Thirteen Phantasms Read Online Free PDF

again.”
    Monty, casting crumpled bills beneath the cage, grins again. “I’m going as far as this here money will allow, ma’am. As far as I can. And I don’t need to come back, neither.”
    The ticket lady, glancing up with a yellow eye, reaches forth a ticket, punched and pale, to the destitute Monty, a secretive grin there detectable to his trained eye.
    Monty shuffles off past long soiled couches in a nearly empty station. The Black Hills Special meanwhile tools west in a crescendo of power, leaving a relieved Monty waving goodbye through a window, grey with the dust of the ages, at the disappearing heads of the aged. The taillights shrink round the distant corner while inside the station sit five waiting travelers. They clutch small suitcases and their heads nod, bounce, and nod again.
    A short moment passes before the white lights of an incoming bus herald its arrival. Monty joins the five through the exit and climbs aboard, stowing suitcase overhead and sinking low into the plush seat.
    We’re off now. Like a breath of fresh wind. Leaving old Dubuque behind to wither. A warm night, quiet outside, as this massive bus pulls away from a yellow curb.
    Monty reaches into a shirt pocket for the stub, nearly falls forward as the bus lurches to a halt, and the old lady, purse full of dimes, huffs and puffs on board. Off again, Monty and the six now. The grey lady shuffles down the aisle, and sits across from a short gentleman with an overly large head, and dressed in a tweed suit. Smiling sideways, she puffs: “I nearly missed the bus, being in the lavatory and all. I wonder, did they take two after all?”
    The dwarf inclines his head, peering at her out of a solitary eye which revolves about a central axis like the eye of a parrot. The bus sails onward, out into the empty plains where lightning bugs bob amid corn stalks like capering stars in the dark. The lady awaits some sort of reply, dabbing at dimpled cheeks with a hanky and nodding slowly, with a smile, toward the gentleman’s eye.
    “I say, I don’t remember seeing you about the grounds. Have you just recently moved to the home?”
    The dwarf, who has a wrinkled face and two pointed ears, turns toward the window, declining to comment, and pulls a silver cloth hat with a stiff brim down low over his eyes. Monty, sitting five seats back, sees the old lady, used so roughly but a short while before, talking and smiling and nodding to an apparently empty seat; our midget slumped low, head midway up the back and feet midway to a gum-strewn floor.
    I’m damned. Here she sits talking to that there empty seat, or so it would seem. But no, now that I’m pressed, there was that short fellow with the tweeds and the hat. That grizzled looking guy with the hat. Yes sir. But what’s she doing here? Intends to floor me with the dimes still. Take me in the back while I’m dozing and leave me senseless beneath the seat.
    Monty reaches into his pocket and plucks forth a half dozen small objects: a horse chestnut, a red and black bean, a tiny purple spaceman waving an ominous-looking ray-gun, two polished stones, and a red agate marble—wonderfully mottled with dark swirls and checked with moon-shaped craters.
    Nothing in the world so beautiful as a marble. These chips just make it shine. Hold it to the light and a whole frozen world sparkles inside. Always there waiting, no matter what. You never want to lose your shooter. Keep it in there. In your pocket where you can pull it out and look inside like some tiny enchanted crystal ball. If you tilt it and turn it just right you’ll see something there. Something you can’t see out here in this odd bus, flying like the purple spaceman’s ship for who knows where. Those two guys in the seat up front. Twins. Bald spot on the tops of their heads, like some grey-suited monks. Striped coats, high-water pants. May well be Tweedledee and Tweedledum, sitting so still there in those big seats. And off to the left; a desperately