Another Short Story Attempt

Here's another one with same characters as framing device, in the same vein:

Weeks after the story of Alvarez, Stu presented Gammell with a photocopy of an old letter. “Our window installer found this in an old Queen Anne in the neighborhood. He gave the original to the historical society, but I thought you might like to read it or even frame it or something…” Gammell peered over his glasses at the copy. “Oh this is good…” he murmured. “What do you have there? Tales of Mystery and Imagination 1925? Oh well I think this is worth at least that edition in trade…” Stu held up the book. “Til later then.” He turned as he was leaving and Gammell was still reading. “Oh yes. Thank you indeed,” he said without looking up, then waved vaguely. Stu smiled and shut the door behind him.

“August the 7th, 1902

Dear Cousin-
I fear I may have been very absent-minded indeed. Did I leave a son or a daughter in the ruin of my past life? Is there an unearthly creditor pursuing me now, another in the long list of disappointed lenders?
It seems that I am not safe even in my dreams. It happened last night, which I make ten years since I have made my home here. Only now has my old life caught up. At any rate, this seems to me the only possible interpretation. Perhaps you may supply another more apt… I left the window open to admit the spring air, as is my custom. It is very salutary, do not listen to the general store experts who insist otherwise… I had left a short candle burning on the stand, there to illuminate my edition of A. Bierce. The mail had not brought good news that day and I was anxious to quiet the voices of obligation in my head…
The voices had faded to a low murmur when I finally was obliged to pinch out the flame and lay my book aside. I smelled the familiar perfume of the lilac outside my window, but underneath it there was a sharp suggestion, a hint of mold. My fading consciousness paid it no mind, but I fear this was a signal to my dreaming self…After a brief period of inner darkness my dreaming eye opened on a scene of great anxiety: myself, searching frantically for a bundle of incriminating papers. The room was my own, familiar yet alien, as if I had returned after a long absence. As I pushed a row of books aside I heard a tread behind me. It was me, dressed as I was, looking as I was, wearing an expression of startled surprise.
This double turned and hurried down the stairs, an act horrible to me because I did not know that he may not have been fleeing me, but leading me… And twice horrible because I knew that I must follow. I knew it in my arms, legs, guts, before any intellectual consideration.
I chased him down the stairs and across the first floor, the rooms familiar as those of my childhood home, but deserted and bare. I followed him through the cellar door, down the uneven basement stairs. For the first time I could see his back before me. It was truly horrible to see him run as another would see me from behind. I do not know what death is like, and I do not want to know until the time comes… but the sight of myself fleeing before me in that gray-lit basement seemed very like death. At the back wall he turned to face me, sweating and panting like an animal. I took him by the shoulders and looked him square in the face. He returned my look, mirroring my mask of confused fright. Then he was gone… Replaced in my hands by a scrap of damp black cloth, a rag. I cast it down, disgusted and afraid of some species of contamination.
Then, off my right shoulder, I heard a young voice, quiet but clear, singing a name, as a child might do searching for a younger sibling or a pet… “Bobby Helms, Bobby Helms,” it sang. “Good luck, Bobby Helms.” The voice emanated from a pile of dirt made smooth over the years. The mound was lit from behind by a grimy window.
I stared at it… Was it a grave? Perhaps. I could barely discern the outline of some broken masonry. The voice faded. Was I Bobby Helms? The obvious answer eluded me, as had every other object in this terrible place… I only knew that I must excavate the mound; but even the thought of picking up a shovel shocked me to my fundament. Mercifully, then, I awoke to my own room and dancing lace curtains.

August the 12th

The events of the past few days have fairly turned me upside-down. I can do no better, then, than simply pick up the thread on the day after my strange dream…
The fine, rich smell of brewing coffee brought me to my senses and seemed to chase away the heart of my nightmare. Mrs. E., as usual, was up before me and busy. She was never obliged to ask me to rise at a decent hour, even I, an old sinner. Somehow she extracted from me what I would never think to ask of myself, and this without any special demonstration on her part, save a species of reserve combined with a directness of action. She is not an unattractive woman, and if that seems faint praise, it is because she does not deign to demand acknowledgement of those qualities that make her handsome, for all that she is. In fact she emanates a contempt for exhibition of any kind, even the most pedestrian or innocent, and as you might have guessed, this only adds to her peculiar magnetism and makes her the object of the sort of attention she scorns. I can only guess that she may have taken a more conventional view of these things long ago and some tragedy was the sequel of just that species of attention. This would explain her removal to this lonely spot, and her reserve toward me, friendly as it was.
In fact, one episode may furnish a clue … It was in the first year after my application. I stood in the front room while Mrs. E. wrote a draft for some supplies. I remarked a collection of photographs hanging on the opposite wall, above a cotillion. On the cotillion was arranged some fine lace, a vase of flowers and a photo scorched on one corner. The photograph depicted a powerfully-built man with a grave face standing by a little girl, in front of a farmhouse. At the center of the arrangement on the wall was a portrait of a grammar school class. As I examined the faces in the fore of the group I thought I could see the face of the little girl in the farmhouse portrait. At the extreme right stood Mrs. E., a gentle smile on her face. I asked her about the school portrait and she answered without looking up from her writing. “Another life, Mr. Helms,” she said. I mentioned my discovery of the little girl in both photographs and there was a long silence. “It is a reminder, Mr. Helms, of the evils of drink. He worked the next lot during the day and carried on at night. The little girl was his. Just before you applied the little girl, Alice, failed to appear in my class and after the usual inquiries a futile search was conducted. After a few days…” She paused here and continued only with great difficulty. “After a few days, days in which her father’s nightly scenes grew more intense and frightening, the farmhouse burned and Mr. Nichols, the drunkard, fled. Neither were seen again. The photo you see was found in the ruin. Ever after, whenever I addressed my class…” Her voice broke and I turned. I saw her pen laying by the draft book. Her hands were clasped before her face. “I am sorry, Mrs. E. I was wrong to pry…”
“No, Mr. Helms, you could not know. I resigned my position at the school. The house is an inheritance and I own it outright. My support comes from a wealthy relative, a small price to him for the continual proof that my choice of career was foolish.” She handed me the draft. “You will pardon my boldness,” I said, “But there is nothing foolish about educating a child. It seems to me a sacred trust, deserving of respect.” She smiled faintly. “It is kind of you to say so, Mr. Helms.” Then she excused herself and the interview was at an end.
Until the day after my nightmare, I respected this reserve and treated her as any tradesman would a steady and reliable customer; for she did provide me with clean, even handsome room and board, in return for my prompt attention to all the minor annoyances pertaining to an aging house on an isolated lot.
But a very odd turn of events upset this fragile equilbrium, as you shall see. I had guessed in opening this letter that my dream signified the intrusion of some past folly on my waking life… But later events have suggested an even more startling construction…
On the day after my strange dream Mrs. E. seemed even more distant than usual. On many occasions I saw her pause before the bay facing the road and stare out, as if she were waiting for someone. Her hands and face, however, spoke something quite opposite from pleasant anticipation. In the glass I saw her eyes deepen to a shade of terrible clarity.
It occurred to me then how fine she was, how resolute in a situation hard enough for a man… I mean the isolation. And it occurred to me how darkly comic that we lived the life of a married couple with barely a word between us, let alone a term of affection… At the sight of her standing before the window I felt a surge of pity, awe, regard and affection, all in one powerful admixture. Still, I quietly ate my breakfast. Just as I finally resolved to speak she spoke to me, as if she were fending off my verbal approach. I watched her face in the glass. “Mr. Helms, I wish you would address an unhealthy odor on the property. Have you remarked it? It seems to originate from that part…” She gestured to an old oak that stood at some distance, on the boundary of the lot. “I would be pleased, Mrs. E.”, I replied. “I have remarked it, even last night, as I fell asleep.” Here eyes moved my direction in the glass. “Is that so?” she said with a trace of wonder. Then her normal reserve returned. “It cannot be healthy.”
“No indeed,” I said. “I will attend to it directly.” I rose to collect my tools and she stopped me with her eyes. “Please, Mr. Helms– finish your breakfast. It is not so urgent you must give that up.” I nodded briefly. “Of course. Thank you, I will.”
She did not stir from that spot , not even when I had crossed the lot with a grasshook to expose the carcass I was certain was the source of the tainted air. I turned when I was fairly under the old oak. She still stood behind the window, tall and straight, her hands clasped before her, like a statue in a churchyard.
It was not until I began my work that I began to feel the presentiment of an evil that Mrs. E. had borne, I think, much longer. How I had escaped it I do not know… Perhaps my selfish nature and the many distractions resulting from it protected me. It manisfested as an evil smell, but in my mind it grew to an echo of an atrocity so profound that it scarred the air... I laid into a tangled island of grass and hawthorne with a will. The branches of the old oak rattled above me; the smell grew stronger at times, then would waft away.
Then, just as I stepped to face a last clump of dry yellow grass, I nearly met disaster: my foot punched through a rotten board and released a cool but foul parcel of air. As you may have guessed, I had found an old well, and the source of the miasma. I could only surmise that it served the neighboring farmhouse in its time, now the burned black skeleton that mrs. E. alluded to in that long-ago interview. The lot that bounded it was an unsightly desert; once, when I offered to approach the owners with a view of clearing it, and before she had told me about the fire, Mrs. E.’s face assumed an expression of sorrow and dread as she told me shortly that she had never seen the owners and did not know if they were even still living. Then she excused herself to perform some urgent but minor household task.
Now, as I studied the black decaying timbers rising from the grass, I felt an outrage and an overwhelming desire to rush to the site and begin pulling down the unholy thing. I turned to the house and saw Mrs. E. straighten and clasp her hands more firmly together, as if she were straining to see events partly hidden by the tall grass. I waved to reassure her and started towards the porch.
She met me at the door and I told her what I had found and my near miss. She insisted on examining my leg and dressing the minor scratches. “There is such a thing as blood poisoning, Mr. Helms. You must be careful,” she said in a worried way that touched me. She returned to her station by the window, as if to hide her face. “Mr. Helms,” she said, “I know it seems excessive, but I must insist the well be excavated completely, the offending material removed and the pit carefully filled so as to prevent any future collapse.” I will own that my shoulders sagged at the thought. “But Mrs. E.,” I rejoined, “That will require the removal of a tremendous amount of clay… Would it not be simpler–“ I detected then a slight quaver in her voice, as of some kind of suppressed violence of feeling. “Please, Mr. Helms, I beg–“ her voice quieted then. “Please do not argue. I am adamant.” I was instantly sorry for my objection. “Of course, Mrs. E. I will do as you say. Rely on me.” Her face relaxed but kept its expression of sadness. “Thank you, Mr. Helms. I do appreciate the pains you are taking.”
When I had laid my tools by the well I turned towards the house. Again, she stood behind the window, watching. She lifted one hand slowly. I could not decide whether she intended the gesture as a greeting or a warning. In both interpretations I perceived an abiding concern for me, perhaps even an affection beyond that merely professional species that grows from familiarity and opens a gate to a much smaller and more private demesne…
At first, the work was almost pleasant: a cool breeze had risen and I removed a mountain of tan soil. The bricks I pitched over this mound to form a tumbled heap on the other side. Presently, however, I exposed a layer of bluish grey clay. My pick shivered cruelly on the surface and my hands burned with opened blisters. The oppression came not from hard work, though, to which I am well accustomed, but from the odor, which had grown steadily in its power and insistence. The odor seemed to fill not only the vessel of my body, but of my mind, the vapors forming the ragged messenger of a long-dreaded answer.
It was not until the evening of the next day that I had descended to the last few courses of the well; in the intervening hours I had been obliged to construct a sort of derrick fitted with a block and tackle and bucket, so that I could hoist the bricks up to the surface, tie off the rope and climb a rude stair cut into the side of the pit to pitch the bricks onto their heap. Finally, though, my labor was near an end; the smell was almost overpowering and I had tied a kerchief around my face in a vain attempt to strain out the worst of it. I resembled a filthy highwayman. As I bent to pick up a brick I heard Mrs. E.’s voice above me. I craned my neck and she was leaning over the side, the sun behind her head. A half-humorous comparison came to me then, in which she was Beatrice and I the poet beginning his arduous climb… I smiled through the grime and she must have stared at me, though to me her face was but a black silhouette. Then a much more solemn comparison came to me… Her voice matched in its exact timbre at that moment the voice of my dream; and here was I at the conclusion of that terrible task assigned to me in that basement before the grimy window!
At that moment I saw a scrap of fabric laying at the bottom of the well. The soft muck that consumed it had an evil, bluish-green sheen. I called to Mrs. E. to drop a stick into the well, and this I used to lift the scrap from its prison.
It was revealed to be a child’s dress, badly faded where the muck had not stained it and bearing the faint imprint of a pattern of blue flowers. The smell, in the meantime, had fairly filled the lower portion of the muddy apartment. I staggered up my dirt stair, made unsteady by my cramped joints and the powerful odor. As my head appeared above the opening Mrs. E. approached, but I warned her away. “You will spoil your clothes,” I rejoined, pretending a light mood which I did not feel. She covered her nose and mouth as I dropped the fabric on the ground and we both regarded it.
A change came over Mrs. E.’s face that was not good to see. Some kind of awful fascination had siezed her and she began to approach the scrap as if to pick it up. Then, either the odor or some other influence arrested her and she turned suddenly, sobbing in disgust, sorrow or some combination of both. Her legs seemed to fail her and I had to hurry to her side and sieze her arms. Her muscles were tight like a bow. Then her arms relaxed in my grip and she began to weep abjectly, turning and sobbing into my filthy shirt. You might rejoin that the scrap was no proof of disaster or foul play, but now I realize we had both entertained the possibility of an innocent outcome, she long ago, and had known as a dowser knows an underground stream what the answer would be.
The sound of her weeping was terrible in the stillness. Her sobs deformed her body, as if they emanated from the ground I had lately excavated and traveled through her frame. I thought of her face that day I had asked her about the child’s photo, and in that moment traveled the years of a divided self who must forget a man who could have been a comfort but whose capacity for wretchedness outstripped all else, and a self who grieved for a child who might have been hers under some happier circumstance, and whose disappearance haunted her existence, forcing her to see man and child together, in a shadowbox of waking dream…
Then the image and sound of my own dream came to me again; this time it assumed the nature of a reproach for a life at once selfish for its lack of forethought and self-destructive in its insistence on perfect solitude. It was as if her grief had overflowed to fill my mind, and I wept with her and held her to me without reservation.
I held her away from me and looked into her eyes. When her questioning gaze met mine I was forced to look down; suddenly my powers of persuasion and dissembling, which has you know, cousin, are considerable, had fled me and I was like a child admitting some minor sin; but in this instance I was a grown man trying to admit, and I do not deny it, a wasted life.
Strangely, instead of admitting my true feelings for her, I found myself telling her of my dream, as if I were merely watching myself speak the words and had no influence over their selection. As I described the empty house and the basement her eyes widened. Then I told her of the voice and, for the first time since I had known her, she smiled broadly through her tears. She lay her palm against my cheek and said with a strange combination of wonder and sudden comprehension: “It was I, Mr. Helms. I was the voice. I dreamed your dream, from outside the house. I could but watch as you descended the stairs… I could but call to you. It was I.” I carefully wiped her tears with my grimy hands– a comic interlude, as her face was now almost as dirty as mine– and I promised her to fill the well and bury the scrap with a marker which I would tend as if the grave contained my own child.
I now know that in excavating the dress I had merely made a foregone conclusion plain for us both to see; for it was just this sad ceremony that could bring us together and bind us; for me, it was a terrible reminder of the expense of my selfish solitude; for her, a sign that marked a crossroads passed for ever and that must be seen small and in the distance to signify its true dimension, to speak the immensity and width of the plain still to come. We had been brought together, then, by more than casual chance, as two who had only this one last opportunity.
I explained this to her the best I could; I can’t even remember the final arrangement of my words; perhaps it could have been more comely; but at any rate the end of it all was a simple question. The air had sweetened by then and her sudden laugh chased away the last of the deadly miasma that hung over. “Yes, Robert. I am your Emma already, and have been, that is the comedy…” We held each other as if we were but vapor and would dissolve if released…


When I had tamped the last shovelful of earth on the well and set a marker near the old oak, I picked up an acorn and planted it in the soft fill. We could not wait for the acorn to sprout, however, before we met there again, this time with a justice. If the fates allow we will have plenty of time to watch it mature together.


P.S. I am sorry for telling you of my recent marriage in such a manner, but if you reflect on my position in the family and the age of my entry in that body’s register of the damned you will see that the affair was necessarily an intimate one. I know this explanation is unnecessary, for you know my mind better, I think, than I, but I felt you must know I hold your opinion highest and, had it been possible, you would have been there with me.
You may ask why the solution to the mystery of the well was so delayed in its revelation… Perhaps the power that furnished the clue wanted to give Emma and I every opportunity to realize our common destiny without resorting to parlor room tricks, or you may begin “The wheels of justice…”

P.P.S. If you receive any more “urgent posts” from E.J. Rigby and Sons please do not shield me any longer. Simply refer him to my current address. You may tell him also to go to the devil, but I will leave that up to you.

Yrs., Robert (Bobby) Helms”

My latest attempt at a short story. It is a draft; suggestions/ corrections/ comments are welcome...

Gammell's Partner


“There’s something different about this space… Is this window new?” Stu said. The bookseller looked up from his chess game, took off his half-lenses. They hung by a slender chain around his neck. He was a sixty-year-old with a sharp but friendly face and Stu always thought he looked more than a little like Harvey Korman. “Yes; that wall used to be all books. And the books on botany and pharmacology were toward the back.” Stu walked towards the man with his book. Gammell was his name and he had moved in several years ago; Stu came down whenever he could. Mr. Gammell didn’t have a lot of space but he used it to his best advantage, and he was of that disappearing species of generalist that Stu admired and felt he could have been had he a little more mental discipline. He had helped Gammell in small ways with advice on windows and insulation when he first moved in to the space and he felt a twinge of regret at the sight of the expensive picture window. It was a sign of how long it had been since his last visit; any salesman’s ambition had died a long time ago and the fact that the window didn’t come from his shop didn’t even occur to him. Gammell surprised him by echoing the thought. “I would have contacted you about the window, but the choice was made for me.” He looked down as he said it and Stu interpreted the cue as a statement of bitterness. “You mean it wasn’t your first choice?” Gammell handed him his change and book and smiled slightly. “I mean it was the only choice.” Stu looked at the window. It was expensive and obviously well-made, but new and not distinguished. He heard Gammell get up behind him. “Not so much the choice of window as the timing…” Gammell stood next to Stu, looked out the window at the brilliant whites and greens of early spring. A woman walked by pushing an immense pram; at first Stu thought it was a reclining bicycle. Jesus, those things just keep getting bigger, he thought. Gammell crossed his arms. His voice quieted. “My hand was forced.” Stu felt the atmosphere darken and was almost afraid that there was going to be some kind of emotional scene. Gammell, who was normally very alert and vaguely sardonic, had become quiet, almost reverential. He looked sideways at Stu briefly. “I’m somewhat of an addict myself,” he said, his old manner returning. Stu looked at the book in his hand, a well-preserved old collection of M.R. James ghost stories. He had noticed that when Gammell had peered over his glasses at the price he had made a disgusted noise in his throat, as if angry at his own acquisitiveness, and had charged Stu half the asked price. Gammell walked back to his desk in front of a turned post in the middle of the space. He moved one of the chess pieces. He talked while he looked at the board, as if he were dizzy and trying to focus on the point at the center of the turning.

“I was always a believer… One perhaps whose belief had never been tested and eventually interpreted the lack of data as a firm foundation…” Stu leaned against the casing of the window. “You mean your belief’s been shaken?” The feeling of impending scene was stronger. Was Gammell going to try to evangelize on him? Tell him how he’d been born again? Gammell anticipated him again and looked up briefly, smiled. “No, it’s not a religious experience.” He sat down, studied the board more closely and moved another piece. “Not in the organized sense, anyway.” He looked over the board one last time and seemed to make up his mind about something. He moved one piece, took another off the board. “It’s a ghost story,” he said. “Do you have time?” He seemed to falter, suddenly aware of his own performance. “I mean, it’s rather long…” Stu tried to defuse Gammell’s embarrassment with a shrug. “I’ve got time.”
Gammell opened a drawer and produce an expensive bottle of scotch and two glasses. “Well then, here’s something to sweeten the deal,” he said, looking over his glases at the label. He poured one for Stu and handed it to him. “Please, sit,” he said, and Stu sat in an old and well-worn upholstered rocker near the desk. The atmosphere really did darken then and Gammell pulled the chain on a blue banker’s lamp on his desk. “Thank you,” Stu said, sipping the scotch and feeling the ache in his feet rise to his knees as he settled into the chair. Gammell studied the amber in his glass, sipped it. He settled back in his chair, which creaked as he tipped back. As he looked at the ceiling the blue light beaded his glasses. “This house was built in 1887 by a speculator in land who was destroyed by the collapse back at the turn of the century. After that it was bought by a manager of income properties and run as a boarding house with this first floor the shop and rooms overhead.” He gestured with his glass. Stu looked at the dark wood casing around the stairwell opening, the corner of which was supported by the post behind Gammell’s desk. The stairs climbed over the space above the front entrance and the side to the shop was lined with books. “It was during its life as a boarding house that Doctor Alvarez moved in. He ran a pharmacy down here and was regarded by many in the neighborhood as their primary physician, though he apparently was never registered as anything but a pharmacist. He was locally famous just as much for his personal attributes as his position in the community. He was a man with very dark skin, tall, powerful frame, and yellow eyes.” Gammell stopped here and turned his glass in his hand. “He served the community here for twenty years and lived in a room behind this space.” Stu looked between the rows of pine shelving and saw the dim outlines of a heavy paneled door in dark varnish.
“No one spoke of him casually. Some had a low opinion of him, but those seemed frightened of revealing the real reason for their dislike… Racism may have had something to do with it, undoubtedly did have something to do with it, but in all the records I could find there was a suggestion of xenophobia. His pharmacy was not typical in that he had a wide selection of plants and herbs no one had ever heard of and kept a library of books, most about plants and medical practice but many on occult themes. His customers who cared to know learned he came from Brazil, and I imagine that the reason his off-topic books didn’t cause more of a stir is that the neighborhood was fairly staid, an unkind word would be parochial, and maybe there weren’t many who could read the titles, which would have been mostly in Spanish. University doctors and other people in the field regularly visited him for expert advice… But the references to these visits are suggestive, not exhaustive… Apparently they were afraid of the censure of their peers for visiting a person that the conventional wisdom must have regarded as some kind of witch doctor or quack.” Gammell looked at the board, moved another piece. “But he was nothing of the kind.” He sipped his drink. “In fact, he was a seeker of things that most are content to posit… Those, like me, who preferred to have their beliefs safely closed behind glass… Never to risk shattering them…
A visiting physician who had formed a sort of acquaintance, I won’t say friendship, with Alvarez came one afternoon and dared to knock on that door.” The chair creaked as Gammell gestured with his head. “Alvarez yanked the door out of his hand, staring wildly and sweating, shouting in rapid Spanish. Behind him the doctor could see a dim flicker like candles burning and chalk markings on the floor. Alvarez was clearly frightened to his soul, almost rigid with fear and didn’t seem to know the doctor right away. When he realized who he was he simply shook his head, repeating “No, no,” and slammed the door. The doctor swears that he could see tears starting in Alvarez’s eyes. He pounded on the door but there was no answer. After a time he heard a sort of muffled laugh. He left and that was the last time he saw Alvarez. Pretty soon the business about the candles and the chalk markings on the floor reached the ears of the manager, a very straight-laced sort who, though she respected and had even learned to like Alvarez a little, despite his forbidding manner, had to use a pass key and enter the back room. If nothing else, the candles were a fire hazard… But there was also something in those chalk markings that offended her a little.
When she entered she didn’t at first find anything to justify her bad feeling… No candles, no designs on the floor, just the doctor’s bed, a sink and a card table. There was a kind of dank smell that she didn’t remember from before, a sort of suggestion of mold that made her crinkle her nose. Slowly, as one does who knows she’s invading but can’t help herself, she crossed the room to the closet, whose door was open to reveal a black strip several inches wide. She was scared now, but bound to open the door. When she grasped the knob she felt an intense heat and heard a sound from behind her like ‘a big man striking the wall with a heavy sledge.’ She turned to the door opposite and screamed when she felt something gouge her hand. She whirled again and pushed the door shut, struggling, she said, against a ‘live force’ that pushed back. She rushed out of the room and up the stairs to the room of a tenant, a plumber who lived alone. He treated her hand and they both later deposed that the gouges resembled the claw marks of a big cat. The plumber did not say this at the scene, however, for the landlady’s sake, and averred the wounds must have been caused by one or several nails… He only made the statement about big cats much later to an interviewer, and then reluctantly. The landlady tearfully siezed on the nail explanation, much shaken and ready to accept anything but the supposition in the back of her mind, something half-formed of mold and contagion and malice…” Gammell stared at his drink, tilting the glass and studying the veinlike legs of liquor trailing down the side.

“The result you may have predicted. Alvarez was asked to leave and this he did, after crating his wares and securing a much more cramped apartment across town. He left under a cloud; since the day the doctor interrupted him he had become a very sick man; whether this wasting disease was the occasion or the result of his dangerous experiment will never be known… I privately think he stepped up his “inquiry” because he knew his time was short. At this point there was a dispute that was to prove important to me personally… The landlady fell ill and was replaced by a less tolerant manager, a man hired by the bank who were the property’s true owners… He insisted on hiring a service to package those few things that remained when Alvarez’ term had expired. The doctor insisted on packing his own things, but it did no good. The manager and the workmen simply waited til Alvarez had to leave and moved in. After they’d done they changed the locks and ignored Alvarez’ pleas to admit him. They replied that they would be glad to bring him whatever he required but that he could no longer enter the room at will. He had become an undesirable… It must have been a painful scene, Alvarez shouting through the door, half-mad with frustration and slipping into a rapid Brazilian dialect. He could never explain what was so important that he was willing to make a very public and very loud scene to obtain, insisting all the while that his things were for his eyes only and that it was dangerous for anyone else to handle them. Later he was discovered trying to force the locks in the dead of night and was hauled off to jail. By then he was very ill… And he died in jail.” Gammell pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed with his finger and thumb. His face was pale in the light from the lamp. “Sometimes I wonder what it was like for the jailer to discover him… Were his eyes open? Were they yellow or dull? Was the jailer frightened? Saddened? Bored? It didn’t matter. I could find no record of his burial… The empty rooms were rented to a chain of shops, mostly books, antiques, that sort of thing. Some time after Alvarez’ death a window like this one was removed and filled in… Perhaps some misguided zeal for security. For years the place had a strange, myopic look, an immense blank wall and a deep porch… “ Gammell finished his drink and poured himself another, then filled Stu’s glass. He bent down again and opened a drawer. For a moment Stu thought he was pulling out another bottle, but instead he lifted out a dusty leather-bound notebook filled with dog-eared yellow pages and scraps. “I think this is what Alvarez was after.” There was a smell of great age with a bitter, septic edge… Stu felt his eyes begin to itch. They both stared at the cover. “I’ve never opened it,” Gammell said. “It’s not that I’m afraid to read it… I’m afraid I WILL read it.” Gammell ran his fingers over the cover tentatively, as if he were running his hand over a long-unexploded bomb.
“It started a couple weeks ago. Every time I walked by the wall where the window is now, I would get a whiff of… Something. At first I thought it was mold, then maybe dead vermin… None of my customers ever said anything, even the ones who wouldn’t have thought twice about telling me my bookshop stank. It was just me, and then only at certain times. Then one day I was dozing over my game when I heard the front door open and felt a draft. I looked up and he was standing there. Alvarez. Only his face was in a kind of shadow, as if he were standing in front of a bright light, even though the day was dark and the lights were on in the store. He was turned to look at the books on the window wall. He turned to me and I saw his eyes.” Gammell drank, paused. “They were brilliant yellow and his pupils were slits, like a cat. He came closer and the shadow… Seemed to follow him. I could hear my heart in my head, like waves coming closer, rising higher. He leaned down in front of me… I smelled that bitter, moldy smell on his breath and it was cold, like a long-sealed crawlspace. Then he smiled. He put his hands on the arms of my chair and leaned down so that my chair tilted forward and our faces were practically touching. “Now you know too,” he said. Then he was gone.
Stu stared at Gammell, watched him slumped in his chair, staring at his drink. All the color had gone out of his face, leached away in the blue/white light of the lamp. “I was paralyzed for what seemed like half an hour. It was probably just a few seconds. I pulled out the materials I’d collected on Alvarez, the scrapbook I’d started as a pastime. I knew then there was another reason I’d taken an interest… It was him that I’d seen, I was sure even before I looked at the one likeness I’d managed to find, a grainy newspaper photo taken from a distance. It didn’t matter. It was him. And as scared as I was, I really didn’t believe he was here to scare me. I knew it had something to do with that smell, that bitter smell… And nothing would change til I figured it out. So I unpacked the shelves, crated the books and carefully took apart the cabinet. My eyes started to itch like yours are now… Even my hands, but I kept going til the wall was clear. The smell was powerful, almost overwhelming, in the center of the space and against the floor. I found a box knife and cut the plaster away, then cut the lath with a saw. This book was inside the framing. When I picked it up I felt a heaviness in the quiet of the room, as if someone were standing behind me, maybe between the shelves in the back. I lay the book down and walked slowly to the back of the store. My shoulders were tight and I could feel my heart laboring. I turned the corner. I saw only books, then the edge of a shoulder, damp fabric… I practically jumped around the corner, but there was no one there. I picked up the scrapbook again, and again felt that menace, that threat of sudden violence… And I locked it in the desk. The feeling abated when I set the book down, but it never went away completely.
But the attack didn’t happen til that night… I was in bed reading, a great pile of books by my bed like always, some arid philosophical thing, to take my mind off the horror for a while, more specifically this odd feeling of loneliness and isolation that never infected me before… I enjoy my privacy, but I’ve never been a lonely man.” Gammell gestured with his drink. “I mean, this place is crowded with personalities even when there’s no one here… But then I was suddenly lonely, fearful; as Alvarez must have felt toward the end. I read til I couldn’t keep my eyes open and slept heavily for a while. Then I had a nightmare, a nightmare of a great weight on my chest, on my face, like a dozen heavy blankets covered with stones… Crushing me. I woke, opened my eyes, but everything was black, as if I’d been buried or blinded. I felt my cheeks crushed, realized a great hand was forcing my head into the pillow. The palm, then the base of the fingers, then the fingers… But the fingers were strange, broad, more like pads…. “ Gammell licked his lips, swallowed. Stu caught himself leaning forward in the rocker. “Then the tips of the pads pressed into my forehead, my eye, my cheek… Then, finally, the claws. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out, just a sort of hot rush of breath that backed into my throat like a bubble. I thrashed with my arms, my legs, crazy with anger and fear. Suddenly I was alone again, really alone, and kneeling on my bed in a tangle of bedclothes, soaked with sweat and panting.” Gammell and Stu both stared out the picture window. “But it wasn’t over,” Gammell said. “I heard a noise downstairs and I rushed down. Halfway down the stairs I saw a shape over the desk. At first I thought it was a man gripping the desk and trying to tip it over… His hands on the top edge, his body pushing… Then I saw on his head were points like ears and a suggestion of coarse fur, the outline forming a bare head and wide, powerful shoulders with no obvious neck. He turned to look at me. His-- its—eyes were yellow, catlike, like Alvarez’ had been… But this wasn’t Alvarez. I could hear it panting, ragged, seething almost. It walked towards the foot of the stairs, stiff, like it was wading through deep water, and muttering something. Sometimes it sounded like words, sometimes like snarling… I realized I was slowly backing up the stairs before it. Then it was on me, with its claws on my shoulders and its mouth in my face. Its breath was hot and I could smell blood… I assumed it was my own… The stairs dug into my back. Then it turned its head, snarled and was gone.
I don’t know how I did it, but I slept the rest of the night and woke with a headache. When I came down to open the store I checked the desk. The drawer was still locked, the book still in it. But there was still that feeling of watching and waiting whenever I picked it up. I began to open it, but my hand and arm cramped and I saw myself close it, stiffly, and put it back in the drawer. Then I got up, slowly, and walked towards the blank wall. It felt like I was being pushed . It never occurred to me before, but I began to resent the wall, resent the obstruction of the view outside. There were windows on this floor, of course, but they look on the neighboring houses. This was the front wall; it should look on the street. The feeling of loneliness and isolation was back again, almost a yearning. That moment I decided to install the window. I made some phone calls and within a few days the window was installed and I’d moved the books. And the night after I’d decided to install the window I slept well with no dreams… Only, perhaps, an odd dream of someone, not me, browsing the books in the middle of the night, sitting at my desk with piles of books on either hand… But there were no more attacks.

The day after it was installed I came down to open up and the day was bright. The sun shone through the window and made a great rectangle of light on the floor and the post at the foot of the staircase. Apart from the sound of traffic, it could have been a morning in Alvarez’ shop, a faint smell of herbs, the warm smell of old paper and leather, the sound of a horse and cart outside on rough cobble… I wondered how I could have worked and lived here for so long without a view on the street. You become tangled in your own problems and forget the world outside, fall in love with your habits, no matter how wrong or repellent… I stood in front of the window with my coffee and thought of Alvarez. Some of that lonely feeling came back, but it was dulled somehow, without an element of fear. It was melancholy in place of a hunted feeling. It was then I saw him for the last time. It was in the glass, a reflection. He was standing there in a wool suit, starched collar, his hair neat, his face calm, ready to open the shop. From behind me I heard a voice, distinct, as clear as yours say “Gracias.” Then he was gone. I looked out the window at the grey/green of the grass by the sidewalk, the limbs of the pear trees, the sun winding up their rough bark. I heard a confusion of pips and whistles and the trees were full of tiny birds, hopping among the twigs, pecking at the bark, even hanging upside down. I watched all of this and felt a little sad that I had met him so late, that we couldn’t have been friends in person as well as in spirit.

Gammell stared into his drink. “I know, it’s ridiculous. But it all happened just the way I said it. I think when I put in the window he saw the world again, remembered who he really was… It was he who saved me from the beast that night; he was defending me because I had listened to him, because I had treated his notebook with respect. The book itself is dangerous, the contents, I mean. But the reality of the book… The ink, the paper, the leather, it anchors him somehow. Unfortunately I think it’s also the reason that this… Thing, this other entity, appears. But I feel we have an arrangement. I keep the shop, I am his link to the world; and he protects me. And it all depends on the notebook. I’ve even started a small collection of herbs, a sort of recognition of his contribution… Somewhere I read that there’s a class of people in Brazil that have special occult knowledge… The ignorant term is “witch doctor”… But that they can heal or damage by request or for their own purposes… Perhaps Alvarez is locked in an eternal conflict with a competitor?” Stu looked at Gammell. “Is he still here? Alvarez?” Gammell looked at the ceiling, the books, the window. “Oh, he’s here. Each time I add to the herb collection, each fact I collect about him… I’ve even begun a sort of biography… His presence is stronger. I really do think of him as my partner.” Stu set his glass on the desk. “Well, at any rate, the herbs smell good.” Gammell smiled, got up. “Yes, they do smell good.” Stu put out his hand and Gammell took it. “Thank you, Mr. Gammell; for the scotch and the story.” Gammell smiled readily, a bookseller again. He walked Stu to the door. Stu paused with his hand on the knob. “I do believe it; I believe your story.” Gammell nodded once, solemnly. “I thought you might; you’re the only one that’s heard it so far.”
Stu walked down the steps and looked back through the window. He saw Gammell look down, then turn away from the window and disappear behind the wall surrounding it. Then he saw his own reflection and the reflection of someone walking by behind him. The other stopped and joined him in looking up; a tall man in a wool suit and a dark face. Stu turned, but there was no one there.

A. & I walked through Mountain Park one snowy night... His mother lived up there, in an apartment all deep carpeting, natural fibers and tubular furniture...

We stayed up til five one morning, for what purpose I don't know... Some kind of self-imposed endurance test maybe... Perhaps an insistence on wasting time in its purest sense, uncluttered by meaningful activity of any kind... Neither of us truly sure of our own motives, but at least happy in our ignorance and content to play our parts to the end...

Once he'd said in a tone of quiet revelation that our mothers kept the same bottle of Schultz plant food in the same relative position on the kitchen window sill... And, I suspect, both had the same paperback copy of Recipes for a Small Planet... Kept as much for its value as part of a reliquary (for the benefit, too, of our growing minds?) as for its utility, its use value...

This was how I saw my mother's library, relegated to its brittle knotty pine and cinderblocks... The titles were pointers to a former self within the person I lived with. They were ciphers that somehow formed a complex pattern, a layering of past aspirations and motivations– a museum of effort, the result of which may have born fruit or merely a withering blossom– captured in its name and circumstance if not its original– and this, in fact, is how I saw and see my own library, not of books merely, but collections of all kinds, photographs, objects compulsively stashed away, ticket stubs, a phone number and name written on a torn-off box flap.

Above the dusty volumes of William Golding, Petrarch, James Dickey, Dylan Thomas, then, up the use-worn treads and enameled banister, into the closeness of rising heat and knotty pine panelling you could find all of this, my library, my private hell of things... There were all the layers, all the secret caverns that could reveal me– all the pointers that led in loops, all with their unique geography of regret or vindication. I longed to escape; I couldn't exist outside it... Because as P.K. Dick says, you are the common thread... You follow you wherever you go.

Consider the map, a net of restraints over a core absurdity that looms larger the closer the scale approaches 1:1. A map of the self must approach and overtake this vanishing point...

I was too fond of paradoxes like this one; perhaps I hid behind my liking for them, confused timidity with a love of reflection untainted by action... Witness:

I watched D. walk by the cafeteria windows, suddenly real and opaque, not at all what I wished, what I constructed... She was real, fallible, capable of cruelty even, as I was... Not a great, indelible cruelty, but the ordinary, mundane cruelty of walking by the cafeteria windows on a gray day in late fall 1987 or '88... Just out of reach of casual eye contact... She couldn't know, how could it be cruelty? But the result was torture... Nothing sweet, nothing sentimental... Only raw frustration and an anger growing in, like incisors into a jaw...

I didn't know her, didn't even think I knew her... It was the question her face posed, the solution that tormented me– I had framed the question in such a way that the only way to answer it was to upset the equation... That one word or expression would be lost in a white noise of failure, of stepped-on lines...

When there was no problem at all, merely the unaccomplished fact of an awkward 17-year-old kid walking up to a brown-haired girl with green eyes that spoke a permanent expression of guileless expectancy, punctuated by a smile or at least the promise of one... He approaches her and speaks to her, a thing he's never done, a thing that horrifies him– and even in his carefully-constructed confusion he knows this is the answer because it horrifies him.

His father had told him this– in the cab of his panel truck, smelling of wet doug fir dust... "No matter what you do, you're gonna shit your pants." Indeed. But it is not the shitting of the pants that's the problem, but the sweaty terror of the moment of eye contact and the space between your open mouth and the utterance– the horror of saying something you've recited, the horror of saying something you haven't... If only you could blurt it out, get it over with... If only you could speak out loud, instead of screaming to yourself.

But this is not Hollywood, but passing time, moments to be lived, and every single one, not just the interesting ones. There are obligations even for you, a confirmed and sometimes proud shirker– distractions– excuses.

And you never speak to her.

The bushes outside the window are busy, occasionally frantic with this wild wind that's plaguing us– like some kind of virus or itch...

This was the kind of weather that became a well-worn vaudeville backdrop for my private histrionics, my rehearsals for confrontations that never came... Now the only thing left is the rain, the sheen on the streets, the eternal hiss of traffic–

Even the one-storey shotgun cottage on 6th Street is gone, replaced by a flat-featured townhouse... Like most American homes, it was a container hopelessly inadequate for the dreams and nightmares it was expected to contain– but it did its level best as we all did, endured as we all did.

6th Street was my street for a long, long time... An epoch in its span and its changes– invisible in their transition, sudden in their accomplished fact... Now I can examine the layers, if I care to...

You turned left from the front walk and left again on C, then followed the street past Mr. Kaufman's at 666, past the electrolysis center with the big dogs in their chain-link run, and finally to the water tower, huge and pale green behind its screen of firs. It guarded a nightmare octopus of an intersection, where C, 10th, Bayberry, Iron Mountain and Country Club all came together...

You crossed behind the cars on C, then Bayberry, then down behind the traffic island of bushes and pines that marked the entrance to Red Fox Hills; then stepped over the curb and onto the sidewalk on the north side of Country Club, with its sharp gravel and four lanes of busy traffic between Lake Oswego and Lake Grove, I-5 and 217... As you headed west you climbed a spur that connected the lowlands of First Addition and downtown to the foot of Mt. Sylvania and its winding complex of tan and grey condos...

On your left was the hurrying traffic; on your right, to the north, formidable laurel hedges and arcing tangles of blackberries, for all their dreadful scale and thorns powerless to shut out the traffic. You felt sympathy for the long-suffering homes they protected. At some point the hedges opened on curb cuts and a traffic island of river rock and manicured pines... Beyond, a low, sprawling tan church that belonged to the Christian Scientists...

After a final stand of laurel you reached a great berm of grass crowned by a fence: the east field. This was for powder puff and soccer. You crossed Hazel at a light to turn right and walk up another hill to the front entrance of the high school, the better to see the football field on your left, and behind it Laker Joe, an immense plywood idol with the outline of a pear, his apex a drooping sou'wester and flowing white moustache. Next to him was the legend "LAKERS" in towering white letters.

If you cared to, if you walked up to the great curve of the bus siding, you could smell the sweet, overused smell of the cafeteria away to your right, and closer, dead ahead, the imperious smells of the main activity: paper, toner ink, floor wax. And if it was a school day, and you were sixteen, an undercurrent of B.O. and anxiety grading sometimes to panic.

Let me try to remember all I can... First, what endures... The cold, the sunlight, summer dying... My breath in clouds, the hollow whine of the school bus. Waiting at the stop... Was it on 6th and D? The pretty black girl that waited with me; she lived in the house at the stop, pale blue with tall laurel hedges... I think this was before Alek's mother moved into the house on 7th...

And after he lived on 5th, there was the blonde girl, all curves and suspicious china doll face, who drove a belching orange Bug... I would hope for her most mornings when I rode with Alek in his Microbus, no matter how many dismissive looks she gave me... And I was always searching for some mode, some stance that would unlock everything else... That would reveal the pattern, a path that would close the loop... No more forks, no more doubt. Yet all of this thinking, all of this posing, never amounted to anything.

And there were the maples that grew across the street from my house on 6th, old and rotten. I picked up their seeds and let them whirl down from the concrete porch. The trees and the grass exalted the rough edges, the laziness, the clumsiness, the perversity, the waste, the neglect in me, in the house, in the neighborhood... They were the only things I never cursed then. I began to write "because they in their living permanence stood outside the manufactured rectangles and squares..." But it was not their permanence, but their deathlessness, their tale of renewal, that defeated all my ignorant pessimism. The dripping gashed hulk in winter became a blazing crown of yellow-green in spring, this tree that began as a weed, a nuisance. It stretched its limbs, filled all the space, cared nothing for the wants or needs of the people walking, driving, yelling underneath it...

It always made me lonely and bored when I had to climb into the musty sweetness of the school bus and turn my back on them. Then I thought it was me, folding at my weak points, showing my inadequacy. But I think the sadness really started when I sat down on the squeaking green vinyl and saw them through the frame of grimy glass and aluminum rivets. Some days the mood would darken to a low ceiling as the bus geared down and and became all whistling brakes and shouting outside the sweeping breezeway at the front doors of the school. And all the trees and leaves were replaced by roman brick and aluminum transom windows. And of course all of these people, half-formed, with their thing, their shit, their needs... Not to mention my own shit, decidedly not pulled together, no, very much all over the place like dirty laundry on a bedroom floor... Secret and tied-down as I thought I was... There's no avoiding the Judgement, you can only change the way you face it...