The professor looked directly at them. Turning to the girl, he whispered something in her ear. Then he walked over to the side of the stage and looked above him. Reaching up, he plucked a large orange from thin air, as if he had picked it from an invisible tree.
He stood calmly peeling the orange as the girl asked the Sphinx if it could recite a piece of poetry for them.
The Sphinx began to recite a long piece of verse. As it spoke, the magician stood quietly at the far side of the stage, eating the orange. He popped piece after piece into his mouth, until it was completely full of orange. It became clear to everyone, even the stubborn few who had doubted until then, that the magician was not throwing his voice. Somehow the head was thinking and speaking on its own.
As it finished reciting the poem, the Sphinx’s powers seemed to wane. It closed its eyes and grew still. The magician approached the box and closed the front panel. Immediately, smoke billowed from it and tongues of flame crept from the cracks.
“What is life but a dream, death but a sleep from which we wake?” asked the magician as he reopened the panel.
The head had disappeared. Nothing remained but a mound of ashes in the bottom of the box.
21
The following day, armed with the key Miss Linton had given her, Emily made a visit to the tumbledown carriage house. Her hand was feeling better after O had bathed it in salt water that morning and redressed it. Over the girl’s protests, Emily had left her behind to mind the shop, assuring her she would be fine to look over the books on her own. The car, taking pity on her condition, started on the first try.
As she tramped through the long grass toward the carriage house, the pigeons sitting on the roof took flight with a startled flurry. She watched them whirl through the air, settling finally on the turret of the house, where the library was housed. Snapping off the spindly green creepers that had grown across the door, Emily turned the key in the rusted lock.
There was a dank, shut-in smell about the place. She flicked the light switch inside the door and a dim bulb dangling from the beams winked into life. Weaving through the clutter of abandoned furniture and rusted gardening tools, she discovered two small wooden crates tucked against the far wall. A smell of mildew and damp drifted out when she opened the lids.
The crates were piled high with books. She lifted an old calfskin-covered book and gave it a sniff. Why on earth would Lenora Linton put these things out here? she wondered as she carefully opened the old volume. She rooted through the piles, stacking the books carefully on the inside of the lids on the floor beside her.
Most of the books were not in English. Her Latin was rusty, her German patchy, her Hebrew nonexistent. From what she could decipher, the books explored arcane and esoteric byways of thought – books of magic and mysticism that, in an earlier age, it might have been dangerous to own. Damaged though they were, she was stunned to come upon such a find.
The dim, web-hung place was beginning to give her the creeps. She carefully repacked the crates, locked the door, and put the key through the mail slot out front.
Over the next several days, Emily sought advice from fellow dealers on the more valuable items in the Linton collection. Armed with that, she put together what seemed a most generous offer and went to the bank to arrange for a line of credit. It was necessary to put the shop up as collateral, but she felt it well worth the risk. At the end of the week, she contacted Lenora Linton. Miss Linton seemed pleased with the offer but said she would need to consult her lawyer. She assured Emily it was a mere formality.
However, when she’d still had no word by the middle of the next week, Emily began to fear that something had gone wrong. Perhaps the size of the offer had led Miss Linton to believe that the collection might be worth even more. Perhaps she had decided to contact one of the larger auction houses, after all.
Meanwhile, O busied herself with preparations for the poetry reading on the following Tuesday. It was to be something of a trial run, so she wanted as many people as possible to turn out. She printed a flyer and made a sweep of the neighborhood, taping it to lampposts, posting it on the cluttered board at the back of the coin laundry. Gigi agreed to put one in the window of her shop.
The Mind Spider’s window, which parents whisked their curious children past, was already chock full of close-up photos of Tiny’s work displayed on various body parts. Still, he took a few flyers off her hands and said he would talk it up with his customers.
While she was making the rounds, O mailed a letter she’d written to her father. In it, she mentioned meeting Leonard Wellman and learning about the Tuesdays at the Green Man. She talked about Emily’s decision to start up the poetry readings again, with her help. She even divulged that she’d been doing a little writing herself and decided at the last minute to include a copy of the poem she’d written on the rooftop:
Perched high on the rooftop
I am level with treetops,
Kin to windblown branches,
Neighbor to clouds.
Twilight falls,
Birds clamor among the leaves,
Call down the dark,
Coax stars from hiding.
Below me, night spreads
Its crazy quilt –
Patchwork houses, roof
Stitched seamlessly to roof,
Treetop to treetop,
Quilted with threads of light.
She returned to the Green Man full of news. “You won’t believe who agreed to take a pile of flyers for the reading,” she said as she came into the shop and dropped the remainder on the ledge by the door.
There was no answer; Emily was not at the desk. She found her in the back room on the couch. One look and O knew something was wrong.
“What is it?”
“I got a call from Lenora Linton. There’s a problem.”
“What sort of problem?”
“Another dealer has made a counter offer. Her lawyer has advised her to accept it.”
“I thought you said she hadn’t told anyone else about the collection.”
“She still claims she hasn’t. Who knows, maybe it was one of the dealers I spoke to about pricing a couple of the items.”
“That’s a little underhanded.”
“If that’s what happened. But I seriously can’t think of anyone I spoke to who would do something like that. Anyway, I think Miss Linton feels badly about it. She’s offered us the items in the carriage house for next to nothing. I’m sure there’s some valuable material there. It’s beyond my expertise, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to sell it in the condition it’s in. But if we turn it down, I’m afraid the whole lot will just wind up in the garbage when she moves.”
That evening, Emily phoned Lenora Linton and agreed to her offer for the carriage-house books. On Friday, she went with Miles and picked them up. They put them in the back room of the shop beside the couch. You noticed their musty smell immediately on entering the room.
22
When O woke up, it was already stifling in the attic room. The curtains glowed like a fire in a grate. The fan swiveled back and forth on top of the dresser, blowing the heat around. At the end of each sweep, it gave a petulant little click, just to let you know it wasn’t happy with its lot in life.
She lay listening to it, getting her bearings before she ventured out of bed. It was Saturday morning. The poetry reading was scheduled for the following Tuesday, July 14. That would make today – she counted backwards in her head – July 11. Since all the calendars in the shop and the flat had mysteriously disappeared, it was a bit of an adventure keeping dates straight. When she’d asked Emily about the disappearing calendars, her aunt just shrugged it off.
She went to the window now and opened the curtains. One of the chairs seemed slightly out of place. It wasn’t the first time she’d noticed that. She told herself it must have been the wind.
By the time she’d made the bed and thrown on her clothes, the sweat was streaming down her face. She retreated to the secon
d floor.
Normally, Emily would be sitting bleary-eyed at the kitchen table, cradling a cup of coffee and listening to the radio. They would mutter a brief “good morning,” and O would fix herself some breakfast and coax Emily into eating a slice of toast or a bowl of oatmeal. At ten, they would head downstairs to open the shop for the day.
But when she came downstairs this morning, she found the kitchen empty and the kettle cold. “Aunt Emily?” she called down the hall and waited for the stock response – “If you keep calling me that, I swear I’ll scream.” But there was silence.
“Emily?” Louder this time. “Are you there?” A quaver of unease had crept into her voice.
She padded down the book-lined hall, peeking first into the living room, then into Emily’s bedroom and the bathroom they shared. Finally, she walked along to her aunt’s workroom at the end of the hall.
The door was open and the room empty, which was extremely uncharacteristic of Emily, who normally locked the room when she wasn’t using it. This was in response to an incident in the distant past. One of the regulars around the shop at the time, a fellow poet, had been allowed to use the washroom upstairs and had taken the liberty of nosing around in her workroom.
Emily was extremely secretive about her work. “Don’t tell me about it,” she said, when O began to tell her an idea she had for a poem. “Don’t say a word. Just write it and then show it to me. If you talk about it first, you’ll kill it for sure.”
O ventured into the forbidden room. The clutter that had flourished in the shop and found its way up to the flat stopped abruptly at the door. The room was as spare as a monk’s cell. A large oak desk sat in the center, the rug around it worn threadbare. A simple cot, with a blanket folded neatly at the foot, was pushed against one wall. Books and manuscripts were ranged neatly on a set of unfinished shelves. A bulletin board – bristling with scraps of paper, found objects, and photos – was the only thing to break the bare expanse of wall. She noticed a recent photo of herself among them, half-hidden by a dried rose hanging upside down from a length of dusty thread.
Though the sun streamed through the window, the desk lamp was on. It shone down on an old typewriter, with a sheet of paper rolled in it that appeared to be the draft of a poem. O leaned down to look. The same few lines had been typed once, corrected by hand, and typed again beneath:
Things I thought long past
Grow present once again.
I see your soundless eyes
As I saw them then.
Your shrouded voice shakes off
The dust of years,
Leans low and whispers
In my ear.
The words sent a chill through her. She switched off the lamp and hurried back along the hall. Fighting a sudden surge of panic, she opened the door to the shop and made her way down the dim stairs.
As she opened the door at the bottom, she heard Emily’s voice. It was coming from the back room of the shop. It seemed someone was there with her.
“You were always good with languages,” she heard. “Can you make head or tail of this? It’s some kind of Hebrew text.”
O found her aunt sitting on the couch. One of the boxes of carriage-house books stood open on the floor in front of her, spilling its musty perfume into the room. Several large old books were piled on the floor beside it. One lay open on her lap.
Emily was alone.
It wasn’t the first time this had happened. On a couple of other occasions, O had come upon Emily unawares and discovered her deep in conversation – with no one. On the mad-poet scale of one to ten, it was a solid nine.
She coughed to let her presence be known. Emily jumped, and the book fell from her lap.
“Good Lord, O. You nearly frightened me to death.”
“I’m sorry. I was worried when I didn’t find you upstairs.”
“I woke up early, so I decided to come down and take a run at this before we opened. It’s a collection of Hermetic texts from the late Renaissance. These writers were all seeking to gain spiritual power by magical means. They believed everything was impregnated with a hidden divine life. Through the knowledge of true magic, they felt they could release the spiritual power within things and overcome the forces of darkness in the world.
“There are early editions of the Corpus Hermeticum, Bruno’s De Magia, works by Agrippa, Robert Fludd, Tommaso Campanella – fascinating, rare material, and I’ve barely scraped the surface; also a number of books in Hebrew, which, I suspect, are cabalistic texts. My friend Isaac Steiner teaches at the university and is an expert in the field. I’m sure he’d be eager to see this.”
O noticed a book with red leather binding sitting on the arm of the couch, the letters L.L. stamped in gold on the cover. She picked it up.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“It was in with the rest of this stuff. It seems to be a journal, most likely Linton’s. His initials are on the cover. But take a look inside.”
O fanned to a random page. The ink had turned a rusty brown. She tried to read the cramped, spidery handwriting. “It’s in another language,” she said.
“Yes. Hebrew.”
“Why would he write it in Hebrew?”
“Perhaps to keep it from prying eyes.”
“But why?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Emily said.
At ten o’clock, O turned the sign in the window, opened the front door, and dragged out the bargain bins. She rolled down the awning to keep off the morning sun. It was going to be a scorcher.
When she switched on the radio, the announcer was introducing a Lester Young number, “Lester Leaps In.” Emily’s voice boomed from the back room, “Turn that up!”
Lester was one of her aunt’s favorite jazz artists. He was the original hipster, the ultimate in cool. He spoke in a clipped, cryptic slang he had invented, wore his porkpie hat perched at a rakish angle, and held his sax sideways when he played. The Beat Poets of the 1950s embraced him as one of their own and used to compose poetry to his music.
While Lester played, O shelved the pile of books Emily had left for her. She was beginning to see a connection between jazz players and poets. They were both a little odd, outsiders and rebels exercising a sort of passive resistance to society at-large, dedicated to expressing their unique gifts in their own way.
A few browsers wandered in. She sold a couple of books, made note of them in the log, and directed people to sections they inquired about. Business was picking up. Meanwhile, Emily continued working in the back room.
Around noon, the bell rang and O looked up. The dark-haired boy with the light fingers walked into the shop. He worked his way over to the poetry section. She noticed a couple of burrs stuck to the back of his sleeve, a couple more to the cuff of his pants.
She waited to see if he was going to take another book, unsure of what she would do if he did. Instead, he reached into his pocket, pulled out a book, and placed it on the shelf.
Emily came out from the back room with something she wanted to show O. She noticed the boy browsing through the poetry section and watched him for a minute, then wandered back into the rear room. No sooner had she disappeared through the doorway than the boy seized his opportunity. He reached out, slid another book into his coat, and made his way quickly out of the shop.
Okay – so he wasn’t a book thief. He was a book borrower. The Green Man was just his local library. O glanced up in the mirror. Emily was making notes on a pad of paper balanced on the arm of the couch and appeared lost to the world.
O got up and headed over to the poetry section. She pulled out the book she had seen the boy return to the shelf. It was a collection of Edgar Allan Poe. She carried it back to the desk to take a closer look.
Poe was one of her personal favorites – one of the poets whose work her father used to leave lying around the house for her to discover. There was a strange beauty to his poetry, a sense of the nearness of the supernatural. So her mystery boy liked Poe too. He ins
tantly went up a few notches in her estimation.
She leafed through the book. There were no markings, no signs of abuse. As she fanned through to the back, a piece of pale blue paper fluttered out. It had been folded twice. She unfolded it and found a poem written on it. She thought, at first, it might be a transcription of one of Poe’s, but as she read it through, she realized it was not.
There was no telling how long it had been in the book, but it didn’t have the faded look of old writing. Maybe it was the work of her mysterious stranger. So he was a poet. He shot up several more notches.
At that moment Emily reappeared with a book she wanted to look up in one of her reference books on the desk. O tucked the poem back inside the book. She was tempted to show it to Emily, but there was no way of doing that without going through the whole story. And she would rather keep her stranger’s secrets to herself for now.
Emily put her book down on the corner of the desk and reached for the heavy old copy of The American Bookman. She started searching through the index. “Have you seen that boy before?” she asked, without looking up.
“What boy?”
“The one who was just in here.”
“Yes, he’s been in before when I was here alone.”
“Did he buy anything?”
“No, just browsing.”
“He reminds me a little of Arthur Rimbaud.”
“Who is that?”
“A French poet. Here, I’ll show you.” And she walked O down to a space on the wall near the front of the shop, where there was a picture of a group of men gathered at a table. She pointed to one, a boy who sat resting his head on his hand. He was much younger than the others.
“That’s Rimbaud. He was just sixteen when he appeared on the scene. Brash and outrageous, he turned the polite world of French poetry on its ear. But he was a genius. He wrote poetry as if he were making magic. Then, before he turned twenty, he abandoned writing completely and went off to Africa.”
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