The Green Man (6 page)

“He said he thought it was my destiny to have this shop. Now ‘destiny’ is a mighty big word, and it struck me as a strange thing for him to say. But I guess he was right. It
has
been my destiny. Over the years, this shop and I have come to fit together like hand and glove. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. And I owe it all to your dear father. So that’s the story. Except –” She poured herself a cup of tea.

“What?”

“You’ll think I’m crazy.”

“No, I won’t.”

“I saw him today.”

“Who?”

“Your father. I was opening the shop after lunch, and I saw him standing outside.”

“That’s impossible. Dad’s in Italy.”

“All the same, I saw him. Not as he is now, but as he was as a boy.”

O felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise.

“He was standing outside the shop, looking at me through the window. When I walked toward him, he turned away. And by the time I got outside, he’d gone.” She picked up her tea and wandered off into the living room.

“You must be mistaken,” said O, feeling a sense of unreality wash over her.

“No, it was him, all right. I’d know that boy anywhere.” She set her tea on the edge of the book-cluttered coffee table and sat down.

“What was he wearing?” O heard herself ask.

“Well, you know, that was very odd. It looked like a pajama top.”

“Long sleeves, with blue cuffs and collar,” O heard herself say.

Her aunt stared at her. “That’s right. How do you know?”

“After you went down to the shop, I was out on the deck going through one of the boxes from my room. I noticed a boy sitting on the wall at the end of the dead-end street, looking back at me. That’s what he was wearing. There was something familiar about him. But it can’t have been Dad. It was just someone who looked like he did back then.”

“I suppose,” said Aunt Emily, sipping her tea, letting the silence wash over them. “Of course, there is another possibility.”

“What do you mean?”

“We live in the midst of mysteries, my dear. They surround us on all sides, and, for the most part, we take no notice of them. Take Time, for instance. What is it? Where does it come from? Where does it go?”

She leaned forward and took a book from one of the piles on the table. “Imagine that this book is that very small piece of reality we call the present – you and I, here, now.” She stood it between two tall piles. “This moment stands between a future that is not yet real and a past that is no longer real.” She placed her hands on top of the piles to either side. “Before we know it, it too has slid into the past, and another moment has come to take its place.

“But what if it is not as simple as that? What if all those past moments still exist, as real as the books on this pile, but hidden from the present moment by a thin fabric, like the painted backdrop in a play? Say that in certain places that fabric were to wear thin and tear, and what lay on the other side were to spill out? Perhaps they would be places where the pressure of the past had grown so great that it could no longer be contained.

“Maybe the Charles I saw at the window spilled over from the past. Maybe he
did
once stand at that window,
walk down that street, sit on that wall as he did today. And if a boy with a buggy could slip through, perhaps other things could cross over in the same way.”

It was clear she was no longer talking to O, but to herself. The words hung in the air, like the smoke in the closed car.

Aunt Emily stood up. “I think I’ll go heat up this tea.”

Nothing more was said of the matter, but for the rest of the evening O found her eye drifting repeatedly to the book propped between the two piles on the cluttered coffee table.

Time was hard to keep track of at the Green Man. One day flowed seamlessly into the next. Before she knew it, they had turned the calendars to June, and the weather was heating up. Their lives had fallen swiftly into a pattern. They ate breakfast together, then went down and opened the shop a little after ten.

Since her “incident,” Aunt Emily had taken to closing the shop for an hour at noon to eat and rest a little before reopening. But after O had been there two weeks and had begun to learn her way around the shop a little, she abandoned the practice. She started leaving O alone while she went upstairs, assuring her that, if anything came up, she was just a shout away.

Most days, they closed a little before six. After dinner,
they read and listened to Aunt Emily’s jazz collection and chatted the evening away.

O noticed things about her aunt that reminded her of her father: the way she held her head to one side when she listened to you, the infectious laugh that bubbled up from somewhere deep inside her when something struck her funny.

Despite their difference in age, she found she was quite comfortable with her aunt. But, then, Aunt Emily was not your normal adult. There was still a lot of the child about her. Maybe that was what made her a poet.

One evening as they sat together, O took a book from the top of one of the piles – a collection of Chinese poetry translated into English. She started reading and was quickly captivated by the simplicity of the words, the clarity of the images, the deep emotion that pulsed below the tranquil surface of the poems.

When she glanced up, Aunt Emily was snoring in her chair. Her glasses had slid to the end of her nose, and her book lay slack in her hands. As O sat looking at her, the words of a poem came into her mind. She grabbed a pencil and a scrap of paper and quickly wrote them down:

As she crept quietly from the room, she heard her aunt moan softly in her sleep.

T
he magician performed tricks with cups and balls, sleights of hand with handkerchiefs and linking rings. Reaching into the wicker trunk, he brought out a pair of intricately wrought mechanical birds, which flapped their jewel-encrusted wings and sang on command. Next he withdrew the miniature figure of a man in Hindu costume, sitting cross-legged on a small decorated box. The automaton was less than two feet tall. He asked several volunteers up onto the stage to examine it. They were invited to ask the figure mathematical questions, which the automaton answered by reaching into a hatch beneath his left hand and sliding numbers in front of a small opening
.

The mechanical man was also able to play cards with them. The magician dealt the cards and placed those the automaton was dealt in an arc-shaped holder before him. The mechanical man selected the card he wished to play by swinging his arm up, plucking the card from the holder, and showing it to the audience. He won every game he played
.

“And now,” said the magician as he tucked the figure away, “we have come to the entertainment entitled the Mystic Mirror. I will need a volunteer from the audience.” He rolled the large mirror forward to the front of the stage. It was set in a heavily ornamented wooden frame, with a pattern of leaves and branches skillfully worked in the wood. Here and there, the hint of a face peered through the leaves
.

When the magician had asked for volunteers before, he’d given each of them a copy of a little book, which he said contained the secrets of his magic art. Several children clutched copies in their laps. But now there was a hesitation, for it suddenly seemed to the children that there was something oddly mechanical about the magician himself, as if behind the veil of flesh were only cogs and wheels and bloodless moving parts
.

“Come, come,” said the magician in his soothing voice. “I assure you, there is nothing whatever to fear. Surely you have all wondered what lies within the mirror’s depths. Is the world we see there the same as this? Is it simply an illusion, or can we enter the mirror world and return to tell the tale? Come now, I need one brave spirit, an adventurer in the realm of magic.”

His deep eyes settled on a boy who sat among the others. Without a word, the boy rose and approached the stage
.

“Let’s give this brave young man a hand,” said the magician. He walked the boy over to the mirror, where he stood facing his reflection in the glass
.

“Now I want you to reach out and touch the surface of the
mirror,” said the magician. The boy reached out and touched the glass
.

“How does it feel?”

“Cold,” said the boy
.

“Indeed. Then perhaps the mirror world is a colder world than ours. You must go prepared.” He reached into the wicker trunk and took out a heavy cloak. He laid it over the boy’s shoulders and drew its deep hood over his head
.

“Now, this time, I want you to reach out as if you were laying your hand on the handle of a door. Give that handle a turn and walk through. Are you ready?”

From within the depths of the hood, the boy nodded his head. An uneasy silence fell over the room
.

As the boy reached out his hand again, something rose from the flat surface of the mirror to meet it. The boy’s hand closed over it. He gave it a twist and strode forward
.

A gasp went up from the crowd as first his arm and then his entire body slowly passed through the surface of the mirror. The cloak fell in an empty heap to the floor. One of the younger children screamed
.

Like the surface of a pool after someone has plunged in, the mirror settled into stillness again. Once more, the trappings of the stage were reflected in its calm
.

“Who knows what wonders await us on the far side of the mirror,” the magician said. “Perhaps our brave adventurer will tell the tale.”

He turned, and from the deep shadows behind the stage, the boy walked forward. The magician pressed a copy of his little book into his hand. To the applause of the crowd, the boy took his place again among the others
.

But as the show continued, several children seated nearby noticed a strange chill in the air about him and shifted nervously away
.

E
mily took a long look in the dusty mirror mounted on the wall by the desk. She reached out, put her hand to the glass, and gave a little push, as if she half-expected it to go through.

The radio, tuned to the local jazz station, sat humming to itself on the shelf beside the desk. The desk was piled high with books and papers. The papers on the bottom had been there so long, they had begun to turn color. It was a vast sea of chaos, with a tiny island of order directly in front of her, at which she worked.

Today, she was making her way through a box of books she’d bought from a young man who had come in that morning. She needed more books like she needed another hole in her head. But she had a soft heart, and when some poor soul came through the door with a box of books for sale, she was as likely as not to buy the lot. Meanwhile, O was busy dusting, muttering to herself about the condition of the shop, just loud enough to be heard.

Over time, a bookshop will take the shape of its owner. Emily had been at the Green Man so long that it had grown around her like a second skin. The books were her flesh; the words that flowed through them were the blood that ran through her veins. The poetry section was the beating heart of the collection. Along with the familiar names, it contained many scarce and obscure items – small-press publications, chapbooks, broadsides, limited runs, books by local authors.

But the mazy aisles and teeming shelves of the shop mirrored other interests in her life as well. Just inside the doorway to the back room were three shelves of books on Victorian stage magic. And on the wall of books that ran the length of the shop beside the desk was a full bay devoted to supernatural fiction.

The supernatural collection was a large and, in many ways, a private collection. Much of it was housed along the hallway of the flat above the shop. It was, without doubt, the most valuable part of her entire stock, and she guarded it zealously, keeping the full extent of it secret from all but her closest friends.

The roots of her interest in the supernatural ran deep. Now and then, one of the shop regulars would gently scold her about it. “You don’t really believe in all this bunk, do you?” Emily would arch her eyebrow, as she did when something got her goat, and her brow would furrow lightly.

For the supernatural was not something she merely dabbled in; she was deadly serious about it. She herself had experienced incursions from that realm just the other side of what people liked to call the “real” world, and those incidents had shaped her into the person she was.

As with all the serious things in her life, she wrapped her beliefs securely in silence. Wasn’t that the poet’s task, after all – to safeguard the silence? It was not merely the words on the page that mattered, but what one glimpsed from time to time through the latticework of letters.

She was a friend of silence, an ally of the dark. She had always done her most creative work at night, while the rest of the world slept. She needed the silence so that she could hear her own words forming; needed the dark so that she could see her own small light burning. She caught sleep when she could.

Lately, sleep held its terrors. Twice in the past week she had dreamt the old dream. It had been years since she’d dreamt in that terrifying way – blissful years, they seemed to her now.

The sun was warm on her back as she sat at the cluttered desk, prepping books before adding them to the stock. She sprayed a little watered-down Windex on a cloth and wiped down the covers of the paperbacks until they gleamed.

The radio was playing an old Bix Beiderbecke number, “Singin’ the Blues.” Pure poetry. Beiderbecke had the sweetest tone of any horn player she had ever heard. She let the tune wash over her as she fanned through the books, checking for markings, seeing if the past owners had left anything behind.