In For a Penny (21 page)

“I never could stand the taste of it.” My old dad drank it by the quart, but I never developed the habit. I was strictly a beer man.” He bent closer to a shelf of books, reading the faded titles on the spines.

“Come here, young fellow,” Swinton said to Johnson, and he held out his hand, waggling his fingers. Johnson approached skeptically.

“Thieves!” Boswell shouted from his perch, and Johnson, apparently taking it as a warning, stopped and looked up at the ceiling. Boswell strode across to a food dish attached to the perch, took out a peanut, cracked it neatly, nibbled the peanut out, and dropped the shell, which landed in an enormous flat brass basin that hung suspended below the perch. “Arson!” he said.

“Ghosts!” Swinton shouted back, and then summoned Johnson again, and this time the dog walked to the foot of the heavily upholstered chair that Swinton sat in. Johnson looked around uneasily. “He needs a good brushing, I’d say. Quite a coat for something that looks like a demented bull-dog.”

“More like hair than fur, isn’t it?” Algernon observed. “There must have been a spaniel in the woodpile.”

Patrick wafted whiskey fumes into his face again. “Some people think that he looks like Edward VII.”

“No doggy brush lying around?” Swinton asked, ignoring him.

John Lanyon, the man sitting near the window, in the chair opposite Swinton, looked up from his book. “Henley’s only just had him a week,” he said.

“Look here,” Algernon said abruptly, pointing at a shelf. “This set of Gaboriau was mine—nearly all that’s left of the lot that Gwen sold to Henley. Henley moved most of the collection to that pig Whiting, out in Chiswick.

“Whiting!” Swinton said derisively. “Now there was a pickpocket.”

“Do you know that we used to call him ‘hogfish?” Algernon said. “Not to his face, of course.”

“And now the man’s got your books,” Swinton said. “
There’s
justice for you. I can’t read French mysteries at any rate. Too tedious for me. Too many people dying of love. When it comes to mysteries I stay close to home. Henley’s got most of my books in Science and Nature, but I suppose he’ll sell them off to your man Hogface before it’s over.”

“Anything in the astronomy line?” Algernon asked.

“Insects. Illustrated and pre-twentieth century volumes on lepidoptera mainly Quite a nice collection, I seem to recall. Funny how you lose interest in things you had an earthly passion for, isn’t it—the books and the bugs?”

“It’s just as well,” Lanyon said. “You also lose a certain regret for the passing away of those things, which is a blessing.”

“Poor old Swann doesn’t seem to have lost much of either one.”

They looked through the doorway into Ghosts and Houses where their friend pored earnestly over the books, so apparently caught up in his study that he was oblivious to them. There seemed to be an aura around him that faded and then brightened feebly again like a battery running down.

“The books were all he had,” Lanyon said. “The rest of us were luckier.” There was a pause in the conversation, as if the comment had silenced them. After a long moment Lanyon asked, “Are we going out tonight? Perfect weather for it, I should think.”

Algernon moved to the window and looked out into the darkness. “I say we do. What time do you have, Lanyon?”

Lanyon looked at his pocket watch. “Nearly one.”

“Will we ask Swann?” Patrick gestured toward the farther room. “Maybe he’d fancy a stroll, just to kill the time.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Lanyon said. “He’s past that sort of lark. He’ll be moving on soon, I should think.”

Swinton laughed abruptly, looked up, and then laughed again. “I’ve got a fine idea,” he said. “Before we go out, let’s give this beast a coiffure. He’s a challenge, but nothing we haven’t faced before. What do you think, Algernon?”

“I think it’s a first rate idea, but make it quick for God’s sake. I’m feeling boxed up suddenly, and I’d like to take the air.” He glanced at Swann again, as if the sight of the old man’s activities disturbed him.

Swinton passed his hand over Johnson’s back, raising the hair in a broad line. Then he moved the fingers of his hand in a little grasping motion, like a spider on a mirror, twirling a patch of hair on the dog’s back into a neat little ringlet and laying it flat. Johnson peered around suspiciously, but wasn’t evidently unhappy.

“Cannibals!” Boswell hollered from his perch. He strode back and forth excitedly, hung upside down, and swiveled his head back and forth.

“Ghosts!” Swinton shouted. “Hogfish!” He made another gesture at the dog’s back, this time as if he were playing the piano one-handed. An inch-long line of hairs parted, exposing Johnson’s hide, which was pink. Swinton added another ringlet and then another part, and was very soon lost in his work, both of his hands moving nimbly, like a hula dancer’s. Johnson lay down on the rug, put his head on his paws, and fell asleep.

. . .

Henley drove the lorry across the North Down, the road virtually empty of cars. He felt rumpled and dog tired, having slept badly at the inn, where the mattress was apparently stuffed with lengths of chain. He had awakened so many times during the night that he had finally simply gotten up and left, and even now it wasn’t much past five in the morning. The moon hovered just a thread’s width above the horizon: in another moment it would be gone. Tomorrow night that same moon would be diminished, Henley thought, and soon it would pass away into darkness and all that darkness implied.

His stomach rumbled suddenly, fishing his thoughts out of the slightly morbid pool they’d started to sink into, and his mind turned to coffee and to Johnson, who had no doubt spent a more comfortable night of it than he had. Probably Johnson wouldn’t have any interest in coffee, although he might be keen on coffee creamer.

He rounded Silbury Hill as the top of the sun rose above the white chalk horse on Pewsy Vale, generating its own hopeful but generally unheeded metaphor. When Henley passed the henge bank with its standing stones, the lorry angling around toward Avebury village, the dawn sun shone atop the tallest of the stones, crowning it in a golden morning light.

“And the earth abideth forever,” Henley whispered, nearly home at last.

. . .

“Isn’t that Henley?” Swinton asked Algernon as the lorry sped past them. They were half a mile from Silbury Hill, and their companions, Lanyon and Patrick, were some distance ahead—two moving shades in what was left of the early morning twilight. It had been a long night, but they had done some good work. If they didn’t hurry, the sun would catch them at it, but who the hell cared, really? They weren’t vampires, after all.

“Henley’s home early,” Algernon said. “Probably worried about the dog.”

Swinton laughed. “I wish we were there to see the reunion.”

“I understood Henley to say that it was old Hoover’s library that he bought, up in Little Comberton. Lanyon knew the man fairly well. He tells me that Hoover was one hundred and three years old when he died.”

“I’m not envious,” Swinton said. “That’s too damned many years.”

“I say we browse through the new books tonight,” Algernon said.

“We could simply shelve the books for Henley,” Swinton said. “Like the elves and the shoemaker.”

“Maybe,” Algernon said doubtfully. “Except next thing you know he’ll be calling in a priest, and the dear Lord knows where we’ll find ourselves and our club meetings, just like happened at that pub full of old dead topers out in Greenwich. I’m worried about Patrick, to tell you the truth. I haven’t seen him sober after midnight for over a month. And poor Swann—he can’t keep his … hands off the books, so to speak, and he can’t remember to put them back, which reminds me that it’s too damned late for us to do anything about it if anything’s out of order right now. Henley’s already suspicious of everything being shifted around willy nilly and left lying about.”

“Well, they
were
Swann’s books, weren’t they?” Swinton said. “You’d think that a man has some small right of property that lingers beyond the grave. And what do you and I care about club meetings when all is said and done? We’ll go the way of poor old Swann ourselves in due time, and there’s an end to the Trismegistus Club, at least for us. Patrick might as well go out drunk, like a sailor breaking into the spirit room when the ship’s sinking. A glass for Davy Jones, you know. All things must pass, old boy, you, me, the Trismegistus Club. … Here it comes!”

The sun rose above the hills in earnest then—a bright day and a warm summer morning. In the first sunbeams that washed the road the two figures farther up the hill vanished from sight.

Swinton and Algernon parted company as the night shadows fled away, the dawn spreading out to reveal an immense crop circle spun into the field of grain on the hillside behind them. The circle was made up of series of commas or apostrophes: little pinwheels of decreasing size sweeping around in a larger arc like the tails of comets and enclosing on each of four sides a quartet of concentric rings. The field round-about was utterly untrodden, as if the circle had been woven from the air, perhaps by a spirit wind or by genies riding carpets.

. . .

Henley went in through the back door of the shop, hauling a carton of books, and at the sound of his footsteps on the floorboards Boswell hollered “Ghosts!” in a raucous voice.

“Ghosts to you, too,” Henley said, happy to see Johnson appear from the dim room beyond. Then he saw that there was something strange about the dog, an odd tangling of its fur. Henley bent over to look more closely, setting the books on the linoleum. Johnson’s fur had been …
styled
was the only word that came into his mind. It was uncanny—swirled around in little ringlets and circles, impossibly neatly, as if someone had labored over it. At first it appeared as if the pattern were shaved into the fur, but he could see that it hadn’t been: the strands of fur appeared to be woven, very neatly woven—braided and then laid flat.

The first thing that came into his mind was that he had to start locking the rear door. Then suddenly he wondered whether the open door—that is to say an intruder—could explain things, including the mystery of the three misplaced items that he had found night before last. It was an unlikely damned idea; thievery he could understand, but breaking in simply to move books about or to decorate a dog’s fur, that was something else again.

He realized then that there was the lingering smell of whiskey in the air, and he went into the front room and looked around suspiciously. Johnson followed him, lying down in his usual spot and looking faintly embarrassed. Boswell wasn’t on his perch, but had climbed down to the book shelves and hung now from the spine of a narrow volume of detective stories. The bird regarded Henley through a single eye, letting go with one of his claws and hanging on with the other, his body swaying back and forth.

“What’s going on, Boswell?” Henley asked the bird, but Boswell was silent now, and at any rate his answer would no doubt involve goblins or wolves or assassins, and none of those explanations seemed entirely likely.

Just then the weight of the dangling bird pulled the book he was hanging from forward and off the shelf, crashing down onto the carpet. Johnson leaped to his feet and stood gaping at Boswell, who walked across the floor with great dignity and started climbing back up another set of shelves.

Ghost
… The word came into his mind, and he didn’t reject it out of hand, at least not quite. He looked around, taking stock.

The whiskey decanter sat as ever behind the counter. Its glass stopper, however, wasn’t in the neck of the decanter, but was lying on the countertop, which accounted for the fumes in the air. He returned it to the decanter, noticing then that spilled crumbs of tobacco lay next to his open can of Dunhill Nightcap, which again was puzzling. Although he wasn’t above spilling tobacco, he hadn’t actually smoked since night before last, and he recalled having wiped the counter clean yesterday morning before setting out for Little Comberton. Or at least he thought he remember doing so. On the other hand, he never twisted the lid onto the can, but simply set it on, because it was too damned difficult to remove. Possibly he had given it an inadvertent knock after wiping down the counter. …

Had
someone been at his Scotch and tobacco? Boswell stepped down from a book shelf and onto his shoulder then, and immediately began nibbling at his ear lobe, muttering in the language of the cockatoo. He encouraged the bird to climb onto his forearm and then put him back onto his perch. Boswell might conceivably have made his way down to the floor, across the room, and up onto the counter in order to investigate the tobacco, which would quite likely look interestingly shreddy to a bird. But surely the creature wouldn’t be interested in the whiskey. …

A car horn beeped out on the road, and without thinking Henley glanced through the window, focusing first on the car that drove past, and then on the distant hillside wheat field out beyond the standing stones. He walked to the window and stared at it in growing disbelief. In the center of the field, glowing in the morning sun, lay an intricate crop circle. He must have driven right past it in the early morning darkness.

He looked back at Johnson, who lay on the rug with his head on his paws, and then back out the window again. There was no mistaking it: the pattern in Johnson’s fur was identical to the pattern in the wheat, although on the hillside it had been repeated several times. He stared at the circle for a long time, trying to come to grips with what this might mean, his mind grappling again with his growing collection of small mysteries and with Boswell’s strangely broadening vocabulary. …