Read Ebook: The Gallery by Phillips Rog Llewellyn Illustrator

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Ebook has 105 lines and 7590 words, and 3 pages

From way out in the country came the whistle of the approaching milk run, the train that would take me back to Chicago. In Chicago I would go to the F.B.I, and tell them the whole thing. They wouldn't believe me, of course, but they would investigate. If the thing hadn't spread any farther than Sumac it would be a simple matter to stop it.

I'd hurry back to the cafe and get my suitcase and tell the waitress I'd decided to catch the train after all.

I turned around.

Only I didn't turn around.

That's as nearly as I can describe it. I did turn around. I know I did. But the town turned around with me, and the sun and the clouds and the countryside. So maybe I only thought I turned around.

When I tried to stop walking it was different. I simply could not stop walking. Nothing was in control of my mind. It was more like stepping on the brakes and the brakes not responding.

I gave up trying, more curious about what was happening than alarmed. I walked two blocks along Main Street. Ahead of me I saw a sign. It was the only new sign I had seen in Sumac. In ornate Neon script it said, "PORTRAITS by Lana."

I don't know whether my feet took me inside independently of my mind or not, because I was sure that this was the place and I wanted to go in anyway.

Not much had been done to modernize the interior of the shop. I remembered that the last time I had been here it had been a stamp collector headquarters run by Mr. Mason and his wife. The counter was still there, but instead of stamp displays it held a variety of standard portraits such as you can see in any portrait studio. None of the TV portraits were on display here.

The same bell that used to tinkle when I came into the stamp store tinkled in back of the partition when I came in. A moment later the curtain in the doorway of the partition parted, and a girl came out.

How can I describe her? In appearance she was anyone of a thousand smartly dressed brunettes that wait on you in quality photograph studios, and yet she wasn't. She was as much above that in cut as the average smartly dressed girl is above a female alcoholic after a ten-day drunk. She was perfect. Too perfect. She was the type of girl a man would dream of meeting some day, but if he ever did he would run like hell because he could never hope to live up to such perfection.

"You have come to have your portrait taken?" she asked. "I am Lana."

"I thought you already had my portrait," I said. "Didn't you get it from that eye in the hotel cafe?"

"It's not the same thing," Lana said. "Through an eye you remain a variable in the Mantram complex. It takes the camera to fix you, so that you are an iconic invariant in the Mantram." She smiled and half turned toward the curtain she had come through. "Would you step this way, please?" she invited.

"How much will it cost?" I said, not moving.

"Nothing, of course!" Lana said. "Terrestrial money is of no use to me since you have nothing I would care to buy. And don't be alarmed. No harm will come to you, or anyone else." A fleeting expression of concern came over her. "I realize that many of the people of Sumac are quite alarmed, but that is to be expected of a people uneducated enough to still be superstitious."

I went past her through the curtain. Behind the partition I expected to see out-of-this-world scientific equipment stacked to the ceiling. Instead, there was only a portrait camera on a tripod. It had a long bellows and would take a plate the same size as that picture of the church I had seen.

"You see?" Lana said. "It's just a camera." She smiled disarmingly.

I went toward it casually, and suddenly I stopped as though another mind controlled my actions. When I gave up the idea I had had of smashing the camera, the control vanished.

There was no lens in the lens frame. "Where's the lens?" I said.

"It doesn't use a glass lens," Lana said. "When I take the picture a lens forms just long enough to focus the elements of your body into a Mantram fix." She touched my shoulder. "Would you sit down over there, please?"

"What do you mean by a Mantram fix?" I asked her.

She paused by the camera and smiled at me. "I use your language," she said. "In some of your legends you have the notion of a Mantram, or what you consider magical spell. In one aspect the notion is of magical words that can manipulate natural forces directly. The notion of a devil doll is a little closer. Only instead of actual substance from the subject--hair, fingernail parings, and so on--the Mantram matrix takes the detailed force pattern of the subject, through the lens when it forms. So, in your concepts, what results is an iconic Mantram. But it operates both ways. You'll see what I mean by that."

With another placating smile she stepped behind the camera and without warning light seemed to explode from the very air around me, without any source. For a brief second I seemed to see--not a glittering lens--but a black bottomless hole form in the metal circle at the front of the camera. And--an experience I am familiar with now--I seemed to rush into the bottomless darkness of that hole and back again, at the rate of thousands of times a second, arriving at some formless destination and each time feeling it take on more of form.

"There. That wasn't so bad, was it?" Lana said.

I felt strangely detached, as though I were in two places at the same time. I told her so.

"I'm a photographer!" Lana said. "I'm connected with the natural history museum of the planet I live on. I go to various places and take pictures, and they go into exhibits for the people to watch."

She pulled the curtain aside for me to leave.

"You're going to let me leave? Just like that?" I said.

"Of course." She smiled again. "You're free to go wherever you wish, to your aunt's or back to Chicago. I was glad to get your portrait. In return, I'll send you one of the prints. And would you like one of your aunt's? Actually, when she came in to have her picture taken it was for the purpose of sending it to you. She was my first customer. I've taken a special liking to her and given her several pictures."

"Yes," I said. "I would like one of Aunt Matilda."

When I emerged from the shop I discovered to my surprise that the train was just pulling into the depot. An urge to get far away from Sumac possessed me. I trotted to the cafe to get my bag, and when the train pulled out I was on it.

Then the express package from Sumac came. With fingers that visibly trembled I took out the two framed pictures, one of Aunt Matilda in the process of dusting the front room. All of her pictures that she had hidden from me were back in their places on the walls. While I watched her move about, she went into the sewing room, and there I saw a picture on the wall that looked familiar.

It was of me, an opened express package at my feet, a framed picture held in my hands, and I was staring at it intently.

In the picture I was holding, Aunt Matilda looked in my direction and waved, smiling in the prim way she smiles when she is contented. I understood. She had me with her now.

I laid the picture down carefully, and took the second one out of the box.

It was not a picture at all, it was a mirror!

It couldn't be anything except a mirror. And yet, suddenly, I realized it wasn't. The uncanny feeling came over me that I had transposed into the mirror and was looking out at myself. Even as I got that feeling I shifted and was outside the mirror looking at my image.

I found that I could be in either place by a sort of mental shift, something like staring at one of the geometrical optical illusions you can find in any psychology textbook in the chapter on illusions, and seeing it become something else.

It was strange at first, then it became fun, and now, as I write this, it is a normal thing. My portrait is where it should be--on the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, where the mirror used to be.

But I can transpose to any of the copies of my portrait, anywhere. To Aunt Matilda's sewing room, or to the museum, or to Lana's private collection. The only thing is, it's almost impossible to tell when I shift, or where I shift to. It just seems to happen.

If Lana had taken my picture without my knowing it and I had never seen one of her collection of portraits, nor ever heard of an iconic Mantram, I would have absolutely nothing to go on to suspect the truth that I know. Except for one thing.

When she is there, and is watching me, and my thoughts are quiet and my mind receptive, she becomes visible. A ghost in my study, or the lab where I work, or--if I am asleep--in my dreams. Like an angel, or a goddess. And we talk.

Back in the physical reality, of course, no one else can hear her voice. My real body is going through its routine work almost automatically but my mind, my consciousness, is focused into my portrait in Lana's gallery, and we are talking. And of course in the real world I am talking too, but my associates can't see who I'm talking to, and it would be useless to try to explain to them.

So I'm getting quite a reputation as a nut! Can you imagine that?

But why should I mind? My reality has a much broader and more complex scope than the limited reality of my associates. I might be fired, or even sent to a state hospital, except for the fact that Lana foresees such problems and teaches me enough things in my field that are unknown to Earth, so that my employers consider me too valuable to lose.

If this story were fiction the ending would have to be that I am in love with Lana and she with me, and there would be a nice conclusive ending where she comes back to Earth to marry me and carry me back to her world, where we would live happily ever after. But the truth of the matter is that I'm not in love with Lana, nor she with me. Sometimes I think I am her favorite portrait, but nothing more.

But really, everything is so interesting. Lana's gallery where I hang, the museum where there are new faces each time I look out, and new voices when I can't see out, Aunt Matilda's sewing room where she is at the moment, and all Sumac as she goes about her normal pattern of living.

It is a rich, full life that I live, shifting here and there in consciousness while my physical body goes about its necessary tasks, as often unguided as not.

I live in a show window that opens out in many worlds and many places that are hidden from me by a veil that sometimes grows thin, so I can see through it. And from the other side of that veil, even when I cannot see through it, come the voices of the watchers, as they pass by, or pause to look at me.

And I am not the only one! There are others. More and more of them, as Lana comes back on her photographic expeditions for the museum.

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