Lester & Mister James

Lester, apparently, made his entire living by buying used media in the city and selling it for a slightly higher price in more remote areas, where people had less accessibility to second hand stores. His dingy white van was full of crates of CD's, cassettes, vinyl LP's and VHS tapes. This was at the dawn of DVD technology, so those were pretty rare, but he managed to snag a few every now and then. How he could sustain an entire life on such a meager margin was beyond me, but he seemed to do all right. He had a circuit, basically, that he made around the state, which meant we would we would see him at our used CD store in roughly three week intervals. He was always a welcome sight, not just because his voracious purchases ensured a decent day of profits, but also because a visit from Lester also meant a visit from Mister James.

The exact relationship between Lester and Mister James was never quite clear. They were roughly the same age, older than fifty, probably less than sixty, and the had similar haircuts and beards. They were both graying and a little paunchy, but Lester always seemed far more put together than Mister James. Where Lester always had his longish coif neatly combed, and always seemed to be dressed in relatively neat, clean clothes, Mister James couldn't have been more unkempt. In a strange way, he looked like a wild version of Lester, like Lester had been left to fend for himself a while in the woods and came out looking like Mister James. Mister James' hair was a tangled shock and he always seemed to be wearing the same, stained pink and white striped shirt every time I saw him. He looked, actually, to be a little bit crazy... and I think he legitimately was.

The prevailing theory was that Mister James was Lester's brother, although I found it odd that Lester would refer to his brother as "Mister James." It may have been a nickname from childhood, I suppose, or a more current term of affection, but I never got the feeling that the two of them were related at all. They definitely shared a bond, and Lester was certainly protective of Mister James, but I don't know that their relationship was familial. Mister James, I think, was Lester's friend, and I think there was a time when he wasn't crazy at all.

Now, that craziness wasn't wholly apparent from a brief conversation with the man. At first blush, he may have come across as slightly eccentric. My first encounter with him consisted of him traipsing toward the front counter, happily slamming his hand near the register and saying, loudly, "Shuggie! Shuggie Otis!" I didn't know what this meant, but he seemed genial and excited, so I pressed for more information. He explained, to me, that Shuggie Otis was an unfairly obscure soul-rock touchstone, a genius on par with Jimi Hendrix that had somehow become lost to time. Mister James demanded, there and then, that I promise that at first opportunity, I buy a Shuggie Otis album and give it a good listen. He guaranteed me that I wouldn't be disappointed. This was Mister James at his most benign. Subsequent conversations included grotesquely detailed accounts of his doctoral visits, dissertations on the cruelty of nuns, theories on the creatures living in his lungs and nearly incomprehensible screeds that were surely racist in origin, but so utterly nonsensical that it was hard to be offended. What became clear in a vast majority of his monologues, however, was a very real feeling of persecution, both from sources real and imagined. I am no psychologist, but I think the man may have suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.

Lester was an ace at calming Mister James down. He had it down to a science. When Mister James would begin to become agitated, often signaled by an increased frequency of vulgarity, Lester would stop his browsing, and quietly sidle up to Mister James, grab the man's arm, and somehow drain the anger, fear or excitement right out of him. It was practically magic. He didn't seem to be doing anything other than exerting a presence. It almost always worked straight away. I couldn't imagine what a boon this was for Mister James... without Lester, I think his delusions and his fears would have easily overtaken him. Nearly anything could set the man off, and once he began a rant, it seemed to spawn a new angry worry with every word. Without whatever medicine Lester practiced, it didn't seem unreasonable to think of Mister James spiraling wildly out of control. Somehow, something Lester offered allowed Mister James at least a semblance of a normal life. I wondered if Mister James even recognized that.

I wondered, too, what Lester got out of the deal, and how he had come to care for his slightly mad friend. Lester probably found the company comforting. He spent most of his life on the road, after all, and he probably got quite lonely. I think the pair lived out of that van most of the time... Lester never spoke of a home, although that doesn't preclude the existence of one, I suppose. Still, I knew their Wisconsin sales circuit pretty well, and I can't imagine Lester's income afforded them too many hotel stays along their trip. Under such cramped conditions, a companion might not seem ideal, but three weeks of isolation is an awful lot. Every road trip is better with a partner.

And Mister James, when not rambling incoherently, was a pretty interesting man. He was a virtual encyclopedia of psychedelic rock. He had elaborate explanations for the meanings behind the songs of Cream, the 13th Floor Elevators, ? And The Mysterians and Pink Floyd. He knew the biographies of hundreds of musicians, and how they interconnected to one another. He could expound eloquently on music theory, and who had innovated what and when. I learned a lot from him... I don't know how much of it was true.

Lester and Mister James stopped coming around in the winter... I'm sure that the cold was not conducive to their lifestyle. I don't know what they did from November until April, and I never found out. Our store shut down in February, and I never got to see either of them again.

Curio Number One: The Tempest Shell

Happened upon in a shallow, fetid tide pool on a small, nameless island off of the western coast of Iceland, the Tempest Shell is an incredible natural wonder, unique to this collection and absolutely priceless.

It was discovered in 1891 by a Captain Arnar Fjalarson, an Icelandic privateer and ex-missionary who used the nameless island as a supply hold for his ship, the Sigur. Captain Fjalarson routinely walked the beaches of his tiny island, amassing quite a large personal collection of shells, starfish and other marine curiosities. (Amongst the other items in his possession were the now lost Twin Trumpeter Oysters and Arnold Richter's famed Black Glass Sand Dollar.) Fjalarson originally housed the pieces in a small shanty museum in the tiny seaside of community of Reykhólar. After reportedly running afoul of a mysterious Norwegian expatriate, Fjalarson sold the Sigur and the bulk of his collection to an American collector named Harold Regis Price. Fjalarson took that money and relocated his family (his wife and two mute sons) to Oxford, England, where they all tragically perished in a nighttime house fire some months later. The Tempest Shell, the crown jewel of Fjalarson's museum was not one of the items the Captain had sold to Price, although Price did manage to acquire it through an agent that had purchased it at the Fjalarson estate sale.

Although Fjalarson's thoughts on the Shell are lost, Price's notes upon its acquisition are still intact. In 1899 he wrote of it, "This object, above all else, is what I had longed for in the Icelander's possessions. My disappointment in noting its absence, a fault of translation (but mostly my own ignorance) was nothing short of devastation. Still, in the demise of the good Captain and his family, a beacon of luck has shone upon me. And while I feel obliged to mourn his loss, and never wished the man a whit of ill fortune, I cannot help but take note of what blessing has been bestowed upon me. This item is of rare beauty, to be sure, but the quality of it rests not in that glorious, glassy pink and blue variegation of the conch, but instead in the power that resides in this nautical wonder. I have seen it work, time and time again, and there is no doubt that, however imbued with the power, it does in fact operate like a damned magical device."

Sadly, Price was never again able to write further about the Shell, and it is never further mentioned in his journals. Whatever magical properties the Shell seemed to be possessed of, Price never got around to articulate them. He suffered a severe stroke shortly after acquiring the Tempest Shell. He lingered for years as a virtual vegetable, although his nurse, Miss Cloris Ostram reported that he seemed to "perk up, or be agitated, in the presence of his beloved and overly expensive seashell." Miss Ostram inherited the Shell when Price passed away in 1906 but quickly sold it to Herschel Hart's Traveling Museum of Wonders based in Ohio.

The Tempest Shell, an iridescent pink and electric blue nautilus shell, emits a faint hum, only audible when its protective bell jar casing is removed. Many viewers have complained of muscle aches, blurred vision and migraines after seeing the Shell. Nearly everyone who encounters the Tempest Shell relates having a vague memory of a sort of music box chiming melody for weeks afterward. There is undoubtedly a strange aura surrounding the thing, but its particular powers are only visited upon a portion of those who come across it.

Herschel Hart and his wife, Eliza, were two of the unlucky ones affected by the Tempest Shell. Upon the Traveling Museum of Wonders' acquisition of the Shell, Eliza Hart was overtaken with waking dreams and hallucinations of horrible storms of thunder and lightning, especially when near her husband. Herschel had similar visions of tsunamis and hurricanes of increasing intensity when around his wife. These visions, initially recognizable to the Harts as fabrications, slowly began to seem more real to the couple. Herschel Hart, in a frantic, scratched handwriting says (in a letter postmarked December 3, 1906, approximately six weeks after he acquired the Shell), "I can't begin to decipher the truth of these damned storms. It continues, with the forest now fallen to the winds and the whole of the town ripped to its anchors... but I'm assured by my kin and my friends that the losses are all in my mind. But what are they trusting but their eyes? Are my eyes somehow more easily deceived? How can any of us be sure that it isn't I seeing the truth while the others turn blindly away from the deadly grip of blasted nature?" Eliza expresses similar frustrations in a letter to her mother sent that very same week. It was quite brief. "Mother, this lightning shall kill me," was all it said.

The constant howl of these hallucinatory winds and the ever-present threat of imaginary lightning was, understandably, very maddening. Herschel, eventually realizing that the storms were worse in the presence of his wife, sequestered himself in a small toolshed on the back of his property. Still, even diminished, the storms seemed to continue. He took to writing his thoughts in black paint on the walls of his new quarters. The toolshed, on the Harts' old property in Brook Park Ohio, is owned, now, by a young man named Edward Morris. Mister Morris took photographs of the black painted scrawl on the walls of the shed, but painted over the writing because it made him uneasy. The words in the Polaroid snapshots are not always clear, but much of it can be deciphered.

"Even moved I still am afraid the howl Far away has been [?] better but still afraid I must go but to [indecipherable] This worry anguish and loss of Eliza She worries and we just [unsure of word, but usually transcribed as "need" or "know"] time IS crawled... to KILL us. Where I must go but to hide cowards!!! to hide In it OH ELIZA, love, you knew all along."

Eliza Hart eventually starved to death in her own home. She ceased writing in her diary weeks before she passed away, but the indication is clear. She was so terrified of the "storms" outside that she was afraid to leave her home. When she was found, every scrap of food, every can, every jar had been consumed. Herschel Hart disappeared without a trace. The property and his Museum were both considered abandoned. Hart's items, including the Tempest Shell, was assumed by Hart's cousin, Glenn Myers, who sold it, piece by piece at a Chicago auction house, where it was purchased, for a large sum, for this collection.

Further research into the Tempest Shell's history revealed that the Harts were not alone in their hallucinated storms or their growing terror. A trip to Reykhólar revealed, through the kindness of the villagers, several near identical tales, involving, over the course of seven years, seven distinct couples falling under the spell of the same malady. The locals understandably assumed something in their environs had driven the couples insane, but nobody could pinpoint a cause. The names of all seven couples were, however, found in the guest book of Arnar Fjalarson's museum.

Nurse Ostram, too, makes passing references in her diaries to a Mister and Missus Ebenezer Dolan, who, after visiting Harold Regis Price (while in the possession of the Tempest Shell), complained of similar frightening visions. Records show that Ebenezer Dolan took his own life approximately a year after his encounter with the Tempest Shell. His wife, Clarissa Dolan, was admitted to the Whispering Woods Asylum in New York State in 1902, her complaints matching those of the Harts and the Icelandic couples' perfectly.

There may be more unrevealed victims of the Shell, and it is, in fact, recommended that couples do not view the piece. The specifics of how the Tempest Shell works are under investigation, but the circumstantial evidence is too voluminous to deny. The Shell obviously has a power to it, some sort of radiation that affects only particular people. Still, in that aspect, it is a much coveted curio, and a valued piece of the collection.