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.