The work of James P. Blaylock (b. 1950) might at first seem conventional, before you realize that he is parodying convention. Works such as his early The Elfin Ship (1982) and its sequel The Disappearing Dwarf (1983) might at first appear to be clones of The Hobbit, but Blaylock leads you down the garden path and into the woods. Over the years his fantasies have become more surreal, trespassing into the steampunk territory on the borders of science fiction (as in The Digging Leviathan, 1984) or luring you into an apparent but unusual children's fantasy, The Magic Spectacles (1991). In Blaylock's stories the barriers between the real and the unreal are constantly moving and you never quite know where you are, as the following beautifully demonstrates.
MY WIFE AND I WERE TRAVELLING ALONG THE Normandy coast when we met John Kendal in St Malo. It was in a hotel cafe - the name of the place escapes me. He sat before a tremendous plate of periwinkles, all heaped into a little seashell monument. With a long needle he poked at the things, removing the grey lump inside each and piling it neatly on the opposite side of the plate. He worked at it for the space of half an hour, and in that time I had no idea it was my old childhood friend Kendal who sat there.
So intent and delicate were his movements that he gave the impression of someone suspicious that one of the periwinkles held a tremendous pearl, which would, at any moment, come rolling out of the mouth of a dark little shell on to his plate.
It wasn't until he paused for a moment to sip his wine that I looked at his face and knew who he was. People change a great deal over the years, but Kendal, somehow, hadn't. His hair was longer and wilder, and he was twenty years older than I remembered him, but that's all. His antics with the periwinkles made perfect sense.
Seeing him there labouring over the shells reminded me of our first meeting, forty years earlier when we were both boys. On the day after I'd moved into the neighbourhood I came across him lying on the street, peering down through one of the nickel-sized holes in an iron manhole cover, watching the rippling water that ran along below the street and reflected a long cylinder of sunlight that shone through the opposite hole. He told me right off that he did most of his water gazing on partly cloudy and windy days when the passing shadows would suddenly darken and obscure the water below and he could see nothing at all. He'd wait there, gazing down into utter darkness, until without any warning the clouds would pass and the diamond glint of sunlight would reappear, sparkling on the running water.
It was all a very romantic notion, and I took to practising the art myself, although not nearly as often as did Kendal, and always vaguely fearful that I'd be run down in the road by a passing car. He had no such fears. The sunlit waters implied vague and wonderful promise to him that I sometimes felt but never fully understood.
And here he was eating periwinkles in St Malo. He was living there. I haven't any idea how he paid his rent or bought his periwinkles and wine. It didn't seem to matter. Nor did it surprise him that we'd met by wild coincidence, twenty years and 6,000 miles distant from our last meeting in California. We hadn't even communicated in the intervening years.
As we sat into the evening and talked, I was struck by the idea that he'd become eccentric. Then it occurred to me that he'd been eccentric at eight years old when he'd spent his free time peering through manhole covers. What he'd become, I can't for the life of me say. My wife, who sees things more clearly than I do, understood immediately, even as she watched him manipulate his periwinkles, that he was slightly off-centre. Not the sort who goes raging about the streets with an axe, but the sort who doesn't even acknowledge the street, who looks right through it, who inhabits some distant shifting world.
That isn't to say that my wife disliked him. He won her sympathies at once by carrying on about the sunsets at St Malo, sunsets which, for two days running, we had missed because I hadn't had the energy to walk from the railway hotel to the old city. He could see them, he said, from his window, which overlooked the sea wall and the scores of rocky little islands and light towers that stretched out into the ocean along the coast there. It was spectacular, the sun sinking like a ball of wet fire into a sea turned orange. It seemed to set purely for the amusement of the city of St Malo. He had the notion that if he could find just the right sort of rowboat - the wooden shoe of Winken, Blinken and Nod or the pea-green boat of the Owl and the Pussycat — he could catch the sun as it set and follow it into the depths of the sea.
The next afternoon my wife and I drank a beer at a cafe above that same sea wall and watched the sunset ourselves. I'll admit that Kendal was right - not a half-mile of green sea rolled between the rocky shore and the sun when it set. There are legends, or so we were told, that when the old gods fished from the rocks off St Malo, one of them cast his golden net with such force that it encircled the sun. Thinking that he'd ensnared a great glowing fish, he hauled it almost into shore before realizing his error and setting it free. The sun had been so taken with the beauty of the coastline thereabouts that it has since followed that same path every evening when it sails from the sky.
It's quite possible that Kendal had heard the same tale and that his nautical pursuit of the setting sun was suggested by it. All in all it doesn't matter much, for it's just as likely that if he had heard the myth, he half believed it. He had the uncanny ability to make others believe such tales too, just as he'd imbued me with a sense of the importance of watching that sunlit water beneath the street, for reasons that I can't at all remember, reasons that have never been defined.
So we talked that first evening over wine and food, and I discovered that he'd never given up the business of watching, of peering through holes. He told us that he had taken for the summer the most amazing rooms, directly above the sea wall. They were in the oldest part of the city, all stone and hand-hewn timber. He'd been told by the landlady that at one time, hundreds of years ago perhaps, his room had attached to it a stone balcony, thrusting out over the ocean beyond a heavy, studded oak door. The stones had long since broken loose and fallen into the sea, and the old door had been nailed shut against the possibility of someone stumbling through it drunk or while sleepwalking, and dropping the 30-odd feet into the tide pools below.
There was a keyhole in the door, however, encrusted with verdigris, through which one could peer out over the sea. Kendal, it seemed, spent a good deal of time doing just that. He could as easily have watched the sunsets through either of two long, mullioned windows in the same wall, but that, he quickly insisted, wouldn't have been the same thing. There was something about keyholes - about this particular keyhole - something he couldn't quite fathom.
My wife, not knowing him as I did, insisted that he explain himself, and his story, I'm afraid, went a ways towards overturning the romantic notion she'd formed of him after his eloquent description of the sunsets.
He had been in the rooms a week before he even saw the keyhole. He was engaged, he said, in certain studies. The view from the windows was such that his eyes were inevitably drawn to and through them towards the sea so that he paid little attention to the old door. One afternoon, however, he'd been sitting at his desk working at something — I haven't the foggiest idea what - when he noticed through the corner of his eye that a thin ray of sunlight slanted in through the keyhole and illuminated a little patch of carpet, evoking, he said, old memories and fresh anticipation. There was nothing for him to do but peer through the keyhole.
Shimmering beyond was an expanse of pale green ocean which joined, at the abrupt line of the horizon, an almost equal expanse of blue sky. It wasn't at all an odd thing to find, quite what he'd expected, but the simple symmetry of the sea and sky with their delicate Easter egg colours kept him at the keyhole for a bit, waiting, perhaps for a gust of wind to toss the surface of the sea or for a cloud to drift into view. As it happened, a sailing ship appeared, just spars and rigging at first, then the tossing bowsprit as the ship arched up over the horizon. He hadn't any idea what sort of ship it was; he knew nothing, he told us, of ships. But it was altogether a wonderful thing as it appeared there with its billowing sails and complexity of rigging and looking for all the world as if it had sailed in from another age.
He leaped up and dug about in his wardrobe for a pair of opera glasses, then returned to the window to have a closer look at the antique ship. But there was, he insisted, no ship there. It must have swung around and sailed back out to sea - curious and unlikely behaviour, it seemed to him.
Out of sudden curiosity he peered once again through the keyhole, but there was only the sea and the sky lying placidly, one atop the other.
He had suspicions, he said, about the keyhole, suspicions that had been fostered years before. He half felt as if the keyhole had been waiting there for him, impossible as that sounds on the face of it, and he determined, quite literally, to keep an eye on it.
His determination faded, however, as he became once again involved in his studies. He was standing at the window late the following afternoon, thinking about the sunset and toying with the idea of going down to the cafe for a cup of coffee. He felt a bit of a fool, he said, for his suspicions about the keyhole, and he decided that it was time to lay them to rest. So he crouched before it and peered through, seeing, to his wild surprise, not ocean and sky and sailing boats, but a study, his own study: the littered desk between cases of books, the rose-coloured armchair beside a tobacco stand, the ungainly pole lamp standing like an impossible stiltlegged flamingo with a hat on. He determined to keep watch, not to look away and so lose it like he had lost the incredible ship. He'd wait, he said, until something happened, anything.
But then he began to wonder at the odds and ends heaped on the desk. They were all familiar; nothing was there that shouldn't have been. But he couldn't be sure - he couldn't swear that the millefiori paperweight, an old French globe that was the only thing of real value he owned, wasn't in the wrong spot. There it was on the left of the desk, sitting atop a copy of Mr Brittling Sees it Through. Yet he was almost sure that behind him it lay next to a bowl of oranges on the right. He could picture it in his mind. It sat opposite Mr Brittling, not atop it.
It began to irritate him, like an itch that he couldn't quite reach. He had to know about the paperweight, and yet he was sure that if he turned, even for an instant, his mysterious keyhole study would sail off in the wake of the disappearing galleon. When he finally gave up and looked away, it seemed to him that he saw, just out of the corner of his eye, the study door begin to swing open as if someone were pushing in through it. But the momentum of rising carried him off, and when he peered through again, after just the slip of an instant, there was the tranquil sea, broken just a bit by little wind waves, and the blue expanse of sky interrupted by the rag-tag end of a fleeing cloud.
He'd been right about the paperweight. He was possessed thereafter with wonder at the nature of that keyhole. You and I would have been concerned with the nature of our minds, with our sanity, but not John Kendal. Just the opposite was the case. For a week he crouched there, spending long hours, squinting until he got a headache, seeing nothing but sea and sky and, in the evening, the setting sun. He'd sneak up on it. He'd act nonchalant, as if he were bending over before it to pick up a dropped pencil or a bit of lint from the carpet. But the keyhole, he said, couldn't be fooled. He even tried whistling in a cheerful and foolish manner to add credence to his air of unconcern. At night there was nothing but darkness beyond, darkness and a little cluster of stars. Later yet a glint of moonlight shone through maddeningly, only perceptible if the room were dark and if he stood just so, somewhere near the north-east corner of the study.
Bits of fleeting doubt began to surface towards the end of the week, the suspicion, perhaps, that he'd been the victim of a particularly vivid dream brought on by an overabundance of periwinkles, which, apparently, he ate by the bushel basketful. It occurred to him that his compulsion was very much like that of a peeping tom, and that his studies were woefully neglected. Finally he simply grew tired of it. He resolved late one Saturday night that he'd had enough, that he'd made a fool of himself and that he'd quite simply put the matter to rest by having nothing more to do with it. He'd shove a wad of chewing gum into the thing if he had to, buy a key and leave it in the hole so as to block the little cylinder of sunlight that filtered in. It was the sunlight, after all, that set him off. It was all very clear to him. Psychology could explain it. He was searching for that same sunlight he'd become so familiar with as a child. Well, he'd have no more of it.
So he sat there, pretending to be reading in his chair, but thinking, of course, of the keyhole — knowing that he was thinking about it and denying it at the same time. He wondered suddenly, irrationally, if the keyhole knew he was thinking about it, and if he hadn't ought to lazy along over towards it and have one last peek - just to put the issue to rest, to dash it to bits. He could see just the faintest silver thread of watery moonbeam slanting in, vaguely illuminating that bit of carpet.
He rushed at the door, casting his book down on to the armchair, pulling his pipe out of his mouth. He'd been tormented long enough. He'd have one last look, just to satisfy himself once and for all; then he'd stuff it full of something, anything - wet paper, perhaps, or a wad of sticky tape.
Through the keyhole once again was his study. His book lay on the armchair. The telltale paperweight wasn't on the desk at all. It was in the hand of a woman with whom he was utterly unfamiliar. She had the complexion of a gypsy, he said, and the most amazing black hair and dark eyes. She was watching someone, that much was certain, smiling at someone - at him? - in a pouty sort of way. It was maddening. He shouted through the keyhole at her, something which must have sounded amazing and lunatic to his neighbours. A moment later there was a shuffling outside his study door, as if someone had come to investigate and was working up the courage to knock. He looked up quickly, cursing, fearing the disturbance that didn't come. And when he returned to his keyhole a moment later, there was, of course, nothing but the dark sea and sky and a few cold stars around a gibbous moon. The study and the gypsy were gone.
He was quite convinced that they weren't in any true sense gone; that they were real couldn't be argued. He became possessed by the idea that if the contents of his study existed on both sides of that door, then the dark woman with her pouty smile did also. It was merely a matter of time, he was sure of it, before he'd turn a corner on his way to the cafe or the railway station and catch sight of her. It wouldn't surprise him if he bumped into her at the market. He could picture it very plainly; her packages scattering, he apologizing, scooping them up, she with a look of vague recognition on her face, wondering at him, at their chance meeting. Dinner, perhaps, would follow. Or more likely she'd go along on her way. Then, a week later, a month later, he'd board the bus for Mont St Michel and there she'd be, beside an empty seat. It would be fate and nothing less.
At the time of our chance meeting over periwinkles, of course, fate hadn't yet played its hand. She never re-entered either of the two studies. Kendal, however, spent more time than ever at his keyhole. He had no more misgivings. And he was rewarded for his faith, mostly by the sight of an empty, book-scattered room.
Once, early one morning, he peeped through and, with a thrill of strange apprehension, saw himself at work at his deak, writing madly, scribbling things down. Papers lay on the floor. His hair was tousled. He wore his salmon-coloured smoking jacket, the one with Peking dragons on the lapels, and it appeared as if he'd been up all night - assuming, of course, that the world of the keyhole operated according to the same clock time as our world. But then who could say that it wasn't our world? Kendal wondered at first what in the devil he was working on with such wild abandon. It seemed to be going very well indeed, if the thirty or forty pages on the floor weren't scrap.
He watched himself write for a time, hoping, he said, for the return of the dark woman. He was possessed by the idea that she was his lover. His manic writing paused and he sat back in his chair and tamped a bit wearily at his pipe, blowing first through the stem to clear it out. He swivelled round, bent over, closed one eye, and peered, to Kendal's sudden horror, at the keyhole. In a fit of determination he slammed his pipe into an ashtray, rose, and strode across towards the old door, bending and peering, his eye hovering not 3 inches from the eye of his shellfish-loving counterpart. For one strange moment, said Kendal, he didn't know absolutely who he was, or which study he occupied. He pinched himself, trite as it sounds, and convinced himself that he, at least, was no figment. "Hello!" he shouted. "There is someone here! You're not imagining things!" It felt good to reassure himself. "You're perfectly sane!" he shouted a bit louder. The eye disappeared. There was a knocking at his study door which nearly tumbled him over backwards. For one sudden moment he'd been certain that the knocking had come from the door into the other study. But it hadn't. There was another knock, and when he opened the door and looked out into the hallway, there was his landlady, giving him the glad eye. She looked past him into the empty room, nodding to him, asking him some contrived question about the rent. He shook his head and was brusque with her, he said, which was unfortunate, because in truth she was a friendly sort. Her concern was justifiable. He hurried her away and bent back across to his keyhole.
The study beyond was empty. The papers on the floor had been gathered into a heap that lay beside the desk. Obviously they weren't trash. It had been a productive night, the sort that gave him a great deal of satisfaction, a sense of wellbeing. He watched the empty study for an hour, waiting there, and was surprised to see, suddenly, a widening patch of sunlight playing out quickly across the floor, as if someone were opening a door and a quick rush of daylight were flooding in. Just as suddenly it was cut off. It wasn't the study door that had opened in the room beyond; he could see the edge of it quite clearly off to the left of the desk. And it wasn't curtains being drawn; he hadn't any curtains. No, a door had been opened, that much was sure, and there could be no doubt which door it was.
He paused in the telling of his story and filled his glass. He'd worked himself into a state. His hand trembled. My wife raised her eyebrows at me, but Kendal didn't see it. He was lost in his tale. He ordered coffee and heaped sugar into it, begging us not to assume that he'd gone mad.
"Of course not," said my wife. "Of course not."
"What I saw," he continued, gazing into his coffee, "were little men."
My wife choked on her wine. It wasn't hard to guess why, but she made a grand effort to make it seem otherwise. Kendal held up a knowing hand and shook his head quickly, as if he were satisfied with her disbelief. I put on a serious face. "Little men?" I said. "Midgets, do you mean?"
He shrugged.
What he had seen at first were the shadows of whoever had come through the old door. He wondered, straight off, where they had come from. After all, he had been peering through a keyhole in the door in question. There was, it seemed, a door beyond the door, and perhaps others beyond that — countless others - a veritable mirrored hallway of reflected doors with little men creeping about down the corridors, and dark women stealing out of one door and through another, and doors creaking open to reveal the wave-tossed galleon slanting in towards a rocky shore. Kendal saw endless possibility, but he hadn't enough time right then to be anything but mystified by it.
One of the little men, as he insisted on calling them, began to haul volumes out of the bookcases, tossing them around on to the floor. Another picked up the piled papers, rummaged in the desk drawer for scissors, and began cutting paper dolls - strings and strings of them. Another wrestled several pages away, found a pencil, and set out to doctor up the manuscript, chewing the end of his pencil, laughing and scribbling away. Yet another appeared, to Kendal's horror, opening the liquor cabinet and yanking out bottles, examining labels, nodding over them with a satisfied air. Pieces of clothing flew into sight, tossed, no doubt, from the closet by a fifth and unseen vandal. His favourite tweed coat shot out, folding over the shade of the pole lamp and hanging there sadly as the liquor cabinet elf squirted at it with the soda water siphon. It was a sad state of affairs. Any possible humour in the scene was dashed by the certain fact that it was his rooms being ransacked, that it was his tweed jacket that lay now in a sodden heap on the floor beside the overturned lamp. One of the devils juggled the paperweight along with two oranges. He was wonderfully dexterous. Kendal held his breath. The one who had been at his clothes wandered in with a hammer. He snatched one of the oranges from the juggler, set it atop Mr Brittling, and smashed it to pulp. Then he made a grab for the paperweight. Kendal was stupefied. The juggler dropped both the weight and the orange and they rolled out of sight behind the armchair. A struggle ensued, one elf poking the other in the eye and yanking at his hair, the other threatening with his hammer, fending the first off. They collapsed on to the carpet and went scrambling out of view. Kendal watched in futile horror the head and upper handle of the hammer rise and fall three times above the back of the chair. He shouted into the keyhole, screamed into it, whacked his fist against the door. There was a general pause within. He'd been heard. He was quite sure of it. The elf with the soda water bottle hunched over, squinting towards him, stepping across on tiptoe as if he were the soul of secrecy, and with a mad grin he aimed the siphon at the keyhole.
Kendal leaped to his feet. He wouldn't, he said, stand the indignity of it. He felt as if he were a character in a foolish play, as if a crowd of people were watching, laughing at his expense. (My wife pinched me under the table.) He waited for a moment, fully expecting soda water to splatter through the keyhole. Nothing happened. He was sure, he said, that they were hovering there, that when he looked again they'd all be waiting, laughing, would squirt him in the eye. But when he could stand it no longer, he peeked through and saw no little men, no study, no gypsy temptress - only the sea and the sky and, to his amazement, the old galleon, sails reefed, riding on the calm water a half-mile offshore.
He sat most of the rest of the day in the cafe above the sea wall, watching the sun fall. He could see, from where he sat, the old studded door that opened into empty air, and he tried to convince himself that if he squinted sharply enough or turned his head just so, he could make out phantom shapes, figments, ghosts perhaps, fumbling around outside that door, carrying on.
He knew, he said, that he should be recording all this business about the keyhole - writing it down. In print, perhaps, the pieces would fall into order. He could look at it with an objective eye, get his bearings. The more he thought about it, the more necessary the task became, and late that evening he returned to his rooms, sat at his desk, and began to write. He scribbled feverishly, casting finished pages over his shoulder, littering the floor. He speculated and philosophized. As it grew later his ideas and the events that prompted them seemed to deepen in importance, as if the night was salting the affair with mystery. Some of it, he insisted, was shamefully maudlin - the sort of thing you write late at night and pitch into the trash in the light of day.
Early the next morning he found himself empty of ideas, seated at his desk, dressed in his smoking jacket with the Peking dragons on the lapels. It was only then that the thought struck him - the idea that he was being watched through the keyhole, that he was watching himself.
"What does all this mean?" he cried, facing the studded door. There was, of course, no response. He snatched up a clean sheet of paper and a pen. "Write a message," he wrote. "Roll it up and poke it through the keyhole." He stood before the desk holding it up so that if indeed he were watching just then he'd get a good look at it. It was a brilliant idea. He waited for a bit but nothing happened. He stepped across and peeked through the keyhole and was rewarded with the sight of the ruined study. The little men had gone and had quite apparently taken his liquor with them. He tore off excess paper from around his note and rolled what was left into a tight little tube. Then he twisted it even tighter and threaded it through the keyhole, shoving it past the far side with the end of a coat hanger. When he peered into the keyhole again the study had vanished.
He was exhausted, he told us, from the ordeal. He decided at first to sleep, not so much out of the need for it, as to be on hand if the little men appeared. But then he vowed that they wouldn't hold him in thrall. He'd go about his business. Let them play their pranks! If he caught them at it he'd make it warm for them. They'd sing a sorry tune. He'd force them, he said, to take him along aboard the galleon. Just to play devil's advocate he drank two quick fingers of his best Scotch - they wouldn't have all of it -and he went out on to the street, locking the door behind him, and spent the better part of the day walking, one eye out for the gypsy girl with the pouty lips.
Some time around two in the afternoon he began to grow anxious. He remembered, suddenly, the sight of the hammer rising and falling beyond the armchair, and he cursed himself for not having slipped the paperweight into his pocket. There was nothing for it but to return at once - to make sure. His wandering about town had accomplished nothing anyway. If he was fated to find the dark woman, then he'd find her, or she him. He might as well be anywhere. He hurried along, and as he drew closer to home he became more certain of what he'd find. As it turned out, he was half correct.
His study was a mess. The tweed coat was a ruin, sprayed with soda water and crushed orange. His papers were reduced to snippings and his books littered the floor. Mr Brittling Sees it Through was the sorriest of the lot. The liquor cabinet was empty but for a half-bottle of creme de menthe from which the cap had been removed. He was furious. He stormed back and forth, nearly stumbling over the remains of the broken paperweight that had somehow been knocked under the sleeve of his soaked coat. It lay in two neat halves, the edges of several glass canes protruding through the broken sides like little pieces of Christmas candy. The hammer from the shelf in his closet lay beside it.
Kendal raged about, trying to think, waving the hammer over his head. He strode towards the door, understanding what it was he had to do. And it was then that he saw what he hadn't expected to see: a little rolled and twisted bit of paper lying right at the edge of the carpet. He unrolled it, shaking. "Write a message," it read. "Roll it up and poke it through the keyhole."
"By God!" he shouted. "We'll see!" And he began to pry out the nails that held the door shut. It wasn't an easy thing. Not by a long sight. He had to rather beat the door up to get at them. But he was determined - he'd come to the end of his rope. One by one they squeaked loose. He paused after the fourth to peer through the keyhole, and there was the sun, the sky, a cloud. Below lay the sea, calm and glistening and dappled with sunlight, broken by a long rowboat in which sat five little men, one at the tiller and four more pulling on the oars, making away towards the setting sun and the galleon anchored offshore, heaving on the groundswell.
He wrenched at the nails. He tore at them. He knew it would do him no good to go to the windows. He couldn't get at them through the windows. He peered through the keyhole again. The rowboat was a speck on the water. Finally the last of the nails pulled loose, and, shouting, he pushed the door outward on its hinges with such a rush of relief and anticipation that he nearly pitched out into the open air. He caught himself on the old jamb and hung on, searching the horizon for the galleon. There was nothing there. At the cafe below him, a dozen idlers gawked up, puzzled, wondering at his antics. He couldn't be sure, he said, which world they occupied, so he searched for himself on the veranda, but didn't seem to be there. Slamming the door shut, he hurried down and asked them about the elves in the rowboat, but the lot of them denied having seen anything. They winked at each other. A fat man with ruined shoes laughed out loud. Kendal raged at them. He knew their kind. Did they want to see what those filthy devils had done to his rooms? None of them did.
Kendal poked idly at his seashells, stirring them around on their plate. He had calmed down a bit later, he told us, regretting his folly. The people in the cafe would think him a wildman, a lunatic. My wife shook her head at that. "Not at all," she said, hoping to cheer him. He shrugged in resignation and emptied his coffee cup. From the pocket of his coat he pulled a crystal hemisphere, his antique paperweight, and he showed it to us very sadly, pointing out certain identifying marks; a peculiar pink rose, a glass rod with a date in it -1846 I believe it was. The top of the thing was spider-webbed with cracks where it had been struck with the hammer. It seemed to us that Kendal could hardly bear looking at it, but that he had it with him as a bit of circumstantial evidence.
After the shouted accusations in the cafe, he'd walked about town again, searching, and had ended up at the restaurant in our hotel, eating periwinkles. It was there that we found him.
He'd been fairly buoyant, wrestling with his shellfish and sipping wine, and, as I said, his discussion of the sunsets was engaging. By the time he'd come to the end of his tale, however, he was as deflated as a sprung balloon. He looked very much like a man who hadn't slept in two days. We started in on another bottle of wine, and he toyed with the idea of eating more shellfish and spoke desultorily about his mystery, now and then breaking into rage or rapture. He seemed particularly enthralled by the possibility that the little men had heard him shout at them, could quite possibly have squirted soda water into his eye through the keyhole. It seemed to hint at connections, real connections. He had pretty well run himself down when on the sidewalk outside, in the glow of the arc lamps, a little knot of people hurried past. One was an olive-complected woman with long black hair and deep, dark, round eyes and full lips. She looked in briefly (as did several of the others) as she walked past, disappearing quickly into the night.
Kendal sat for a moment, frozen, with a wild look in his eye. He jumped up. I wanted to protest. My wife clutched my arm, encouraging me, I suppose, to dissuade him. Enough was enough, after all. But I wasn't at all sure that he hadn't every reason to leap up as he did. He shouted his address to us as he raced out of the restaurant, forgetting entirely to pay his bill, which had amounted by then to about thirty-five francs. We settled it for him and rose to leave. There on the table, shoving out from beneath the cloth napkin, was the broken crystal paperweight with its little garden of glass flowers. I dropped it into the pocket of my coat.
I revealed to my wife, as we walked down the road towards the sea, Kendal's youthful predilection for gazing down manhole covers. There had been other habits and peculiarities — rhine-stone and marble treasures that he buried roundabout in his childhood, drawing up elaborate maps, hiding them away and stumbling upon them years later with wild excitement and anticipation. I recalled that he'd once got hold of an old telescope and spent hours each evening gazing at the stars, not for the sake of any sort of study, mind you, but just for the beauty and the wonder of it.
My wife, of course, began to develop suspicions about poor Kendal. I produced the broken paperweight and shrugged, but she pointed out, no doubt wisely, that a broken paperweight was hardly evidence of a magical keyhole and of little men coming and going across the sea in an old galleon that no one but John Kendal could see. I put the paperweight away.
Next day we were both in agreement about one thing - that we'd look Kendal up in his rooms. My wife affected the attitude of someone whose duty it was to visit a sick friend, but I still suspect that there was more to it than that; there certainly was for me. We decided, however, to wait until evening so as to give him a chance to sleep.
We found ourselves eating supper at the cafe that had figured so prominently in his story. We sat outdoors in a far corner of the terrace where we could see, quite clearly, Kendal's studded door. I admit that I could perceive no evidence of any ruined balcony -no broken corbels, no cracked stone, no rusty holes in the wall where a railing might have been secured.
We finished our meal, left the cafe, and followed cobbled streets up the hill. Quite truthfully, I felt a little foolish, like a Boy Scout off on a snipe hunt or a person who suspects that the man he's about to shake hands with is wearing a concealed buzzer on his palm. Part of me, however, not only believed Kendal's story, but very much wanted it to be true.
We found his rooms quite easily, but we didn't find Kendal. He wasn't in. The door was ajar about an inch, and when I knocked against it, it creaked open even further. "Hello!" I shouted past it. There was no response. "I'll just tiptoe in to see if he's asleep," I told my wife. She said I was presuming a great deal to be sneaking into a man's rooms when he was out, but I reminded her that at one time Kendal and I had been the closest of friends. And besides, he'd quite obviously been despondent that previous evening; it would be criminal to go off without investigating.
That last bit touched her. But as I say, there was no Kendal inside, asleep or otherwise. There was quite simply a mess, just as he had promised.
He'd made some effort at straightening things away. Half the books had found their way haphazardly on to the shelves; the rest were stacked on the floor. The tweed coat lay in its heap, and I'll admit that the first thing I did when I entered the room was to feel it. The top had dried in the air, but it was still wet beneath, and stiff with the juice and pulp of squashed orange. On the desk lay the copy of Wells's Mr Brittling Sees it Through, covered with the remains of a second orange. His liquor cabinet sat empty but for the uncapped bottle of creme de menthe. The old half of the broken paperweight lay canted over atop the desk. Clothing littered the floor about the door of the closet. All of it bore out Kendal's tale.
Protruding from the keyhole in the old door was a twisted bit of paper. My wife, as curious by then as I was, pulled the thing out and unrolled it. Written on it in block letters were the words, "I must speak to you." In what time or space they'd come to be written, I can't for the life of me say. It was impossible to know whether the message was coming or going.
My wife pushed open one of the big mullioned casement windows and I looked out at the setting sun. She called me over and pointed towards the tidepools below. There, among anemones and chitons and crabs, floated a half-dozen bits of paper, some still twisted up, some relaxed and drifting like leaves. In another hour the tide would wash in and carry them away.
On impulse I bent over to have a look through that keyhole, a thrill of anticipation surging within me along with vague feelings of dread, as if I were about to tear open the lid of Pandora's box or of the merchant Abudah's chest. I certainly had no desire to have my tweed coat pulped with oranges, and yet if there were little men afoot, coming and going through magical doors… Well, suffice it to say that I understood Kendal's quest in quite the same ethereal and instinctive way that I understood his peering down holes in the street forty years earlier.
So I had a look. Just touching the dark sea was a vast and red sun. Silhouetted against it were the spars and masts of a wonderful ship, looping up over the horizon, driving towards shore. And rowing out towards the ship, long oars dipping rhythmically, was a tiny rowboat carrying a man with dark, wild hair. On a thwart opposite sat the olive-skinned woman. I'm certain of it. That they were hurrying to meet the galleon there can be no doubt. They were already a long way from shore.
"Do you see it?" I cried.
"Yes," said my wife, supposing that I was referring to the sunset. "Beautiful isn't it?"
"The ship!" I shouted, leaping up. "Do you see the ship?" But of course she didn't. Through the windows there was no ship to be seen. Nor was there any rowboat. "Through the keyhole!" I cried. "Quickly."
To humour me, I suppose, she had a go at it. But there was nothing in the keyhole but the tip of the sun, just a tiny arched slice now; disappearing beneath the swell. She stood up, raised her eyebrows, and gestured towards the keyhole as if inviting me to have another look for myself. Nothing but cold green sea lay beyond, tinted with dying fire.
We left a note atop his desk, but either he never returned, or he hadn't the time or desire to visit us at our hotel. I suspect that the former was the case. Our train left for Cherbourg next morning.
We haven't seen him since. It's possible, of course, that we will, that his travels will lead him home again to California and that he'll look us up. He has our address. But as for myself, I rather believe that we won't, that his course is set and that his travels have led him in some other direction entirely.