Thirteen Phantasms Read Free Page A

Latzarel looked out in time to see the postman shut the mailbox and turn away, heading up the sidewalk. Squires went out through the front door and emptied the box, then came back in sorting letters. He took a puzzled second look at an envelope. “You’re a stamp man,” he said to Latzarel, handing it to him. “What do you make of that?”
    •
    Landers found that he could stand upright on the catwalk, although the roof sloped at such an angle that if he moved a couple of feet to either side, he had to duck to clear the roof rafters. He walked toward the boxes, but turned after a few steps to shine the light behind him, picking out his footprints in the otherwise-undisturbed dust. Beneath that dust, if a person could only brush away the successive years, lay Mr. Cummings’s own footprints, coming and going along the wooden boards.
    There was something almost wrong about opening the boxes at all, whatever they contained, like prying open a man’s coffin. And somehow the neatly tied string suggested that their packing hadn’t been temporary, that old Mr. Cummings had put them away forever, perhaps when he knew he was at the end of things.
    Astounding … ? Well, Landers would be the judge of that.
    Taking out his pocket knife, he started to cut the string on one of the top boxes, then decided against it and untied it instead, afterward pulling back the flaps. Inside were neatly stacked magazines, dozens of issues of a magazine called
Astounding Science-Fiction
, apparently organized according to date. He picked one up off the top, December of 1947 and opened it carefully. It was well-preserved, the pulp paper yellowed around the outside of the pages, but not brittle. The cover painting depicted a robot with a head like an egg, holding a bent stick in his hand and looking mournfully at a wolf with a rabbit beside it, the world behind them apparently in flames. There were book ads at the back of the magazine, including one from something called the Squires Press: an edition of Clark Ashton Smith’s
Thirteen Phantasms
, printed with hand-set type in three volumes on Winnebago Eggshell paper and limited to a hundred copies. “Remit one dollar in seven days,” the ad said, “and one dollar monthly until six dollars is paid.”
    A dollar a month! This struck him as fantastic—stranger in its way, and even more wonderful, than the egg-headed robot on the front cover of the magazine. He sat down beside the boxes and leaned back against the wall so that the pages caught the sunlight through the window. He wished that he had brought along something to eat and drink instead of the worthless telephone. Settling in, he browsed through the contents page before starting in on the editorial, and then from there to the first of the several stories.
    •
    When the sunlight failed, Landers ran an extension cord into the attic and hooked up an old lamp in the rafters over the catwalk. Then he brought up a folding chair and a little smoking table to set a plate on. He would have liked something more comfortable, but there was no fitting an overstuffed chair up through the hatch. Near midnight he finished a story called “Rain Check” by Lewis Padgett, which featured a character named Tubby (apparently there had been a time when the world was happy with men named Tubby) and another character who drank highballs. …
    He laid the book down and sat for a moment, listening to the rustling of leaves against the side of the house.
    Highballs. What did people drink nowadays?—beer with all the color and flavor filtered out of it. Maybe that made a sad and frightening kind of sense. He looked at the back cover of the magazine, where perhaps coincidentally, there was an ad for Calvert whiskey: “Just be sure your highball is made with Calvert,” the ad counseled. He wondered if there was any such thing anymore, whether anywhere within a twenty-mile radius someone was mixing up a highball out of Calvert whiskey. Hell, a
hundred
miles