Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology by James Patrick Kelly

Author:James Patrick Kelly [Kelly, James Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2006-05-11T17:55:31+00:00

glass of whiskey, behind the typewriter or the photo of my wife and

son, but now it did not seem to be worth the effort. I was not fooling

anyone. Ganz took note of the glass in my hand with a raised eyebrow

and a schoolmarmish pursing of his lips.

“Well?” I said. There had been a brief period, following my son’s

death and the subsequent suicide of my dear wife, Mary, when I had

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the god of dark laughter | 213

indulged the pitying regard of my staff. I now found that I regret-

ted having shown such weakness. “What is it, then? Has something

turned up?”

“A cave,” Ganz said. “The poor bastard was living in a cave.”

The range of low hills and hollows separating lower Yuggogheny from

Fayette County is rotten with caves. For many years, when I was a

boy, a man named Colonel Earnshawe operated penny tours of the iri-

descent organ pipes and jagged stone teeth of Neighborsburg Caverns,

before they collapsed in the mysterious earthquake of 1919, killing the

Colonel and his sister Irene, and putting to rest many strange rumors

about that eccentric old pair. My childhood friends and I, ranging in the

woods, would from time to time come upon the root-choked mouth of a

cave exhaling its cool plutonic breath, and dare one another to leave the

sunshine and enter that world of shadow — the entrance, as it always

seemed to me, to the legendary past itself, where the bones of Indians

and Frenchmen might be moldering. It was in one of these anterooms

of buried history that the beam of a flashlight, wielded by a deputy

sheriff from Plunkettsburg, had struck the silvery lip of a can of pork

and beans. Calling to his companions, the deputy plunged through a

curtain of spiderweb and found himself in the parlor, bedroom, and

kitchen of the dead man.

There were some cans of chili and hash, a Primus stove, a lantern,

a bedroll, a mess kit, and an old Colt revolver, Army issue, loaded and

apparently not fired for some time. And there were also books — a Scout

guide to roughing it, a collected Blake, and a couple of odd texts, elderly

and tattered: one in German called Über das Finstere Lachen, by a man

named Friedrich von Junzt, which appeared to be religious or philo-

sophical in nature, and one a small volume bound in black leather and

printed in no alphabet known to me, the letters sinuous and furred with

wild diacritical marks.

“Pretty heavy reading for a clown,” Ganz said.

“It’s not all rubber chickens and hosing each other down with selt-

zer bottles, Jack.”

“Oh, no?”

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214 | Michael Chabon

“No, sir. Clowns have unsuspected depths.”

“I’m starting to get that impression, sir.”

Propped against the straightest wall of the cave, just beside the lan-

tern, there was a large mirror, still bearing the bent clasps and sheared

bolts that had once, I inferred, held it to the wall of a filling-station

men’s room. At its foot was the item that had earlier confirmed to

Detective Ganz — and now confirmed to me as I went to inspect it — the

recent habitation

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