The focus could direct the beam, but it could not heal itself. At the very moment that Weisel died, Fred Tolliver—still unaware of what he had done—sat in his home, realizing finally that the contractor had done him in. He could never repay the note, would perhaps have to get work again in some studio, and probably would be unable to do it with sufficient regularity to save the house. His twilight years would be spent in some dingy apartment. The modest final hope of his life had been denied him: he would not be able to just simply get by in peace. It was a terrible lonely thing to contemplate.
The phone rang.
He picked it up wearily. “Yes?”
There was a moment of silence, then the voice of Miss Evelyn Hand came across the line, icily. “Mr. Tolliver, this is Evelyn Hand. I waited all day yesterday. I was unable to participate in the recital. Please have my violin waiting for me, repaired or not.”
He was too stunned, too depressed, even to be polite. “Okay.”
“I want you to know you have caused me great pain, Mr. Tolliver. You are a
“Yes. Yes, of course,” he said, dimly, faintly.
He hung up the receiver and sat there.
The emotions sang, the electrons danced, the focus shifted, and the symphony of frustration went on.
Fred Tolliver’s cello lay unattended at his feet. He would never get through, just barely slide through. He felt the excruciating pain of pins and needles in his legs.
Shoppe Keeper
I was riding down Beverly Glen with Arthur Byron Cover. I said to Arthur, “You know, one of the things that always bothered me about those fantasies in which some dude comes across a magic shop that sells real magic, or three wishes, or genuine love potions, or whatever, is they never told you what kind of life was lived by the proprietor. I mean, where did he get his stock? In what sort of coin could you pay someone for things that valuable? When the dude leaves the shop it always vanishes; where does it go? What happened to the poor schmuck who ran the joint? Huh, answer me that?”
Arthur looked at me seriously and said, “You know, you’re a very weird person.”
That is how this story came to be written.
To satisfy my curiosity.
And you can stick it in your ear, Cover.
A pale, short, young man wearing filthy blue jeans and goat-roper boots worn away at the heels came shuffling down Jamshyd Avenue. As he passed the narrow arcade alleyway, the rusty creaking of a sign hung on chains caught his attention. He stared at the sign with eyes that were just the slightest bit crossed and glazed. The sign proclaimed
Only five feet, two inches tall, the young man paused at the mouth of the alley, stared at the swinging sign for a moment, ran a hand with dirty nails through his long hair, then turned in.
The shoppe was tiny, with leaded-paned windows, dusty and fly-specked. He could not see inside, but there was a dim and golden light shining through the murkiness of the glass. The door handle was a brass lizard with a forked tongue. The young man put his hand on the brass and it was warm. He opened the door, which opened easily, and he went inside.
The shoppe seemed to stretch on before him indefinitely. It defied dimensional description, like an Escher etching. Such a narrow shop could not possibly be so wide, and so deep, and so high. The frontage of the shoppe on the alley had seemed only twenty feet across, but here inside it was easily ten times as wide. The cathedral ceiling hung far away above him in dismal shadows, beamed and sloping, smelling faintly of mildew and sandalwood and tallow. The light that he had seen straining through the obscured glass of the windows was a mere glow, trembling through the murky interior from a distance so far in the rear of the shoppe that it was no more than a suggestion of light.
The shoppe was jammed with goods; filled with goods; odd goods.
Hobbyhorses with peculiarly mad expressions in their eyes, and with foam-flecked lips. Rows and rows of amphorae, tightly stoppered and each marked with indecipherable inscriptions, written with felt-tip pens. Cases of amulets and tokens, some Egyptian-looking, some contemporary and clearly the products of communes. Puppets hung on long wires from the rafters above, a community of brittle, brightly painted figures, all with broken necks. Shelves filled with anemones. A stack of abacuses. A wall of clocks, from all periods, some with nine or fifty-six divisions of time. Bookcases filled with grimoires, daybooks, hornbooks, arcane thesauri, enchiridia, illuminated manuscripts, diaries, palimpsests, incunabula, claviculae, parerga, ana and epilegomena. Incan icons. Glass phials within which emboli floated, turning slowly in a tideless tide. In one corner an enormous freestanding antique mirror with chased brass fittings; another land, dark and distressing, could be seen in the mirror. Showcases containing plastic doggie vomit and ice cubes with cockroaches in them. Whoopee cushions. Meteorites. Thousands of boxes, all sizes, stacked one atop another. Golden balls of all sizes. A butcher’s-paper roller screwed to one wall, holding a large roll of gold-foil. Bugles. In one showcase a complete set of English vintage automobile cigarette packet cards, 50 to the set, with one hundred thirty-six duplicates of card #26, the 1925 Vauxhall. Orrises, embroideries of gold and silver lace, tossed willy-nilly over a rattan chair. Bolts of paduasoy. On a Duncan
