In For a Penny (22 page)

“Hogfish!” Boswell shouted, as if reading Henley’s mind, and the unlikely although familiar nature of the word, or rather of the name, stopped Henley cold. Who on
earth
…? he asked out loud, looking up at the bird in disbelief. But Boswell peered back down at him inscrutably, and was silent.

. . .

Henley spent the rest of the day unloading and uncrating Little Comberton’s books, sifting out the keepers and re-boxing the chaff, until by four in the afternoon he was forced to resort to the nitroglycerine tablets again and sit down for a rest. Leaning down from his chair, he browsed idly through a newly-opened carton, stopping to take a closer look at a worn copy of a volume titled simply
Mechanical Traps and How to Build Them
by a man with the unfortunate name of Willis Hollis. The book was far more interesting than Henley would have guessed, being a definitive study of traps of all varieties, many of them highly improbable, and before long he found himself immersed in it.

. . .

On the library table before him lay a small and empty wooden box with a hinged lid that had once held a bottle of brandy. Next to the box lay a tube of epoxy glue, two pieces of a broken mirror that he had found in the garage, and a roll of tape. There was hole drilled through the end of the box where a rope handle had been affixed, but he had cut the handle loose and thrown it out, because what he wanted was just the box with the unobstructed hole. After referring to the book again, he squirted epoxy on one of the inside walls of the box and pressed a piece of mirror into the glue, holding it for a minute till it was set. Then he glued the other piece of mirror opposite the first one. The result seemed to him to be entirely satisfactory: if you were tiny enough to fit inside the box, the mirrors would reflect each other infinitely.

And that was it: the trap was built. It was a little like the monkey and the coconut: lure the prey into the box where it will find something so vitally interesting that it won’t go back out, even to save itself. The book suggested various sorts of bait, all having to do with the standard human vices, including, a little nastily, a pornographic photo, but he settled on pipe tobacco, just on the likelihood that he wasn’t the only …
person
in the shop who was fond of it. Also, he happened to have the can of Nightcap handy, which wasn’t the case with photo. He closed the box lid, taping it shut for good measure, and left it sitting on the library table.

Henley realized that once again he was dog tired—worse than tired: his heart was fluttery, and he felt weak. It had been a long damned day and night, and he was as weary as he could remember having been in a decade. His mind drifted to thoughts of retirement. It would be an easy thing to take the sign out of the window and the placard off the hooks in the yard and simply lock the door and take to his bed. But as tired as he was, the thought didn’t appeal to him. Not quite yet. He had always imagined that he would die among his books, perhaps clutching at a shelf as he toppled over, precipitating an avalanche of books that would bury him right where he lay. …

He felt the sensation of a breeze just then and what sounded like the lingering echo of a sigh. Johnson, who lay on the floor in front of him, stared intently into the corner of the room, where there was a clutter of open cartons. The curtains moved, although the window was tightly shut. Henley peered into the corner, holding his breath and listening hard for a repetition of the sigh, for any noise at all. There was nothing—nothing but a strange misty glow, like dust motes in the moonlight, taking on a shape that was vaguely human. After a moment, when the moonlight faded behind cloud shadow, the illusion evaporated, and the suspended dust appeared to rain downward into the boxes of books.

. . .

In his bedroom Henley sat down heavily on the bed. Thank God it was Sunday and the shop was closed tomorrow, because he would have to take it easy, very easy. Mrs. Cobham would come in at noon to give the place a cleaning, and she’d find it cluttered with books. But it wouldn’t be the first time, and he was simply finished—bed-raggled, as his nephew Jack used to say.
Entirely bed-raggled
, he thought, and fell asleep in his clothes.

. . .

“This is exactly what I was afraid of,” Algernon said. “Henley’s trapped poor Swann in the box there, and next he’ll be after the rest of us with some sort of device that he’s found in this damned book.”

“Can you blame him?” Swinton asked. The living aren’t fond of the dead except as memories.”

Algernon bent over and peered into the hole in the wooden box. Inside, a firefly light moved slowly and continually back and forth between the endless reflections, the tiny, played-out ghost of what had been Lambert Swann, searching for a door into the infinite.

“Just the last spark of earthly energy,” Lanyon said. “Watch out you don’t get lured in after him.”

Algernon straightened up, turning away from the trap and surveying the hundreds of books in cartons on the floor. “Tobacco hasn’t ever been one of my vices,” he said.

“A glass of Scotch whiskey, though—that would do it, eh, Patrick?”

“I’ve never known it to fail,” Patrick said, not looking up from his book. The Scotch decanter sat beside him on the table, open as usual.

“Watch this,” Swinton said, and he pointed at the topmost book in the box at his feet, then waggled his finger three times. The book rose into the air, opening up spine-upward, its pages ruffled by a slight wind. Slowly it sailed birdwise toward a shelf along the far wall and hovered in the air, its covers flapping languorously. Swinton gestured with his other hand, and the line of books on the shelf slid down a couple of inches, opening up a space just wide enough for the hovering book to slide in.

“Impressive,” Algernon said. And then he waved both hands at another open box and six books rose at once, each of them flitting off toward their respective places.”

“Not bad,” Swinton said. “But you’ve got them in upside down.”

“Hell,” Algernon started to say, but he was interrupted by a flickering in the corner of the room, in among a heap of open boxes. A glittery little dust devil spun up out of the books, the dust motes hanging in the air, the light within them pulsing faintly, brightening and dimming and then brightening again.

“Here’s Mr. Hoover, if I’m not mistaken,” Swinton said. “Our new member.”

The light steadied, and the swirling dust grew increasingly opaque, the suspended particles coalescing, shadow separating from shadow to form a tall, thin human figure, the features growing solid and clear. A very old man stood before them finally, looking around at first with a bewildered countenance, but then casting a suspicious eye on the four men in the room, as if they were up to something.

“John Lanyon,” Lanyon said, stepping forward and holding out his hand. “Perhaps you remember me, Mr. Hoover.”

“John Lanyon’s dead and gone this past year and half,” the man said, looking at him shrewdly.

“And you’re dead and gone, too,” Swinton said. “We’re all dead and gone.”

“Don’t be so infernally blunt,” Lanyon said to him.

“Right,” Swinton said. And then to Hoover he said, “Welcome to the Trismegistus Club. You’re now part of the … corpus. You’ve been duly elected by the fates, and nobody yet has refused his membership.”

The old man stared at Swinton now. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

“Miles Swinton,” Swinton told him. “Erstwhile book trader.”

“Swinton’s catalogue? The insect Swinton?”

“In the flesh, figuratively speaking.”

“But you’re dead, too. You died two months ago. I heard you drowned at Blackpool.”

“I won’t deny it.”

“Algernon Brewer,” Algernon said. “London. And this is Patrick Clemens.”

“Never heard of either of you,” Hoover said.

He looked around slowly at the open cartons on the floor. “These are my books. …”

“In fact they are,” Swinton said. “We’re just putting them up. It passes the time, you see.”

“Did my daughter Sarah …? I mean to say …” He looked confusedly at Lanyon. “We’re all dead men, like he says?”

“Yes,” Lanyon said. “Sarah sold your books to Ian Henley—after you were gone.”

Hoover nodded his head now, as if he were coming to grips with things. Lanyon took him by the elbow and led him out into the front room, where the old man sat down in the chair by the window. “It seems like such a long time ago,” he said, and then after a moment of silence he began to weep. Lanyon gestured toward the door, and the rest of the men stepped silently out through the back kitchen and into the moonlit garden, where Johnson was on the lookout for the hedgehog.

. . .

It was just two in the morning when Henley awoke to the realization that his heart was once again fluttering like a weak bird, and that there was a sharp pain in his upper chest and left arm.
This is it
, he told himself, and he breathed very evenly and lay still, utterly focused on his heart, waiting for it to happen, although time passed and nothing did. He became aware as he lay there of what sounded strangely like muted weeping, and then the low muttering of voices. He pushed himself up onto his elbows finally and swung his feet off the bed, sitting up, wavering there for a moment until he found his balance. His medication was on the dresser. He tottered across to it, uncapping it and shaking out two pills, swallowing them dry.

He heard a dog bark out in the back garden, and he moved the curtains aside and looked out onto the moonlit night. Johnson stood near the shrubbery, apparently peering in at something, and beside him stood four men, engaged in conversation. Henley stared at them in wonder. They were dressed in dark suits and wore ties, as if they’d just come away from church or the theater. Clearly they weren’t house thieves.

And there was a smoky essence to them, so that they looked like half-faded old photographs. Henley couldn’t quite make out their features, although there was something in what he could see of the face of one of the men that was almost familiar to him. A hedgehog appeared just then, and Johnson followed it across the lawn. One of the men pointed at the two beasts, and Henley could distinctly hear laughter, but just the echo of it, as if it were coming to him from very far away. Then another of the men looked up at the window and pointed straight at Henley, and the other three looked, too.

Hallucination
, Henley thought, pulling the curtain shut.
I’m having a near-death experience
. He listened for the sound of weeping again, but couldn’t any longer make it out. Nor could he say when it had stopped, or if he had really ever heard anything at all. He peered out through the curtain again, but the back garden was empty of anything but moonlight, the dog Johnson, and the solitary hedgehog.

He walked to the chair and sat down, realizing that even though the pain in his chest had diminished, he felt distinctly badly—not merely weary, but ill. Tomorrow morning he would pay a visit to the doctor, where he would have to mention hallucinating the men in the garden, just in case they were symptoms and not ghosts. But if the doctor told that he needed a bypass or some damned thing … He sat down in the chair, briefly considered the bottle of Talisker, rejected it as being too late—or rather too early—and instead doggedly lit his pipe. If he dropped dead, at least he would have had one last smoke.

. . .

Hoover still sat in the corner, caught up in his own thoughts and memories. The others knew that it would take him a while to come around, and also that he wouldn’t come around by any conscious effort or encouragement, but rather by the dwindling of regret for what he had left behind, and the certain knowledge that he was forever beyond it, like a man awakened from a long and tiring dream. In a few earthly hours the world and its toil and trouble and joy and hope would simply have ceased to concern him.

“Let’s get to work,” Algernon said. “If we’re going to be elves, we might as well stitch up some shoes.”

With that, Lanyon and Algernon went into the ghost room, and Swinton made his way to Science and Nature. Patrick announced that he would work in History and Philosophy, where, the others knew, he would spend most of his time snorting fumes from the Scotch decanter, which he had happily took with him, the levitated bottle floating along in front of him on a waft of spirit wind.

“I got the distinct feeling that Henley saw us from the window,” Algernon said to Lanyon after they’d worked for a while.

“I shouldn’t wonder. It’s very nearly his time. He’s starting to sense things that he was unaware of earlier.”

“Aren’t you just a bit envious of old Swann?” Algernon asked, glancing at the ghost trap. “I’m a little weary of making up amusements in order to kill time. The crop circles are a good lark, mind you. It’s absolutely healthy for people to be baffled once in a while, and we’ve given them some top notch bafflement, but there comes a time when it’s also good to be at an end of things that have an end to them.” As he spoke, he waved at one of the open cartons, lifting half a dozen books at a time and sending them off toward various shelves. One of them sailed away into the antechamber and disappeared from view.

A series of books rose from Lanyon’s box, like stair steps and moved away one by one, finding room on the shelves.