Shadows Out of Time

The next day was dead. There were four readers on, every one of them itching for a reading slip. I played it casual. No point in getting competitive, especially with the women readers. In the matriarchal environment of a tea room, it could get nasty.

Thom gravitated toward me. He had that world-weary look that came from reading the same people in the same environment for far too long. I knew his kind well. “The Psychic Damned,” I called them.

“I stay out of the kitchen as much as possible,” he explained, sotto voce.

“I hear the same damn male-bashing complaints I was hearing fifteen years ago. Sometimes it drives me crazy.”

“I get Aztec stuff around you,” I said casually.

Thom perked up. “I’m a gumbo of White, Black and American Indian,” he admitted. “My Indian name is White Black Man, or Black White Man. I forget which. I don’t know about Aztec. They were mean mothers.” His muscular brow burrowed. “What a minute. I had an ancestor who was a Filipino Conquistador.”

“There’s your Aztec blood,” I said.

Thom showed me around the place. Most of the windows still had their original Sandwich glass. The doors had been replaced over the life of the house, but the Holy Lord hinges— so-called because they were cast to resemble the joined letters H and L, and crafted to dispel witches and other malefic entities — had been preserved. Thom was as proud of these details as if he owned the place. A sure sign of a lifer.

“See this counter?” Thom said, bringing a fist down on the heavy surface on which the tea was made. “Notice the slant?”

“The floor must be sinking,” I ventured.

“Built that way. This place is what they call a shipshape house. Everything slopes for drainage.” He turned over a cup of unfinished tea. Brown fluid ran down at a slope and into a little gunnel, where it emptied into a white plastic bucket. “Selfcleaning, 19th-century-style,” Thom remarked, grinning.

“The original house had a dock at the rear where the tea would come in,” he went on. “One night about 1867 the Blue Moon came in during a Nor’easter. Ran smack into the back, taking out the dock, splintering the entire house and everything else. They couldn’t rebuild the Clipper — the Arkham shipyards had stopped making merchantmen — so they salvaged what they could of house and ship and built this place.”

“You’re kidding me. This house used to be a ship?”

“This,” he said, gesturing around the cramped little plumcolored pantry with its heavy rough-hewn cupboards, “was the first ship to make the Kingsport-to-Siam run. She sailed down the coast, rounded Cape Horn, up the west coast of South America to San Franscico to lay in supplies, then straight on across the Pacific to the Gulf of Siam. Did it in sixty days flat.” He opened one age-discolored cupboard. On the inside surface, a chicken-track dance of initials were carved into the wood every whichway. “Some of these were made by Blue Moon sailors,” Thom explained. “After you’ve been here a year, you get to carve your own initials in here too. It’s tradition.”

I suppressed my smile. I had no such plans. “Where do they get their tea now?” I asked casually.

“Same place as always. Siam.”

“You mean Thailand. It hasn’t been Siam since I don’t know when.”

“Guess you’re right. Miss Theresa always calls it Siamese tea. Makes it sound more exotic, I suppose. Anyway, when the Blue Moon was cannibalized to build this place, old Captain Terrill retired from shipping. The day of the Clipper ship was over anyway. When they opened up the Suez Canal, Clipper speed became obsolete. Steamships and square-riggers replaced them all. But no ship ever clipped so much as a day off the Blue Moon’s top run. That’s why they called them Clippers. They clipped off the nautical miles. Liverpool to New York was fifteen days. Hong Kong to San Francisco was thirty-three.”

I interrupted: “Where do they keep the tea now?”

“Basement. Only Miss Theresa and me are allowed down there.”

He opened a lower cupboard, and pulled out a small teakwood coffin of Far Eastern design. “I’m supposed to bring up a day’s supply at a time, no more.” He shoved the box back, closing the door. “She guards that damn tea like it was gold.”

“It is gold…for her.”

Thom laughed. “You got that right.”

As he was showing me around, I asked, “How do they get their tea these days?”

“Search me. By air, I guess. But you’re asking the wrong person. I’m a psychic, not a shipping clerk. I only know what I’ve soaked up from working here, and I don’t ask questions I don’t need to know the answers to. Heard a lot of this from Miss Theresa years ago. But as she’s getting along in years, she keeps upstairs a lot. Listens in on the readings over hidden mikes sometimes.”

“Nosy type?”

“I think they call it quality control now.”

I grunted. It was enough to know I’d have to watch my mouth as well as my mind. But I’d guessed as much. Once you get accustomed to knowing other people’s secrets, it becomes an addiction.