In for a Penny E-Book

James P. Blaylock

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: Short stories
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 287

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This mesmerising collection from World Fantasy Award-winner James P. Blaylock offers seven brilliant excursions into one of the most idiosyncratic imaginations of our time. Highlighted by the acclaimed novella, "The Trismegistus Club" - a brilliant riff on the antiquarian ghost story - In for a Penny goes from strength to strength, taking us deep into the heart of a quirky, deeply engaging fictional world that no one but Blaylock could have created. Other high points include "Home Before Dark," which chronicles one man's first few hours in the afterlife. Its thematic companion, "Small Houses," recounts an aging widower's last few hours on earth. Both stories constitute deeply felt, lovingly detailed farewells to the things and places of this world. In "The Other Side," a minor precognitive episode leads the hero to an obsessive fascination with the hidden mysteries of the universe. In "His Own Back Yard," a story worthy of the great Jack Finney, a middle-aged man finds himself stranded in the haunted territory of his childhood. The blackly funny "War of the Worlds" uses a bowling ball and the imminent end of Life As We Know It to illuminate the fault lines in a modern marriage. Finally, in the wonderfully imagined title story, the single-minded pursuit of treasure - of something for nothing - leads Blaylock's protagonist to a harrowing confrontation with his own worst self. Startling, funny, eccentric, and often unexpectedly moving, the Blaylockian worldview shines forth with undiminished vigor in this marvellous collection, which shows us ourselves - and the world around us - from a wholly unique perspective. "Simply, almost artlessly written, the six fantasy stories in this slim collection from Blaylock (Thirteen Phantasms), set in the gentle, loving territory of his personal California world, verge on the sentimental but never slip into the banal." - Publishers Weekly

Leseprobe

Copyright © James P. Blaylock 2003

All rights reserved.

Cover art by Dirk Berger.

Published as an e-book in North America by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD., in 2013.

ISBN: 9781625670366

ALSO BY JAMES P. BLAYLOCK

NOVELS

The Elfin Ship

The Disappearing Dwarf

The Digging Leviathan

Homunculus

Land Of Dreams

The Last Coin

The Stone Giant

The Paper Grail

Lord Kelvin’s Machine

The Magic Spectacles

Night Relics

All The Bells On Earth

Winter Tides

The Rainy Season

Knights Of The Cornerstone

Zeuglodon

The Aylesford Skull

COLLECTIONS

Thirteen Phantasms

In For A Penny

Metamorphosis

The Shadow on the Doorstep

NOVELLAS

The Ebb Tide

The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs

WITH TIM POWERS

On Pirates

The Devil in the Details

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Also by James P. Blaylock

my own back yard an introduction

the other side

the war of the worlds

his own back yard

home before dark

in for a penny or the man who believed in himself

small houses

the trismeaistus club

About James P. Blaylock

my own back yard an introduction

I WON’T SAY that the stories in this volume are particularly autobiographical (with the exception of The Other Side” which—as unlikely as it sounds—is largely drawn from life) but all of them are close to home in one way or another. “Small Houses” always reminds me of my old friend Mike Kelly, who had on his left arm a tattoo of a skeleton pitching a shovel full of dirt over its shoulder. Beneath a half dug grave were the words, “dig your own.” The main character in “Small Houses” decides to build his own coffin, and blithely informs his wife that he’ll use it as a tool box during his time on earth, and then as a casket during his time beneath it. If you’ve read the story you know that she’s less than excited about the idea.

In fact, that bit of inspiration happened to me in just that same way, and unhappened just as quickly. I had bought a couple of hundred board feet of red oak to build some furniture, and there was quite a bit left over, and it dawned on me one Saturday morning when I was pushing sawdust around out in the garage, halfway through my first cup of coffee, that with a couple of days’ work I could kill two birds with one stone: coffin and toolbox both.

I’ve always been most comfortable surrounded by stuff, mainly books and baubles—tin toys and ceramic Humpty Dumpties and salt and pepper shakers and other odds and ends of junk that I’d accumulated over the years. We’re told that you can’t take it with you, but I wondered about that. The old Egyptian mummies didn’t go empty-handed into the underworld, and I couldn’t see why I should either. Why not turn the coffin into a sort of portmanteau—corpse in the bottom and afterlife accoutrements in the lid? It wouldn’t be bad to have something to drink, for example, and so I would build into the casket a slot that would fit a bottle of Laphroaig scotch and another slot for a glass to drink it with. I’d pack some books, say five of them, including Huckleberry Finn and Tristram Shandy and a collection of Stevenson’s essays. The books would take some consideration. Maybe I’d want a pocketknife, maybe a half dozen of my favorite marbles and of course a couple of photographs. During the years that I played out my earthly existence, I could lodge a sliding T-bevel in the slot where the scotch glass would go, an assortment of hammers in the book niches, and so forth, maybe put the box on casters so that I could drag it down the driveway without throwing my back out.

I went into the house in a rare state of excitement. Viki was washing dishes at the sink. “Listen to this!” I said, and then revealed the plan in all its glory, and all the time she kept washing the dishes, as if I weren’t there at all, the expression on her face unchanging. After I was done, or better yet, played out, she said, “No, I don’t think so.” She picked up another dish and put it into the sink, and I went back outside and built a table. About six months later Tim Powers heard that Mike Kelly had shot himself down in Mexico somewhere.

Later yet—several years later—I had one of my characters build the coffin for me, and it was in the writing of the story that I saw that he wouldn’t take anything with him after all, that the story was in fact about the difficulty of leaving earthly things behind. The tree house in which he’s living sits on stilts in an avocado tree in my own back yard; his goldfish belonged to my young friend Sarah Koehler; the bottle of sherry was one that Viki and I nearly bought when we were traveling through Spain, but didn’t, because it was too expensive—nearly eight dollars, as I recall.

“Home Before Dark” is a companion story, so to speak, to “Small Houses,” except that the main character is dead when the story opens, and he’s got a brief few hours to come to terms with that. Both of the stories are strange in one way: unlike the perhaps more typical story in which a character grapples with some variety of trouble, my characters had to grapple with a lifetime of relative happiness and with the sad fact that there’s an inevitable end to it.

I’ve always liked what Dorothy learns in The Wizard of Oz. I think that for most of us it’s true. I’ve noticed that Westerners are always scuttling off to the east in search of gurus, looking for the Way. Somehow I don’t see as many Easterners heading west in search of the same thing (unless the Way has to do with money), and maybe that’s because they believe what Dorothy came to believe, and which I’ve been convinced of most of my life, as sentimental as it sounds.

“His Own Back Yard” and “In For a Penny” started out as the same story, or were at least the product of the same thinking and note-taking. I wanted to write about treasures and about greed, and I had it in mind that my character would bury coffee-can treasures as a child, and then when he dug them up as an adult, they would have magically metamorphosed into authentic treasures, and he would fall under their spell, and dig himself silly before it was over. I myself, however, have buried a few coffee-can treasures in my life, back when I was a child, and then again when I had children of my own—there’s one or two out in the back yard right now—but I’ve never drawn a map, nor have I remembered their location for more than a week. Those small treasures, however, didn’t seem to want to be put into a story about greed. They had something to do with my abiding happiness with stuff, which I’d already meddled with in “Small Houses,” and something to do with nostalgia, and something to do with the sad passing away of bits and pieces of our lives. Greed just wasn’t in it, so I determined to write two different stories about treasures. As I pegged away at “His Own Back Yard” I saw that my character was suffering from a temporary case of the cup-half-empty syndrome, and had to discover that he was looking for something he already had, but had temporarily lost sight of. I concluded that to some small extent, if we’re lucky, we gain as much as we lose over the years. It was another story about happiness.

“In For a Penny” recalled a novel I wrote a few years back called All the Bells on Earth, which was about a number of things including what John Ruskin referred to as “the great fight with the dragon.” What is it, we might well wonder, that will defeat us if we don’t actively do battle with it on a daily basis? It seems to me that we’re in the deadliest sort of peril if we look at “down-going men” (as Robert Louis Stevenson refers to them in Jekyll and Hyde) and say, “that’s not me.” “There but for fortune” is a safer bet. I’m not at all certain that greed is one of my own dragons, but it has a certain luster, and it was that luster that attracted me to the story, which is simply about the common spiritual disease of believing too firmly in oneself.

As I said, “The Other Side” comes closest to home, at least in regard to the facts of the story, all of which are true except when the main character goes to the party at the house of the psychic. So far I haven’t hobnobbed with any psychics. My good friend Jeff is a Freudian, very highly regarded in the field of psychiatry and monumentally intelligent. He’s a rationalist through and through, and for him the fanciful is nonsense. I, on the other hand, firmly believe that rationalism is utterly irrational, and I read Charles Fort with enthusiasm. If I saw my grandmother’s ghost appear before me wearing her wedding dress and a blazing halo, I’d be a happy man (“thrilled” is maybe a better word) and her appearance would simply confirm what I already suspect to be true—not that there are necessarily ghosts in the world, mind you, but simply that there is much in the world that I don’t begin to understand, and quite possibly never will. In short, I very often favor the mystery over the solution. What would Jeff make of his grandmother’s ghost? Either that someone had slipped him a psychotropic drug or that he had gone off his chump.

From time to time I wonder whether I’ve gone off my chump. After the bizarre pair of phone calls that I recount in “The Other Side,” I wondered this out loud in a conversation with Powers. He suggested that I quit worrying about it, and file the mystery in the bin that’s marked “inexplicable” and let it go at that. As long as I’m not cutting the heads off dogs, he said, I shouldn’t worry too much. I think it was good advice. When one is caught up in the solidly irrational, one shouldn’t expect rational answers, and that’s what the story itself is about in the end. The happiest and most philosophical pigs I’ve ever witnessed possessed nothing more than a head of lettuce, and I’ll bet you a nickel they didn’t begin to understand it, or care to, either. As for the possum—that’s just exactly how it happened, a frivolous case of precognition apparently. It was the weirdest damned thing, at least from my point of view. The possum himself, on the other hand, was just getting to the other side.

Where does that leave me? With “The War of the Worlds” which isn’t really science fiction at all, and which (of all the stories) bears very little resemblance to anything in my own life. It was generated when a pal of mine bought the infamous eight-ball bowling ball after a night of long-neck Budweisers down at the lanes. His wife was pregnant at the time, and money was tight. The ball cost him over two hundred bucks, and he was still giddy enough when he got home to bring it into the house to show it to her, setting off a land mine that might have blown apart a marriage that wasn’t quite so solid as theirs. I ran into him several months later, and he was still carrying the ball around in the trunk of his car, and from time to time he would take it out and gaze at it. He hadn’t gone bowling since the night of the blowup, and he had no real desire to, but he has a hell of a bowling ball if he ever decides to take it up again. It reminds me of the geneticist who crossed a mink with a gorilla: it made a nice coat, but the sleeves were too long. There’s a downside to everything, I guess.

I don’t know entirely what all this means. Rethink coffins and bowling balls, that’s one thing. Your wife mightn’t be half as enthusiastic about them as you are. And don’t bury valuables in a coffee can without drawing a map: coffee cans rust to pieces surprisingly quickly, and at least for most of us, so does our memory. Remember that easy money can be a hard life after all, as the song said. When the poet tells you that nothing gold can stay, he’s probably right, but remember that there’s another poet who tells us that the world is always turning toward the morning, and maybe he’s right too. He just sees things from a different point of view, like the possum, and if you can manage it, it’s not a bad perspective to cultivate. As for phone calls out of the void, I have no advice for you at all, except that you should be leery about who you reveal them to, Freudians included.

James Blaylock Orange, California January, 2003

the other side

IT WAS EVENING, half past five on a late autumn Thursday, and the sun had already gone down on the changing season. The homely smell of wood smoke from fireplace chimneys lingered in the air of the lamplit neighborhood, and there was the smell of damp vegetation from yesterday’s rain. Nina, Art and Beth’s five-year-old daughter, was at a friend’s house where she had stayed for dinner despite its being a school night, and Art was on a mission to pick her up and haul her home while Beth fixed their own supper of steamed crab legs and drawn butter, food that no right-minded child of five would eat, any more than she’d eat onions or mushrooms or a fish head at the Chinese restaurant.

He opened the car door and sat down on the cold upholstery, and in that moment, abruptly and incongruously, there came into his mind the starkly clear picture of a possum crossing a road, illuminated by a car’s headlights. Just as quickly the image was gone, as if he had caught a second’s worth of a television program while switching through the channels. He looked out through the windshield at the empty street, his thoughts interrupted and scattered.

As he drove, he recalled the image clearly, rerunning it in his mind out of curiosity—a dark grove of some sort, the weedy dirt shoulder of the road, the big possum angling across the asphalt, caught for a moment in his headlights as it scurried toward the shrubbery on the far side. He rolled the window down an inch to let in the night air and headed down Cambridge Street toward Fairhaven Avenue, barely seeing the human shadows in the silent cars that passed him, bound for their own lighted living rooms and fireplaces and suppers.

At the stop sign opposite the cemetery he waited for a car to swing past in front of him, and then he turned left onto Fairhaven, remembering suddenly that he was supposed to stop at the market for a container of sour cream for the baked potatoes. Thinking about it, his mind drifted back on course, which at this time of night inevitably meant food, and he realized that he was ravenously hungry and that the evening ahead looked to him like a paid vacation.

Fairhaven was dark, with only a few lights glowing in the cemetery chapel. His headlights illuminated the turned earth of the first rows of the orange grove on his left and the shadowy oleander bushes that hedged the shoulder on the right. And just then something appeared ahead of him, moving across the road. He braked the car, slowing down more out of amazement than necessity: a big possum had come out of the grove and was running with a heavy gait toward the oleanders, its fur showing silver in the headlights. In a moment the animal had disappeared in the night.

A horn honked behind him, and he accelerated, realizing that he had come to a full stop there in the middle of the road, and for a moment he was so addled that he couldn’t recall his destination. The thought came to him that he should pull over and go back on foot to see if he could find the possum, just to make sure that he hadn’t imagined it, but he gave the idea up as lunacy and drove on across Tustin Street and into the neighborhood on the far side, slowly returning to his senses.

* * * *

“So you didn’t get the sour cream?” Beth asked him, setting the big plate of crab legs on the table. She poured him a glass of white wine as he hacked open his baked potato.

“I was too … shook up, I guess.”

“By a possum? You didn’t hit it, did you?”

“Heck no. I was nowhere near it. It was … seeing it, you know, after what happened when I got into the car. I don’t think you’re following what I’m saying. I’m not talking about a simple déjà vu or something.”

Nina came into the kitchen, dressed in her pajamas, skinny as an orphan. She had her mother’s dark hair and eyes. “I have homework,” she said. She held out an empty shoebox.

“In kindergarten you have homework?” Art picked up a crab leg and pulled it open along the slit that Beth had cut into it with a knife.

“She has to make a collection,” Beth said. “Mrs. Barnes was talking about it at back-to-school night, remember?”

“Sure,” Art said. “I think she told everyone it shouldn’t be bugs.”

“Nothing dead,” Beth said, taking the butter out of the microwave and sitting down. “You don’t have to kill things to have a collection.”

“How about leaves?” Art asked helpfully. He doubled a long piece of crab and dipped it into the drawn butter right up to his fingertips. “Do leaves count as dead?”

“Leafs?” Nina wrinkled up her nose in the style of a rabbit. “What’s that thing?”

“That thing is a crab leg,” Art said. “Hey! I’ll tell you what. How about a crab leg collection?”

Nina frowned and shook her head in small jerks. “Those smell.”

“And they’re dead,” Beth added. The telephone rang, and Beth stood up again to answer it.

“Anthony Collier,” Art said, looking up sharply. The name had simply popped into his head, arriving out of nowhere, like a light blinking on.

“Wait,” Beth told him, waving him silent and picking up the receiver, clearly assuming that he was starting to tell her something about his old friend Anthony, who had moved to New York the previous winter. “Hello,” she said, and then listened, double-taking just a little bit. She handed him the phone, her hand over the mouthpiece. “Anthony Collier,” she said.

“Hey,” Art said weakly. He realized that his heart was racing now, and he replied in half sentences, finally begging off to eat dinner.

“Wow,” she said. “That was a weird coincidence. What were you going to tell me?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean nothing? You started to tell me something about Anthony.”

“Just his name. His name sort of flew into my head. It was weird, like the thing with the possum.”

“I think feathers,” Nina said, looking at the parakeets, which had started chattering when the phone rang. They had two of them, both green, in a cage suspended from the ceiling. Nina climbed onto a chair and peered into the cloth seed guard that aproned the underside of the cage. She reached into it and pulled out a loose feather, smiling and holding it up for them to see before dropping it into the shoebox.

* * * *

For the next hour Art was unable to concentrate on anything else. He tried to think out the meaning of the two incidents, possessed by the idea that they were a new category of experience, that they were evidence of … other things. He had never been a rationalist, and had always been willing to consider things he himself had never witnessed—ghosts, flying saucers, the hollow earth, New Zealand. But never had he ever been a party to a public display of these things. The paranormal was something he had read about, something that happened to others, whose stories were related in pulp-paper magazines.

During the evening the phone rang twice more, and each time his mind supplied him with a name as he leaped up to grab it, but he was wrong both times, and he realized that he had been merely guessing. With Anthony he hadn’t guessed. The information had come from outside of himself somehow, independent of his own thinking, exactly as if it had been beamed into his head.

He stopped himself. That kind of thinking sounded crazy even to him, and he wondered suddenly if this was some kind of schizophrenic episode, the precursor to a gibbering decline into nuttiness. Except, of course, that Beth had been a witness. She could misunderstand the possum, because she hadn’t been there, but she’d heard him come up with Anthony’s name out of the blue.

He went into the pantry and dug out a deck of cards, then returned to his chair in the living room, fanning the cards out on the coffee table. Coincidence wouldn’t answer the possum question. That much was clear to him. Beth came out of Nina’s room, where she had been reading the nightly story, and she stood watching him move the cards around. He could see that she was interested. This thing had gotten to her.

“Five of spades,” he said out loud, flipping over a random card from the middle of the spread. It was a queen of hearts. He tried again, naming the two of clubs, then the eight of diamonds, and then a half dozen other numbers and suits, dead wrong every time. The five of spades finally appeared, meaninglessly late. Beth had already lost interest and gone into the family room to watch television. He heard the theme song from Jeopardy! start up, and he put the cards back in the pack, giving up and going in to kiss Nina goodnight.

“Read me one,” Nina whispered, pulling the covers up to her chin so that she looked like Kilroy.

“You already had a story,” Art told her. By her bed lay the shoe box, empty except for the parakeet feather. “This is a good collection,” he said.

“It’s only one. Mom says one’s not a collection.”

“Maybe we should go feather collecting.”

“Do you know where?” she asked.

But just like that he had lost the thread of the conversation. In his mind’s eye he saw the possum again, returning to haunt him, its hairless tail vanishing into the oleander. Everything had been identical in his mind and on the road—the angle at which it crossed, the grove off to the left, the way the headlights picked it out of the darkness, the way the creature had been swallowed up by the shrubbery and the shadows. …

Something struck him then, something he hadn’t thought of before.

“Do I know where what?” he asked, finally reacting to Nina’s question.

“Where there’s feathers?”

“Sure. I know a place. We’ll go looking.” He tucked her in and went out, hurrying into the family room where Beth sat watching Jeopardy! He saw right away that the Double Jeopardy categories weren’t up his alley. “Listen to this,” he said to Beth, sitting down next to her on the couch. “The two incidents aren’t the same thing.”

“Okay,” she said, her eyes on the television screen.

“With Anthony, his name came into my mind the instant the phone rang. At the same time.”

“I still say it’s coincidence.”

“That’s all right. It might be. But listen to what I’m telling you. With the possum it was different. I predicted the possum. You see the difference? I forecast it. There was a five- or six-minute lag between when I pictured it and when it appeared.”

“I do see the difference. I don’t know what it means, but I see what you’re saying. The possum is kind of … psychic.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Actually they’re both kind of psychic, aren’t they? Unless you really think the phone call thing was coincidence.”

“I don’t know what I think. What’s the Santa Maria?”

“What?” he asked, utterly baffled by this.

“The name of Columbus’s ship,” she said. “Explorers for six hundred.”

“Oh.” He watched the game show for a minute. It was winding up. “You know why it’s not a coincidence? Because of the possum. That would make two weird things on the same night, which would be a double coincidence.”

“The Final Jeopardy subject is British History,” Alex Trebek said, looking shrewdly at the audience, and the program cut away to a commercial.

“Oliver Cromwell,” Art said, the name almost leaping out of his throat. This time he was sure of it. It was like the possum and like Anthony Collier. He hadn’t guessed. He hadn’t had time to guess. The name had simply come to him. Beth looked at him wonderingly and he nodded his head. “That’s it again,” he said. “At least I think it is.” Instantly he had come to doubt himself. Was this another guess, like the five of spades? Or was this the possum, crossing the road to get to the other side?

There were half a dozen commercials, interminable commercials, but finally the show was on the air again. Trebek read off the answer: “This Puritan Prime Minister of England was so hated by the populace, that after he was dead and buried his body was exhumed and …”

Art didn’t hear the rest of it. He sat with his mouth open, his mind swimming. Beth stared at him when the answer was revealed. “Now you’re giving me the creeps,” she said.

* * * *

On Friday evening he tried again with the cards, and again he couldn’t make them work. He rolled dice, but that was a washout, too. He made a mighty effort to blank out his mind, to open himself to psychic suggestion, but it was no good. The harder he tried, the more he understood that it wouldn’t speak to him, whatever it was, and he tried hard not to try as hard. When the phone rang at eight o’clock he shouted “Jimmy Carter!” but it was the Fireman’s Fund selling tickets to a talent show. Beth humored him to the point of asking the caller whether his name was Jimmy Carter, but it turned out not to be, and the man hung up angry, thinking that she was making fun of him.

“I guess it’s not working as good as it was,” Beth said, and from her tone of voice Art could tell that her Oliver Cromwell enthusiasm had pretty much worn off.

* * * *

On Saturday morning he stopped at Rod’s Liquors and bought five dollars’ worth of lottery tickets, marking the little ovals as random numbers wandered unbidden into his head, rejecting numbers that seemed too insistent or that appeared there twice or that were clearly ringers, like Nina’s birthday or his own age. Quickly, however, every number on the lottery ticket began to seem suspect, and he filled in the last two games by shutting his eyes and pointing.

On the way home, he stopped at the used bookstore where he found something promising: a book called A Field Guide to the Paranormal. He knew the clerk at the counter, a thin, owl-eyed man named Bob who had worked there forever and, in fact, lived a couple of blocks away from him and Beth.

“You’re interested in the paranormal?” Bob asked him, taking his money.

“Yeah,” Art confessed. “I find it kind of fascinating.”

“My sister’s a psychic. She has a sort of organization.”

“Really? What do you think about it,” Art asked. “Just out of curiosity.” He realized that he wanted very badly to tell someone about his experiences, and it dawned on him that he was more than a little bit proud of himself. He wasn’t the same man today that he had been last week.

“I’ve got no problem with it. There’s a guy at Krystal’s meetings that bends spoons. That and all kinds of other stuff. I’ve seen it. How about you?”

“Yeah, I’m a believer. A couple of things happened to me recently …” He realized that he couldn’t think of any way to relate the possum story or the phone calls in such a way as to give them the punch they deserved, and he wished that something more grand had happened to him, like predicting an earthquake or a train wreck. “What kind of things?”

“Oh, you know, knowing in advance who’s calling on the phone, that kind of thing. And I nailed a Jeopardy! answer before the question was asked.”

“You mean you got the question before the answer.”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant. It was Oliver Cromwell.”

“Cromwell? The host? I thought it was that other guy.”

“It is that other guy. I meant the answer was Oliver Cromwell.”

“I got Oliver Hardy once,” Bob told him, counting out change. “The category was silent films, I think. Or maybe it was comedians. Either way.” The transaction, just like the conversation, had run its course.

“Sure,” Art said. “I guess so. Look, what’s this thing with your sister? She has meetings or something?”

“Thursday nights, at her house. It’s a kind of support group, you know?”

“Psychics need a support group?”

“Hell, everyone needs a support group these days.”

“And her name’s really Crystal?”

“With a K,” Bob said. He wrote his sister’s name and number on the back of the sales receipt and handed it to Art, who slipped it into his wallet. When he got home he sat down in the overstuffed chair in the living room and thumbed through the book, but it turned out to be volume one of a set, mostly concerned with spontaneous human combustion and the aura phenomenon, neither of which, apparently, applied to his own situation.

He had the house to himself, and he decided to take advantage of the peace and quiet to meditate in order to foster psychic suggestion. As he sat there with his eyes shut, his thoughts spun idly, and he began to develop the notion that unwittingly he had managed to access a particular grotto inside his mind, a place where the subconscious depths lay like a hidden pool, where he might swim if only he could find it in the darkness. He pictured the pool itself, illuminated by moonlight, and he wandered toward it along shadowed corridors….

* * * *

He awoke to find that Beth and Nina had gotten home from lunch. Nina had a nondescript gray feather to show him, probably from a pigeon. The thought came to him that he had wasted the entire morning chasing after psychic phantoms. It had been three days since Anthony Collier and Oliver Cromwell and the disappearing possum. Perhaps he had sailed temporarily into some sort of whimsical psychic breeze, which he would never again pick up no matter how much sail he loaded onto the masts.

The thought was disheartening, and he realized that the experiences of Thursday night were … special in some way. That they somehow made him special. They showed beyond all doubt that … He tried to grasp what it was they showed, exactly. They showed … that there were enormous things that were true about the universe, things that he now had a firsthand knowledge of. He recalled the derailed conversation at the bookstore, and he knew there must be a larger picture. There had to be. He had a handful of puzzle pieces, but he needed more if ever he were to get a clear view.

“Can we go feathering?” Nina asked him, coming out of her bedroom with the shoebox.

“Okay,” he said. “How about around the neighborhood?”

“But there was that place you said. With the birds.”

“There’s birds in the neighborhood,” he told her. “We don’t want to ignore them and go to the park, or they might feel bad.”

“I might go after groceries,” Beth said, coming out of the kitchen.

Art and Nina went out onto the sidewalk and into a perfect fall day. The wind gusted leaves along the pavement, and again there was the smell of wood smoke, perhaps someone burning tree prunings. The sky was as clear as water, inconceivably deep and blue between brush strokes of cloud drift. Art found that he was distracted though, unable to enjoy the afternoon, constantly anticipating another psychic interlude, reassessing what had been happening to him. He tried to keep his mind on the here and now, but he had to work at it. Several houses down they found a white feather lying forlornly on a clipped lawn, perhaps a seagull feather, and then, at the corner house, they discovered a dead mockingbird beneath a curb tree, torn apart by a cat.

“Yuck,” Nina said, “what is that?”

“It’s a mockingbird,” Art told her, picking up a long mottled feather.

“But is it guts?”

“Yep,” Art said, “it’s guts.”

“That’s yuck.”

They walked on, heading up the next block where an acorn woodpecker hammered away at the trunk of a palm tree. The bird stood upside down, defying gravity, showing off. “See his red head?” Art asked.

“Can we get a red feather …? Look!” Nina shouted, pointing at the sky. An airplane blew out a vapor trail off to the east, a skywriter, spelling something out. They waited for it, shading their eyes, naming the letters before the November wind bore them away. “April,” it said, and the plane circled back around and circumscribed it with a heart, although by the time the heart was completed it was blown to tatters, and the whole thing looked like an ill-drawn parallelogram containing ghostly hieroglyphics.

Art was suddenly overwhelmed with the idea that it meant something, that it was a sign, maybe some sort of spirit writing, perhaps intended for him…

…but just as soon as he conceived the thought, he realized that he was off his rocker, lost inside his own bafflement, confusing an endearment with a ghost. He forced himself to focus on the world around him, the weathered sidewalk, the comical dog that watched them through a picket fence, the wind in his hair. He put his arm on Nina’s shoulder as they walked, and immediately he felt steadier.

“There’s one!” Nina shouted, and she ran straight to a blue feather that lay half covered with dead leaves.

“From a blue jay!” Art said. “How many is that?”

Nina counted the feathers in the shoebox, making a laborious job of it, losing track and recounting to get it right. “Five,” she said finally.