Fantasmagoria Read Free Page B

showered and tried not to think about it.
    Sitting at his workbench, minty and damp, he stared into the glass jar at its eyeless passenger. The dome of the creature’s cranium reached across its forehead and ended at two fleshless, skull-like nasal openings. Its skin was gray and soft. Its phalanges looked long enough to strangle a man. Its camouflaged wings resembled dead, black leaves, and they snapped together in angry clicks as the creature hissed at Gilbert through rows of tiny serrated teeth.
    Gilbert set the glass jar down next to the terrarium. His three remaining live fairies, a male western crested blue fay and two female pink Winkler’s pixies, peered at the new arrival from behind the rock. The withering sprite was larger than the others by several inches. Gilbert wondered if it looked like a giant to them, or if, like insects, they were too stupid to notice. Either way, at least they were cowering at something besides him.
    Gilbert took out the mounting block he had made for the withering sprite. He’d carved it custom. The withering was so rare, McMasters didn’t even keep a specimen tray large enough in stock. Gilbert pressed the inlaid cork to make sure the glue had dried. Then he pasted the information card to the right side.
     
    Species: Withering Sprite
    Genera: Winter
    Gender: Unknown
    Habitat: Unknown
    Average Size: Unknown
     
    Unknown, he thought. Perfect.
    Gilbert looked up at the rear wall of his loft. It was covered in specimens: pixies, fairies, fay, and sprites of all sizes and colors hung inside small wooden blocks, sorted by genera, color, and type. Gilbert had a sizable collection of autumn and summer varietals and quite a few spring as well. Similar species tended to show similar coloration, and so there was a splotchy rainbow effect on the wall. Warblers tended to be purple or violet-hued—except for that blasted green meanie—and Gilbert had arranged them in a cluster near the bottom. Above the warblers were the mint pixies, then the dark spotted, then the western and eastern light spotted, and so on up to the crown jewel: Gilbert’s exhaustive collection of razorbacks, all reddish-hued and violent.
    He had mounted the razorbacks in live-action poses, wielding small sticks like swords and poised mid-strike. (It was well-known that razorbacks, besides being potent insect-hunters, were one of the few species intelligent enough to use tools.) Taken together, the red collection looked like a dance of devils, a miniature dark mass, photographed and frozen.
    In the center of everything was a picture of Gilbert’s dad. Carl Tubers had died of a stroke in a crowded elevator. Rush hour patrons had come and gone while he clutched his chest in silent agony, unable to move or call for help. Pressed to the back of the car by the crowd and then released, over and over, the coroner estimated Carl was stuck there, clinging to the rail, for the better part of an hour, surrounded by people who could help.
    “Sorry, Dad.” Gilbert took the picture off the wall and looked at it. His dad was bald and scrawny and smiling. “You were only just a placeholder.”
    Gilbert hung the empty mounting board on the vacant nail. It fit perfectly.
    He walked back around his cluttered workbench and picked out the supplies he needed: the jar of ether, a cotton ball, an extra-large skewering needle. He cleared a stack of medical texts and set the equipment down. The withering sprite had stopped hissing at him. Its tentaclelike phalanges were pressed to the glass. A thick, mucous drool hung from the edge of the sprite’s rounded mouth as its eyeless head stared at the cowering fairies. Their tremors shook their wings, which shed a sparkling dander that floated down to the terrarium floor.
    “I bet you’re hungry,” Gilbert said. “You had a long trip. How about one last meal?”
    Gilbert loosened the top of the jar and placed it inside the terrarium. The pixies shrieked in high-pitched squeaks, like a record