Harlan Ellison - Shatterday

He was too stunned, too depressed, even to be polite. “Okay.”

“I want you to know you have caused me great pain, Mr. Tolliver. You are a very unreliable and evil man. I want you to know I’m going to take steps to rectify this matter. You have taken money from me under false pretenses, you have ruined a great opportunity I had, and you have caused me unnecessary anguish. You will have to pay for your irresponsibility; there must be justice. I will make certain you pay for what you’ve done!”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” he said, dimly, faintly.

He hung up the receiver and sat there.

The emotions sang, the electrons danced, the focus shifted, and the symphony of frustration went on.

Fred Tolliver’s cello lay unattended at his feet. He would never get through, just barely slide through. He felt the excruciating pain of pins and needles in his legs.

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”

I was riding down Beverly Glen with Arthur Byron Cover. I said to Arthur, “You know, one of the things that always bothered me about those fantasies in which some dude comes across a magic shop that sells real magic, or three wishes, or genuine love potions, or whatever, is they never told you what kind of life was lived by the proprietor. I mean, where did he get his stock? In what sort of coin could you pay someone for things that valuable? When the dude leaves the shop it always vanishes; where does it go? What happened to the poor schmuck who ran the joint? Huh, answer me that?”

Arthur looked at me seriously and said, “You know, you’re a very weird person.”

That is how this story came to be written.

To satisfy my curiosity.

And you can stick it in your ear, Cover.

A pale, short, young man wearing filthy blue jeans and goat-roper boots worn away at the heels came shuffling down Jamshyd Avenue. As he passed the narrow arcade alleyway, the rusty creaking of a sign hung on chains caught his attention. He stared at the sign with eyes that were just the slightest bit crossed and glazed. The sign proclaimed Shoppe of Wonders and beneath those words in curlicued but. extremely readable Islamic calligraphy: Your Heart’s Desire.

Only five feet, two inches tall, the young man paused at the mouth of the alley, stared at the swinging sign for a moment, ran a hand with dirty nails through his long hair, then turned in.

The shoppe was tiny, with leaded-paned windows, dusty and fly-specked. He could not see inside, but there was a dim and golden light shining through the murkiness of the glass. The door handle was a brass lizard with a forked tongue. The young man put his hand on the brass and it was warm. He opened the door, which opened easily, and he went inside.

The shoppe seemed to stretch on before him indefinitely. It defied dimensional description, like an Escher etching. Such a narrow shop could not possibly be so wide, and so deep, and so high. The frontage of the shoppe on the alley had seemed only twenty feet across, but here inside it was easily ten times as wide. The cathedral ceiling hung far away above him in dismal shadows, beamed and sloping, smelling faintly of mildew and sandalwood and tallow. The light that he had seen straining through the obscured glass of the windows was a mere glow, trembling through the murky interior from a distance so far in the rear of the shoppe that it was no more than a suggestion of light.

The shoppe was jammed with goods; filled with goods; odd goods.

Hobbyhorses with peculiarly mad expressions in their eyes, and with foam-flecked lips. Rows and rows of amphorae, tightly stoppered and each marked with indecipherable inscriptions, written with felt-tip pens. Cases of amulets and tokens, some Egyptian-looking, some contemporary and clearly the products of communes. Puppets hung on long wires from the rafters above, a community of brittle, brightly painted figures, all with broken necks. Shelves filled with anemones. A stack of abacuses. A wall of clocks, from all periods, some with nine or fifty-six divisions of time. Bookcases filled with grimoires, daybooks, hornbooks, arcane thesauri, enchiridia, illuminated manuscripts, diaries, palimpsests, incunabula, claviculae, parerga, ana and epilegomena. Incan icons. Glass phials within which emboli floated, turning slowly in a tideless tide. In one corner an enormous freestanding antique mirror with chased brass fittings; another land, dark and distressing, could be seen in the mirror. Showcases containing plastic doggie vomit and ice cubes with cockroaches in them. Whoopee cushions. Meteorites. Thousands of boxes, all sizes, stacked one atop another. Golden balls of all sizes. A butcher’s-paper roller screwed to one wall, holding a large roll of gold-foil. Bugles. In one showcase a complete set of English vintage automobile cigarette packet cards, 50 to the set, with one hundred thirty-six duplicates of card #26, the 1925 Vauxhall. Orrises, embroideries of gold and silver lace, tossed willy-nilly over a rattan chair. Bolts of paduasoy. On a Duncan Phyfe table lay a folio of ottava rimas. A shelf containing tins of tennis balls. Oil lamps of the sort Aladdin rubbed to produce his genie. Dangling from a hook on the wall, an uncountable number of fishhooks, with unnameable things still snagged thereon. Hanging over an arched doorway in the side wall, a gonfalon upon which was emblazoned a booted foot crushing a five-headed serpent, one of whose heads was arched back around with the fangs imbedded in the heel of the foot. Stoppered extra-thick glass bottles of vitriol: blue, green and white. Tubes of bismuth. Clothing racks of hair shirts, habergeons, hauberks and herringbone suits. Potted fleabane. Dolls with quarter-melon slices bitten out of their heads. Several dozen small cases containing dancing mice, dyed in rainbow hues. A glass-fronted cabinet originally intended to hold dental equipment, jammed full of severed paws, monkey, civet, fox, lynx, bear, and others, several with the claws extended, one that looked as though it had been lopped off a yeti. Philters labeled “love potion.” Hexahedrons. Tomes on epigraphy (all with unreadable titles, of course). Kourbashes coiled on hooks on the wall. Beakers bearing the label “phlogiston.” A complete run of Amazing Stories dated from April 1926 to December 2009. More grimoires (some in paperback editions). A plethora of keys, of all kinds, sizes, shapes and intricacies. Calling horns, some as simple as a shofar. others as cuculiform as a cornucopia. Scruples in breather-jars. Umbilically joined oxymora. Silver seashells that, when placed next to the ear, as the short young man did, reproduced not the sound of the sea, but the sound of the wind between the stars. Shrink-wrapped packages of miniature hydra heads. A thirty-foot-high glass-fronted cabinet that seemed to contain model toy soldiers, until the young man looked closer and saw that the models were not metal at all, but seemed to be miniaturized human beings, frozen and solidified in the moment of combat: the Battle of the Ardennes; Balaklava; Visigoths against Huns; Rough Riders against Villa; Luftwaffe and Wolf Legions at Stalingrad; the Battle of the Little Big Horn; Midway; Chosen Reservoir; the one hundred Spartans at the Hot Gates against Xerxes’ millions; the French Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu; Spartacus and his gladiator army versus the Roman Imperial Legions… each soldier perfect, down to the expression of utter horror as he was whisked off the battlefield, shrunk, and concretized. Polish for the True Lamp. A fragment of Christ’s molar in the wafer. Stigmata kits. Packets of dried Granny’s Claw. Eyes of newts. Toes of frogs. Spiderweb poultices. Transmigration threads on huge spools bearing the Seal of Solomon on each. Cryogenically frozen pixies, nixies, niads and dryads. Pickled kraken tentacles. Fire-breathing salamanders in asbestos cages. Disintegrator pistols. Saintly relics—fingers, tibiae, fibulae, eyeballs. And everywhere the young man looked, in every nook and crevice, there was rubbish, junk, litter, rags, odds and ends, trash, offscourings, tares, waste, rubble, debris and dregs.