Free Thirteen Phantasms by James P. Blaylock

pursuit of Olivia I can’t say, nor can I determine whether Keeble hazarded the making of yet another amazing device for his plucky niece, who was the very Gibraltar of her family in the months that followed the tumult.
    So this history, I hope, will cause no one embarrassment, and may satisfy the curiosities of those who recall “The Horror in St. James Park.” I apologize if, by the revelation of causes and effects, what was once marvelous and inexplicable slides down a rung or two into the realm of the commonplace; but such explication is the charge of the historian—a charge I hope to have executed with candor.

Bugs
     
    The last customer stopped at the door to wave. Ted happily waved back. He was always happiest when customers left. This one was maybe twenty years old and wore a white T-shirt with the face of Kerouac stenciled onto it. He had bought a Beat Poets Map, studded around the perimeter with ill-drawn faces of San Francisco writers and red
X’s
to mark the spots where those luminaries had eaten and drunk and lived the Bohemian high life. The aluminum-frame door swung shut behind him and clipped his elbow, and Ted heard just the first note of a stifled grunt.
    For a moment he was cheered by the whole episode, but then he was a little ashamed. He had embarrassed the kid by asking him about the black beret that had been shoved into a back pocket of his Levi’s so as to be casually displayed. And then he had made up a transparent lie about his own days in North Beach, which the kid was forced out of politeness or stupidity to swallow. It was cheap as dirt to humor a customer, but somehow Ted couldn’t manage it anymore. He was out of patience all the time these days, and he hadn’t any reason to be.
    Today maybe he did have a reason. It was his anniversary, and he didn’t feel very anniversarylike. There was something about the expectations that went along with a gala event that was almost guaranteed to make it less gala. He had screwed up in the gift department, too. He had forgotten all about it until the last moment, then called the local florist and had a bouquet sent over along with a card that he hadn’t signed. It was the sort of remembrance you’d send to a bereaved widow because you didn’t want to look her in the face.
    He would find a way of making it up to her. Not being a shithead for one thing. Whatever Nona had planned was going to have to be all right with him—more than all right.
    Just being alone in his bookstore should have been enough to loosen him up. It was pretty nearly perfect, as bookstores went—crammed with volumes in dark wooden cabinets he had designed and built himself. There were stacks of lawyers’ bookcases too, that he had very nearly stolen at an antique auction in Los Angeles years ago. Now they lined twenty feet of one wall, full of first editions and old collectable, signed books that nobody bought. His cash register numbered the day’s receipts. The Beat Poets Map, at $6.50, had been sale number nine.
    He picked a pink fluorite crystal out of a wooden box on the counter. Beneath it were three hand-blown marbles and a trilobite fossil. Such things were like ballast to him, or perhaps amulets. Right at the moment, though, the charms kept their own secrets. The magic had gone out of them.
    He set the crystal down and stepped across to lock the door. There were forty-five minutes to go before closing, but what was he waiting for? Sale number ten? He poured himself a glass of scotch from the counter bottle and sat back in his chair. A roach ran up the wall beside him—a little brown roach of the swarming variety. It was alone, out without its friends. He slammed at it with his bare fist, missing it by six inches. The tremor in the wall jarred it loose, and it fell to the floor and scuttled under the counter. Ted waited for it to reappear, but it was too canny and stayed hidden.
    He leaned back, putting up his feet, pretending to have lost interest in the roach. On