside street of thrift stores and bars and boarded-up windows. The harbor side of the street was built largely upon pilings, and below the slumping wooden buildings were shadowy broken remnants of abandoned wharfs and the shifting, gray Pacific tide. The windows of the shop were obscured by heavy dust that had lain on the cracked panes for years, and there were only dim, scattered lights shining beyond to indicate that the building wasn’t deserted. A painted sign on the door read “Tropical Rarities—Fish and Amphibia,” and below it, taped to the inside of the door and barely visible through the dust, was a yellowed price list, advertising, I recall, Colombian horned frogs and tiger salamanders, at prices twenty years out of date.

  The door was locked. But from within, I was certain of it, came the humming of aquaria and the swish-splash of aerated water against a background of murmuring voices. Had I been ten years younger, I would have rapped on the glass, perhaps shouted. But my interest in aquaria had waned, and I had come to the neighborhood, actually, to purchase tickets for a boat ride to Catalina Island. So I turned to leave, only vaguely curious, noting for the first time a wooden stairway angling steeply away toward the docks, its stile gate left carelessly ajar. I hesitated before it, peering down along the warped bannister, and saw hanging from the wooden siding of the building a simple, wordless sign depicting ideographs and a tri-colored koi. It was the shock of curious recognition as much as anything that impelled me down those stairs, grinning foolishly, rehearsing what it was I’d say to whomever I’d meet at the bottom.

  But I met no one—only the lapping of dark water against the stones and a scattering of red crabs that scuttled away into the shadows of mossy rock. Overhanging buildings formed a sort of open air cellar, dark and cool and smelling of mussels and barnacles and mud flats. At first the darkness within was impenetrable, but as I shaded my eyes and stepped into the shadows I made out a half dozen dim rings of mottled stone—amphibian pools I imagined, their sides draped with trailing water plants.

  “Hello,” I called, timorously, I suppose, and was met with silence except for a brief splashing in one of the pools. I stepped forward hesitantly. I had no business being there, but I was struck with the idea that I must see what it was that dwelt within those circular pools.

  The first appeared to be empty of life aside from great tendrils of tangled elodea and a floating carpet of broad-leaf duckweed. I knelt on the wet stone and swept the duckweed aside with my hands, squinting into the depths. Some few bits of clouded daylight filtered in from above, but the feeble illumination was hardly enough to lighten the pool. Something, though, glistened for a moment below, as if beckoning, signifying, and I found myself glancing around me guiltily even as I rolled up my shirtsleeve. In for a penny … I thought to myself, plunging my arm in up to the shoulder.

  There was a movement then beneath the water, as if the pool were deeper than I’d thought and I’d disturbed the solitude of some submerged creature. I groped among plants and gravel, nearly dipping my ear into the water. There it was, lying on its side. My fingers closed over the half hoop of its handle just as a slow scuffling sounded from the far end of the twilit room.

  I stood up, prepared for heaven knew what, holding in my hand, impossibly, a familiar tin pail, its side dented in now, its blue ocean bent over and half submerging the children still at play, these many years later, along its sandy beach. Before me crouched a small Oriental man, staring oddly, as if he half recognized my face and amazed to find me, it seemed, in the act of purloining that bent, toy pail. I dropped it into the pool, began to speak, then turned and hurried away. The man who had confronted me wore no rubber boots, and he carried no enormous fishnet in his hand. In the dim halflight of that strange ocean side grotto his skin, at a hasty glance, was nothing more than skin. I could insist for the sake of cheap adventure that he was scaled, gilled, perhaps, with webbed hands and an ear-to-ear mouth. And he easily might have been. I left without a backward glance, focusing on the alligatored blue paint of the ramshackle stairway, on the shingled roof that rose into view on the opposite side of the street as I climbed, step by creaking step. I drove home, I recall, punching randomly on the buttons of my car radio, turning it on and off, aware of the incongruity, the superfluousness of the music and the newscasts and the foolish and alien radio chatter.

  The incident rather took the wind out of the sails of my tropical fish collecting—sails that were half furled anyway. And certain odd, otherwise innocent, pictures began to haunt my dreams—random images of pale, angular faces, of painted lead soldiers scattered in a weedy lot, of the furtive movement of fish in weed-shadowed aquaria, of a wooden signboard swinging and swinging in wind-driven rain.

  Beyond the locked front door lies nothing more than the shadow of evening foliage, stirring in the rainy wind. Common sense would have it so, would say, in a smug and tiresome voice, that I’ve been confused by a dangerous combination of coincidence and happenstance. It would be an invitation to madness not to heed such a voice.

  But it’s not a night for heeding voices. The wind and rain lash at the dark shubbery, the shadows waver and dance. Through the window glass nothing at all can be seen beyond the pallid light of the porch lamp. Two hours from now the sun will rise, and with it will come a manufactured disregard for the suggestion of connections, of odd patterns behind the seemingly random. The front porch—rainwater drying in patches, the mission chairs sitting solid and substantial, the oranges and pinks of hibiscus bloom grinning at the day—will be inhabited only by a hurrying, square-jawed milkman in a white cap and by the solid clink of bottles in a galvanized metal basket.

  Myron Chester and the Toads

  All this happened some months ago. Not that it makes any real difference. It might have mattered hugely if the aliens hadn’t left, if things had gone a bit differently and people weren’t so pig-stupid. But like my neighbor Mrs. Krantz, they mostly can’t see past their noses without getting their eyes crossed.

  On April twenty-third a dry goods salesman from Tampa was whisked off through space aboard an alien starship. That’s what he said on the news. He was on television eighteen times on Tuesday, once on Wednesday, and not at all since. I’d like to think that the aliens took him away again, that he inhabits a bubble home in some distant galaxy and has learned to manipulate the controls of a magnetic air car shaped like a fish. But that’s not the case. I can see him right now, in fact, in the moonlight glowing along the shore on the pond behind my house. It’s two in the morning and he’s scouring the countryside for toads. His name, you might recall, is Myron Chester.

  He’s still a dry goods salesman in Tampa, but his business isn’t worth a fig. Almost everyone saw him on television or heard him on the radio, chattering like an ape about creatures in a glowing ship, about gilled, amphibious, eye-goggling star dwellers, the enormous offspring of toads and alligators that shunted him up and down the thoroughfares of the Milky Way—for some reason, for a lark probably. He wasn’t sure. He’d thought at first that they meant to harm him; they’d take his brain out and hook it up to some sort of device. He’d be a piece of machinery. But that didn’t happen. They just drove him around. They shook his hand. They communicated telepathically, hardly moved their lips.

  Nobody wanted any more of his dry goods after that. That’s what I think. You don’t buy tea towels and string from a madman. When I
was in Tampa I found his warehouse out on the road to the airport. The salt air off the Gulf had corroded the tin roof over the years, and now he didn’t make enough money to repair it. When storms blow in it rains all over his dry goods. I stopped in there and shook his hand. But that was a month after his incredible ride aboard the starship, and the television interview had soured him. He never should have opened his mouth, he said. Now his business wasn’t worth a fig. Not a fig. And it was going from bad to worse. They wouldn’t leave him alone, he said.

  Who? I asked, just to make sure. I thought I knew who he meant. What he meant, rather. A tremendous toad croaked outside the window off and on as we talked, and twice in the twenty minutes I was there he went out searching for it, making little clicking and smacking noises as if trying to attract a cat. Funny behavior, really, in light of the supposed nature of that toad.

  But I was happy about one thing—that he knew that I knew that he wasn’t just idly chasing toads. That didn’t serve to pep him up much, though. My testimonial, lord knows, wouldn’t help him sell dry goods.