He was deep in a corner, examining what seemed to be 9mm 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 cross-eyed 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. “ A w, 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.”
The young man reached for an octagonal-shaped stone. The old man stopped him with a word. “No!” The young man pulled back his hand. The old man picked up another one, diamondshaped. “Here. This one.”
“What was wrong with the other one?”
“Wouldn’t have served your need. Take my word for it, this’s the one you want. Two dollars. A steal at twice the price.”
The young man took it from him. It was warm to the touch. He
closed his fist around it. The heat grew in his palm. He opened his hand and stared down at the glowing rock. “How do I use it?”
“Just carry it with you. Heat it in your hand from time to time. It’ll do the rest.”
The young man fished around in his jeans pocket, brought up two moist and wrinkled dollar bills. He gave them to the old man. The old man took the bills, walked back to the area where the rocking chair sat under the beaded lamp, and reached into an open drawer. He brought out a ledger and a quill pen.
“I’ll just enter the transaction,” he said. He brought the ledger over to the showcase, laid it down, opened it, and wrote a few words on the first empty line. He looked up from the ledger; the young man didn’t like the look at all. “I’ll need a tear,” the old man said.
“A tear?”
“Yes, a tear.”
“Not blood?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Sign these things in blood; isn’t that supposed to be the way of it?”
“Just a tear, thank you.”
“And how do I do that?”
“No problem.”
The young man suddenly felt his eyes well up with tears. One rolled down his face, hung from his chin for a moment and then dropped onto the glass of the showcase. “Very good,” the old man said, and dipped the quill in the tear. He wrote a few more words.
He closed the ledger slowly, and looked at the young man. “That’s it,” he said. “Anything else?” In fact, it was a dismissal. The young man paused a moment, as if trying to brazen out the instant; but the old man quite clearly did not want him in the shoppe any longer. He turned toward the door. It was clear afternoon out there.
“You wrote down my name, didn’t you?”
“Goodbye,” said the old man. “Come again.”
“How did you know my name? I didn’t say my name.”
“Goodbye.”
The young man got a nasty look on his face and seemed about to say something. He clutched the powerstone in his hand and waited for it to work. But he knew it wouldn’t work on the shoppe keeper. He had once bought a revolver from a pawnbroker, and the hockshop owner had sold him the bullets in a sealed cartridge carton, with a band around it. Shopkeepers always took precautions so the merchandise wouldn’t be turned against them.
The young man walked toward the front door. He had only taken three steps before he was there. But it had been such a long walk to reach the old man.
He put his hand on the knob—a crescent moon—and opened the door. He turned to look back at the old man, but the old man was gone. The light of the beaded lamp no longer shone. It was all darkness back there, with a swirling vortex of white mist where he had last seen the old man standing.
“I’ve read stories about this kind of place,” he said defiantly, to nothingness. There was no answer from the misty vortex. “Nobody ever wrote one about who runs a place like this. Why you sell stuff like this so cheap? What’s in it for you? Why do you keep coming and going like that? Who do you work for? What’s in it for you?”
There was a final whisper of dismissal: Goodbye.
He stepped through the door, closed it behind him, and started away. He took three steps, as he had inside the shoppe, and turned around, thinking better of his purchase.
Where it had been, there was a blank wall between two boarded-up entranceways. As promised, the Shoppe of wonders, in which the filthy young man with the unsavory manner had purchased his heart’s desire, had vanished.
He stabilized his atoms and assumed his normal form. He was not an old man, nor was he a swirling vortex of white mist, nor was he a beautiful woman or a robot or Cernunnos of the Gauls. He was, himself, a young man, perhaps no older than the young man to whom he had sold the powerstone. The thin disc that had been slid between the atoms of the femur of his left leg had one thousand and eleven growth rings on it. He was a young man, only one thousand and eleven years old.
The shoppe solidified around him. Its outer walls were gone. He was back at Rubble Point. The world outside was ashes and darkness. The stasis field held the shoppe inviolate, but though he was safe from the Infinite Dark Mass that pressed against its walls, its potency could still be felt: pressing against the field, incredible devouring power exerting unceasing pressure. Outside the shoppe it was all sky, no land surface, no horizon. Sky, empty space, devoid of life, black, terrible and cold. Ashes and darkness.
He ran his hands wearily through his thick hair, and thought of Ahna.
The time he had spent with the shoppe just off Jamshyd Avenue could be quantified/as thirty-five “minutes.” Subjectively. But he had been gone only a tick in the objectified chronology of Rubble Point.
What he had done suddenly flooded in on him. He was—all at once—as terrified as a child who had broken his mother’s best china figurine. He knew what he had done was wrong! More than simply wrong. It had been personally destructive. But there were times when he could not help himself. It had now put Ahna in jeopardy, as well as himself, but he could not fully regret it; he knew he would do it again if the moment were to be repeated. Despite the job he had to do, despite the purpose that drove him obsessively, there were times when he could not help himself. He was, after all, an artist.
He stood there among the items of stock he had been given to sell, and he thought about his Art. In the face of what he had done, and what it meant for Ahna, he felt vain and foolish. Headstrong. Destructive. He turned and turned, looking for an answer to his actions, but everything in the shoppe spoke reproach. He remembered one special manifestation of his art that he had thought personified what he had to say:
In the Glass Square, having reassembled himself in the shape of a silver tetrahedron radiating light in waves of chromatic brilliance, sending the light through random phases of color in bursts and washes without once repeating the sequence. No one had paid any attention. But he had stayed there for a very long time, and finally, when it was a totality, and he was done, and the time for that particular piece of art to be disassembled, and he reformed himself, one of the Supervisors had solidified in front of him and had asked, “What was the name of that?” And he had said, “Integrity,” and the Supervisor had looked at him without speaking. Then he had vanished. The gentle murmuring of the colors could still be heard faintly, dissipating.
He thought about that despicable young man with the powerstone. He was so anti-Art, so anti-life…
No! He would not think about it. They might not know; they couldn’t be everywhere; they couldn’t know everything; they had too much to supervise, too much to worry about; they would not discover what he had done. That was over, done, finished. He didn’t want to think about it; it made him cold and dead inside to think about it. He wanted to think of Ahna, to think of the time when she would be with him again. He wanted to see Ahna. To reaffirm his purpose, to sublimate his need to create. To force the artist to sleep, so the man could do what he had to do.
He gathered muons to himself, concentrating them in the fingertips of his right hand, and made a sign in the empty air of the shoppe. The air ran and bubbled like lava and a communication frame was created. He looked into it and said, “This is Lhayne. I would like a pass to go to the vaults.”
The blip of light in the upper left quadrant of the communication frame pulsed, “Aren’t you on service at this time, friend Lhayne?”
Lhayne admitted he was. “I’ve just returned from my duty period.” He knew the discrepancy would be noted. The blip pulsed, “There seems to be an imbalance. Your pass is, of course, granted; however, this break in your schedule will count against your quota.” Lhayne said he understood that would certainly have to be. the case. H. e was getting a trifle annoyed. He was, after all, a human being, and this was, after all, only a logging device to which he was speaking. He wanted to get to Ahna as quickly as possible, had to see her, actually see her, as quickly as possible. The blip pulsed, “This will be logged.”
“Then log it!” Lhayne said, angrily.
/> Without rancor, the lower right quadrant of the frame strobed validation of the pass. Lhayne made another sign in the air and the communication frame wavered and scintillated and vanished.
Lhayne stood a moment, still trembling with fear; then he disassembled his atoms and save for a momentary watery quality to the air in the shoppe, he was gone and the shoppe was empty. Empty: with the silent, voracious pressure of the Infinite Dark Mass steadily pressing against it.
He could not entirely divorce himself from his sense of duty, no matter what had happened, what he had done back there during work-time, no matter how much he hungered to see Ahna. And so he paused in transit and re-formed in the Supply section.
Beyond the frame in that place he could see men and women working with photons, quarks and muons to create the supplies the shoppe used as stock. The glass beads and trinkets.
The communication frame greeted him politely and had the temerity to inquire why he wasn’t out on work-time.
“I need restock,” he said, “do you want to take my order or lecture me on attendance?”
“What do you need?” the blip pulsed.
“Stock is low on Omicrons, healing ointments and hula hoops. I’ll need seven-league boots in sizes 10 to 13 triple A. Three succubi, a gross of the Beethoven cubes, about a dozen pair of the eyeglasses that see through solid matter, and have you gotten those universal college entrance exam answers back in stock yet?”
The blip pulsed, “No, I’m sorry, friend Lhayne, not yet. But we do have the original Shakespeare first folios and a large supply of original copies of Cotton Mather’s ‘Wonders of the Invisible World. ‘“