Shatterday (15 page)

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 car, Cover.

I often wonder what the Vintners buy
One half so precious as the goods
They sell.

Stanza LXXXV,
The Rubáyyat of Omar Khyyám

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
Shoppe of Wonders
and beneath those words in curlicued but extremely readable Islamic calligraphy:
Your Heart's Desire.

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 flyspecked. 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 pen. 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 Phyfe table lay a folio of ottava rimas. A shelf containing tins of tennis balls. Oil lamps of the sort Aladdin rubbed to produce his genie. Dangling from a hook on the wall, an uncountable number of fishhooks, with unnameable things still snagged thereon. Hanging over an arched doorway in the side wall, a gonfalon upon which was emblazoned a booted foot crushing a five-headed serpent, one of whose heads was arched back around with the fangs imbedded in the heel of the foot. Stoppered extra-thick glass bottles of vitriol: blue, green and white. Tubes of bismuth. Clothing racks of hair shirts, habergeons, hauberks and herringbone suits. Potted fleabane. Dolls with quarter-melon slices bitten out of their heads. Several dozen small cases containing dancing mice, dyed in rainbow hues. A glass-fronted cabinet originally intended to hold dental equipment, jammed full of severed paws, monkey, civet, fox, lynx, bear, and others, several with the claws extended, one that looked as though it had been lopped off a
yeti.
Philters labeled "love potion." Hexahedrons. Tomes on epigraphy (all with unreadable titles, of course). Kourbashes coiled on hooks on the wall. Beakers bearing the label "phlogiston." A complete run of
Amazing Stories
dated from April 1926 to December 2009. More grimoires (some in paperback editions). A plethora of keys, of all kinds, sizes, shapes and intricacies. Calling horns, some as simple as a
shofar,
others as cuculiform as a cornucopia. Scruples in breather-jars. Umbilically joined oxymora. Silver seashells that, when placed next to the ear, as the short young man did, reproduced not the sound of the sea, but the sound of the wind between the stars. Shrink-wrapped packages of miniature hydra heads. A thirty-foot-high glass-fronted cabinet that seemed to contain model toy soldiers, until the young man looked closer and saw that the models were not metal at all, but seemed to be miniaturized human beings, frozen and solidified in the moment of combat: the Battle of the Ardennes; Balaklava; Visigoths against Huns; Rough Riders against Villa; Luftwaffe and Wolf Legions at Stalingrad; the Battle of the Little Big Horn; Midway; Chosen Reservoir; the one hundred Spartans at the Hot Gates against Xerxes' millions; the French Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu; Spartacus and his gladiator army versus the Roman Imperial Legions … each soldier perfect, down to the expression of utter horror as he was whisked off the battlefield, shrunk, and concretized. Polish for the True Lamp. A fragment of Christ's molar in the wafer. Stigmata kits. Packets of dried Granny's Claw. Eyes of newts. Toes of frogs. Spiderweb poultices. Transmigration threads on huge spools bearing the Seal of Solomon on each. Cryogenically frozen pixies, nixies, niads and dryads. Pickled kraken tentacles. Fire-breathing salamanders in asbestos cages. Disintegrator pistols. Saintly relics—fingers, tibiae, fibulae, eyeballs. And everywhere the young man looked, in every nook and crevice, there was rubbish, junk, litter, rags, odds and ends, trash, offscourings, tares, waste, rubble, debris and dregs.

He was deep in a corner, examining what seemed to be 9-mm artillery shells made of sterling silver, when a voice from behind him said, "Those are intended for use in slaying were-dinosaurs. Only been one call for them; chap who swore his vicar changed into a killer stegosaurus at the full of the moon. Unlikely, but you never know. Try to keep up a full stock, y'know."

The young man turned around, looking for the speaker, but saw only a life-sized, ecclesiastically dressed figure leaning rather precariously against a wall. "Not me," the voice said. "That's St. Thomas Aquinas."

The young man looked amazed.

"Let you have him cheap," the voice went on. "Not much call for Aquinas these days. Not since his Proofs were disproved. Have to fix those knee joints; he keeps leaning like a kangaroo with a broken tail."

The young man with the filthy, caked hair and the ever so slightly crosseyed look was suddenly frightened. He could not see the person speaking. It sounded—at first—as if it were an old man, with an English accent. But the second time the mysterious voice spoke it was a much younger man, with the accent diminished. He came out of the corner and stood in the open area just inside the door. He looked behind him, through one of the dusty windows. Just outside in the arcade alley there was heavy fog. A roiling gray soup that seemed to be lit from moment to moment by flashes of lightning. His fear grew. He had read about places like this, in fantasy stories. It was
certainly
one of
those
shops.

"Over here, young feller," said the voice, now that of a seventy-year-old New England shopkeeper. "Over here, under the beaded lamp."

And a beaded lamp in the rear of the shoppe clicked on. There was an old man sitting in a rocking chair under the lamp. The young man could just make him out. It was that far away.

He turned and tried the doorknob. It wouldn't turn. He pulled at the door, but it wouldn't budge. From outside the shoppe came the sounds of great beasts prowling, of thundering machines, of death and horror. He turned and stared down the length of the shoppe at the old man, who rocked slowly and waited. From outside came a thunderous explosion. Magnesium-flare brilliance illuminated the entire shoppe for an instant, revealing merchandise that made the young man's blood run cold; in the moment of chill white light the face of the old man seemed to run and bubble and change: first it was the face of a beautiful woman, then the face of a Congolese Songe mask, then the face of a robot without nose or mouth, then the face of an ancient god—perhaps Cernunnos of the Gauls. Then the moment of cold light was gone, and it was an old man once more, nothing but an old man once again.

"Don't mind the screams and shouts out there, son," the old man said. "Just an idea of the management to discourage walkouts. Keeps people browsing till the storm's over."

The young man didn't want to, but he suddenly found himself walking. Toward the rear of the shoppe. Toward the old man in the rocking chair. He tried to make his feet stop moving, but they placed themselves one in front of the other and he kept walking. But no matter how long he walked, the young man realized he was drawing no closer to the figure in the rocker.

He walked and walked, down among the fossilized remains of jabberwocks and eohippuses and broken reel-to-reel tape recorders, until his ankles began to blaze with pain from the walking. As if he had been striding uphill on a thirty degree slope. He found he was able to stop walking; he sat down on a three-legged stool to rest.

The old man said, "That's a nice item, that one. Belonged to William Rufus, the Incarnate King; had a nasty dustup with The Lady of the Lake, he did; something silly about a macaronic song, I believe. Or maybe it was who had the louder climax. Can't recall. Something like that. Let it go cheap if you're interested. Sitting on it's guaranteed to cure constipation instantly."

The grubby young man leaped off the stool.

The old man was chuckling in a very friendly key. "Aw, hell, kid, come on over; I'll stop playing around with you."

The young man started walking. He was able to approach the old man. In a few moments he was standing beside him.

"Now. What can I do for you?"

The young man stared at him with faintly glazed eyes lit by a peculiar light. Just stared. He didn't know what to say; he was actually, for the first time in his life, frightened down to the marrow. Even when he had been strapped in the orphanages, or beaten in the reformatories, or ganged in jail, he had never really known fear; it wasn't in him to understand that kind of fear. But here, in this strange matrix of imponderables, with the brutal bellowing of shuffling autochthones filling the air just beyond the fogged windows, he was paralyzed with fear. He could not speak, did not know what he could ask for, did not know what he could have.

But knew he could have
anything
, just for the asking, just for the buying. That was what this shoppe was here for.

The old man seemed to understand his problem. He stood up and patted the young man on the shoulder, "Well, truth in advertising, young feller. We're just what the sign says, a shoppe of wonders; your heart's desire is here, somewhere. Just have to figure out what it is. You only get one chance, you know. Purchases limited one to a customer."

He seemed about to say something more, but caught himself as his mouth opened. He looked at the young man a good deal more closely, and lines of worry appeared in his forehead. When he spoke again, there was an appreciable coolness in his manner. More businesslike, infinitely less friendly and playful. A bit more menacing.

"All sorts of items," he said. "Complete set of books listed in the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum,
including Bergson's 'L'Evolution Créatrice.' Cloak of invisibility. Just got in a fresh supply of black cobra blood from the Dinka; best black cobra blood on the market, you know; southern Sudanese; just smear some on the houseposts of your enemies. One hundred per cent guaranteed to produce incredible anguish and death. Love philters. Antigravitation discs. Dildos. Pills you can drop in your gas tank, just add water and it makes pure octane. Just name it, we've got it."

For the first time the young man spoke. "When I leave here, will this shop vanish the way they do in the stories?"

"I'm afraid so, yes."

"Why do they always do that?"

The old man sighed. "You know, you're the first one who ever asked me that."

But he didn't answer the question.

He walked toward a case filled with small objects. "Hey, come on over here. Maybe we have something in here to suit your fancy."

The young man scratched at his chest where his shirt lay open minus a button. He scratched at a bug bite. It was an angry red welt. He walked to the showcase and looked in. Eyes of newts. Toes of frogs. Other things.

They stood silently on opposite sides of the case for a few minutes. Finally, in a strong young voice, the old man said, "Okay, bud, what's your heart's desire?"

The young man did not look up. "Power," he said.

"What kind of power?"

"I want people to do what I want them to do."

"That's easy enough." The old man reached into the case and brought out a black velvet pad on which lay a group of stones. They seemed to glisten and scintillate as though encrusted with dendrites. "Powerstones," the old man said. "To make others do your bidding. Two bucks a shot."

The young man looked up. "Why so cheap?"

The old man shrugged. He gave a little laugh that was no laugh at all. "Cheapest things in the universe. Two dollars each is a good price."