Free Thirteen Phantasms by James P. Blaylock Page B

doubled, he was surprised to find, now that he had provided the thing with a home and a meal.
    He picked up his felt-tip pen and wrote
East, West, Homes Best
on the side of the box, running a little curlicue out of the tail of the last
T
. Then he wrote
Moe
underneath, which was a good enough name for a roach.
    He drifted into the storeroom. Something was being suggested to him, something that he couldn’t glimpse except out of the corner of his eye. His desk was a littered mess, and he had to push papers out of the way to switch on the lamp. Books lay in heaps on the floor, waiting to be priced and shelved. He couldn’t bear to look at them. He found his jar of thumbtacks and emptied it onto the blotter. Then, picking up a heavy, stainless-steel letter opener and holding it like a dagger, he hacked holes into the lid of the jar.
    There was a spider under the counter out front. It had been there for days, spinning its web back in the corner. Ted didn’t like spiders at all, but now it occurred to him that they would be about twice as tolerable if they were set up with a house and meal, just like the roach.
    He was shoveling the spider into the jar, trapping it with the lid, when someone began knocking on the door. He froze, thinking at first to stay hidden behind the counter. Carefully, he peered Indianwise around the edge of it, holding the lid on the jar. The woman at the door waved at him happily.
    There was a quartz crystal as big as a baby’s fist hanging on a copper chain around her neck, and her hair had been done up, apparently, with an electric fan. She wore a low-cut, ground-length muumuu, spun out of flax or chaff or something, probably in Pakistan. Twenty years ago she had been a hippy, or else hadn’t been and was making up for it now. She poked the spring-hinged mailbox open and chattered through it.
    Ted couldn’t entirely make out what she said, but it had to do with its still being ten minutes until closing and she had driven all the way out from somewhere and. … He moved across to unlock the door, thinking that he didn’t have a jar big enough to fit the woman into. She wedged herself into the doorway when he had pushed the door only a third open, so that she blocked his way, and he couldn’t push it any farther, and she had to hunch down to shove past him, brushing against him heavily, almost intimately. She smoothed the sides of her dress as if they had got crushed coming through, and took a curious look at the spider in the jar.
    She reeled backward, grimacing.
    “Spider,” Ted said. “His name is Clyde.” He found that he was still recovering from her entrance.
    “He’s a
pet?”
she asked, turning so that she looked at him out of the side of her head.
    “Yes, he is. Silly, isn’t it? It’s a form of therapy, actually—the New Age approach to phobias. Effective, too. There was a time that the very sight of such a thing would have sent me toward the door. I’m just now feeding him.”
    “What?” she asked. “Flies?”
    “No, bits of a cheeseburger. Defeats the purpose to feed them flies. It’s a sort of Garden of Eden approach to therapy. Buddhist, really. Suggested by Eastern teachings. Ghandi and that crowd.” It struck him suddenly that Eastern teachings would hardly suggest feeding cows to spiders, but the woman apparently wasn’t having any trouble with the notion. This is just another customer, he told himself, and probably a very nice one. Settle down.
    “I’m Laurinda Bates,” she said, looking intently at the jar now. The spider stood across from the food, gathering courage, as if it had tackled flies and silverfish before, but never a piece of cow. “This is fascinating. What’s in here?”
    “Cockroach, actually. He and I are old friends. I used to have a horror of them, like most people do, but then I read some literature written by a man who had just spent three years in Nepal, and I saw the way. It was as simple as striking up a friendship. It’s sort of