A Garden Gathering

The first time I looked out, I only saw one of them. Smiling its happy-idiot smile under the scrawny shelf of a juniper hedge. Peaked yellow cap, muddy red boots, standing at attention with a shovel in one hand and the other hand hooked in its belt. Your typical garden gnome.

I was house-sitting, trading some painting and light renovation for room and board while some friends of friends were away. All the work I was doing was inside, and that worked fine for me; I didn't want to mess with the house's slate-shingled exterior or the sprawling profusion of its gardens.

At lunch time, there were two gnomes. The second, blue-capped, peered out from behind the base of the birdbath. I must not have been looking hard enough earlier-- it was perfectly visible from the window over the kitchen sink. I washed up my dishes and got back to priming the upstairs bedroom.

At twilight, there must have been a dozen of them-- digging gnomes and dancing gnomes, gnomes with accordions and gnomes with garden shears. Some prankster, I figured, messing with the new guy in the neighborhood. That was OK; I'd relocated a few plastic flamingoes and decorated a few lawn jockeys in my day. I understood the appeal.

When I took out the trash a little later, I made a few comments for the benefit of any amateur landscapers who might be lurking in the bushes.

"Nice job, guys," I said. "Really livens up the place. Just make sure everybody's back home before Marty and Helen get back next week."

In retrospect, I don't recall if I remembered to lock the door when I came inside. Probably too busy listening for any sound in the garden. I did think I heard a little rustling, very quiet, and what might have been whispering or might only have been the wind.

I settled in for an evening of watching cable, surfing through all the channels I didn't get with the rabbit ears at home.

When I came out to nuke some popcorn between the end of one show and the start of the next, something set off the motion sensor lights. The sudden brightness must have scared off whatever it was; rabbit probably-- Helen had warned me they'd been getting into the garden. I'd have to recheck the chicken wire around the vegetable patch in the morning.

I turned on the backyard floods and looked out at the garden, the colors flattened by the harshness of the flood lights. I started to count, but now there was only the one, original gnome. With its shovel, its boots, and its yellow cap with a peak that I'd thought had been flopped over to the other side. I almost had my nose up against the screen, straining to see a little further into the dark. Must have been a trick of the way the shadows fell that was hiding the rest of them.

I laughed at myself; no more late night X-Files rerun marathons for me. I gave my little backyard friend a wave.

He waved back.

The Antarctic Napoleon

In 1899, a team of Antarctic explorers from the Borchgrevink expedition discovered a meteor rock that bore a striking resemblance to a bust of Napoleon. When they tried to lift the meteorite, they found that it was embedded in the frozen ground. They spent several hours alternately chipping at the soil and pouring boiling snow-water into the growing hole in an attempt to melt the rock free. By the time they decided that they could linger no longer, they had worked their way down to the stone figure's waist.

Although the site was marked with stakes and bright-colored pennants and the exact latitude and longitude of the find was recorded, subsequent explorers have been unable to locate what Borchgrevink's men had christened, in ironic French, "notre petit empereur du ciel"-- our little emperor from the sky.

The Mirrorball of Many Worlds

In November of 1987, a disco mirror ball was found in the back room of the Oak and Tendril, a public house located on the outskirts of Uddersleigh, Hants., UK. Being a hollow sphere of plastic chrome, the ball was lighter than it looked. Because the motorized base to which the mirrorball was attached still smelled of singed plastic, no one suggested plugging it in.

The mirrorball was discovered by a Mr. Noel Hardy, employed at that time as the Oak and Tendril's dishwasher and general-purpose mop wrangler. It was Hardy who first noticed that every facet reflected a view of a different world, and that none those worlds was our own.

One afternoon, after three-quarters of an hour of assiduous squinting, Noel announced that he'd located a world in which, Manchester United, not Arsenal, had won the 1979 F.A. Cup. Another day, he regaled the lunchtime crowd with tales of worlds where the inhabitants were centaurs, where rain fell upwards into the air, or where herds of carnivorous trees prowled rock-strewn plains by moonlight.

During his afternoon break on 23 November, Mr. Hardy dropped the disco ball, resulting in a lightning-shaped crack to one of the facets. He claimed to have been startled by some sort of fanged rabbit springing out from the underbrush.

"Had to have been at least the size of terrier," he said, "and a large one at that."

Mr. Hardy was later observed, in the words of one witness, "faffing about with the broken bit."

"You'll cut yourself," said the barmaid, a Miss Lynette Spurwink, who had rejected two proposals of marriage by the aforesaid Noel within the previous week.

"Or worse," said the proprietor, a Mrs. Enid Morton.

The staff and patrons of the Oak and Tendril report that, at approximately 11:15 that evening, a loud sound was heard throughout the establishment. This noise was described as "a wooshing" and "a bit like what happens when you drop a television and the picture tube breaks."

The mirrorball was found on the floor in the stock room. Some traces of what appeared to be blood were visible on the cracked facet, from which a small triangle of plastic was now missing. The ball was hissing softly, making a sound "like a tire with a slow leak." After being patched with liberal amounts of cellophane tape, the ball has not been observed to make any noise at all.

Mr. Hardy was never again seen in the environs of Uddersleigh. The disco ball is now a decorative feature in the Oak and Tendril, mounted like a globe on a corner of the bar. The following summer, Ms. Spurwink married a local plumbing contractor and, in the spring of 1994, she and her husband purchased the pub, with all its furnishings, from Mrs. Morton.

Some patrons of the Oak and Tendril have claimed to see Mr. Hardy in the reflection of that cracked facet. He is usually glimpsed riding by on a giant luminous slug. As these reports tend to be associated with the consumption of multiple pints of bitter, they should not be given too much credence.

The Dodo's Return

Louise Premble had wandered away from a school group in the park and into the chilly shadows of the Museum of Natural History.

The building seemed completely empty. It was a lovely day outside-- sun and bright blue sky, so she wasn't surprised that no one else was about. She would have stayed at the picnic, but Billy Keeler had been teasing her again, calling her a musk ox and making snorting sounds like he was some kind of wild animal about to charge. All his friends had laughed and so had most of hers.

The inside of the museum reminded Louise of a train station, with all these big iron beams holding up the ceiling. But there were little plants made of metal on some of the columns, and that made it fancier. Stone arches along all the balconies made the central room look like something from the Aladdin video she had at home, and there were stone statues of famous scientists around the walls.

Louise looked around at the cases full of bones and sand-colored fossil rocks, the displays of animals and birds stuffed and mounted in lifelike posses, the big skeletons that stood in the atrium, each in its own little enclosure circled by ropes like they had for the line at the bank. She wandered for half an hour, marveling at the Mososaur's overly plentiful teeth and the fact that the Iguanodon's shinbone was almost as tall as she was, until she had the feeling that someone was following her. She walked around the statue of Newton-- she knew it was him by the stone apple lying next to his stone foot-- and then doubled suddenly back.

Louise saw a pudgy-bottomed bird, covered in little gray-brown feathers that looked almost like dog fur, except around its face, which was a featherless leather mask. The bird didn't seem surprised that Louise had discovered it.

It stretched its neck and clattered its big beak, making a sound like wooden clogs on a hard floor. The bird was muttering with a voice way down in the back of its throat. Louise couldn't figure out the words, they sounded a bit like "Nim her me ear. Nim her me ear. Nim her me ear..." The bird had a strange accent; she thought maybe it was Swedish, like that mad cook on the TV puppet show.

She had some salted peanuts in a little paper bag. She gave one to the bird.

The bird clacked its beak up in the air to swallow, then nipped at Louise's waist. It blinked at her; it clearly wanted more. She gave the rest of the peanuts to the bird-- two small handfuls-- and the bag was empty.

When she reached out to pat its head, the bird reared back with a start.

"Nim her?" it said. Again in that strange cooing, growly voice. "Nimmer, nimmer-- nim her me ear?"

"What's that?" she said. People on TV talked to animals sometimes, and the animals would be able to show them what they meant, even if they couldn't talk.

"Excuse me," said a voice that echoed all around. "You can't be in here. Have you lost your group?"

It was a man in a blazer and tie who looked to Louise like he was as old as her grandfather.

"I guess so," said Louise.

When she turned around, the bird was gone. There were only bones, in all the glass cabinets and roped-off enclosures, in all the museum's galleries, its laboratories and its hidden storerooms, only bones and nothing more.

Pebble Rain

One warmish day that spring, it rained pebbles. Started after lunch, with a mist that was actually a very fine sand and, within twenty minutes, it was pelting down stones as big as goose eggs.

Old man Revelle was insufferably smug the whole next week.

"Told ya that cloud looked a bit igneous," he said.

QWARNYUTOP

During the late 1860's, a group of spiritualists rented a room above Kleinsteuber's Machine Shop at the corner of 3rd and State streets in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The group's members, who called themselves "The Prodigals," met one evening a week to chant themselves into trance states from which they would be capable of communicating with the angelic presences who, they believed, guided the destiny of the human race. Aided by ever-advancing technological progress, the world around them seemed to be emerging out of a long nightmare of war and ignorance and chaos. The dawn of a radiant new age seemed imminent.

Although pursuing a more practical, concrete approach, the engineers, inventors and miscellaneous tinkerers who met in the machine shop downstairs shared a similar vision of the future. One group in particular-- centered around inventors Christopher Latham Sholes and Carlos Glidden-- worked to cobble together the first prototypes of a new mechanical typing machine.

The Prodigals feared that the hoped-for new Eden would not be without its serpents, and made it their goal to obtain for humankind the benevolent patronage of such higher powers as could best ensure utopia. They undertook a series of night-long séances through which they endeavored to identify the spirits most congenial to their project. Along the way, several of their members strayed into inescapable and all-too-vivid visions of machine-hells, and were lost to madness. By the spring of early 1868, however, the remaining Prodigals had succeeded in learning the arcane syllables that would summon to our plane the angel Zeph-An-Menekh-Tiron-Shekariel, an entity who could lead the world into a new and more righteous epoch.

Refining their revelation down to the most economical utterance, the Prodigals produced the incantation Q W A R N Y U T O P I S D F G E J K L Z X C V B H M: "O celestial shepherd, sun-born child of higher spheres, alight and guide us on the path of progress."

Several of the Prodigals had taken to spending time in conversation with members of the inventor's fraternity downstairs, and were able to persuade Sholes that the keys of his typing device should be arranged in the oracularly propitious order. In the course of actually using the new machine, however, the inventor discovered that, if two adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, those two keys tended to jam. Sholes minimized this problem by relocating the letters involved in the most-often-occurring letter pairs in the English language-- TH, HE, AN and IN. With the keyboard rearranged into the now-familiar QWERTYUIOP letter order, Sholes, Glidden and their investors presented the prototype to the Remington manufacturing company.

It is unclear exactly who-- or what-- would be summoned by the syllables corresponding to the new letter arrangement.

The Prodigals may have had some inkling of the effects of the revised incantation; they met with increasing frequency and mounting desperation during the months leading up to the Remington company's introduction of the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer, which featured the QWERTYUIOP key arrangement. Shortly after the new invention appeared on the market, several of the spiritualists were seen selling all their worldly possessions and buying train tickets that would take them to the thinly settled territories out west. Shortly after the exodus of their fellows, the few former Prodigals who remained in Milwaukee-area asylums died.

The only indication that any of the inventors downstairs were aware of the possible metaphysical repercussions of their tinkering comes from the diaries of the son-in-law of Charles F. Kleinsteuber, the patriarch of the inventor's circle. Kleinsteuber's last words were jeder Engel ist shrecklich -- "every angel is terrifying." This phrase anticipated by some forty years the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who would open the second of his Duino Elegies with those exact words.

The End

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