The First Science Fiction MEGAPACK®. Fredric Brown
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Megapack
The First R. Austin Freeman Megapack
The Second R. Austin Freeman Megapack*
The Jacques Futrelle Megapack
The Randall Garrett Megapack
The Second Randall Garrett Megapack
The Anna Katharine Green Megapack
The Zane Grey Megapack
The Edmond Hamilton Megapack
The Dashiell Hammett Megapack
The C.J. Henderson Megapack
The M.R. James Megapack
The Selma Lagerlof Megapack
The Murray Leinster Megapack***
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack***
The Arthur Machen Megapack**
The George Barr McCutcheon Megapack
The Talbot Mundy Megapack
The E. Nesbit Megapack
The Andre Norton Megapack
The H. Beam Piper Megapack
The Mack Reynolds Megapack
The Rafael Sabatini Megapack
The Saki Megapack
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack
The Robert Sheckley Megapack
The Bram Stoker Megapack
The Lon Williams Weird Western Megapack
* Not available in the United States
** Not available in the European Union
***Out of print.
OTHER COLLECTIONS YOU MAY ENJOY
The Great Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany (it should have been called “The Lord Dunsany Megapack”)
The Wildside Book of Fantasy
The Wildside Book of Science Fiction
Yondering: The First Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
To the Stars—And Beyond! The Second Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
UNKNOWN THINGS, by Reginald Bretnor
I have met any number of collectors during my thirty years in the antique trade: greedy ones (though, of course, they’re all greedy one way or another), and some with superb taste and a deep understanding of their fields, some with book knowledge and no taste at all, others who collect status symbols or security blanks, rare people with whom it is a joy to converse and many more utter bores, and others still so unbelievably eccentric that they defy classification. But Andreas Hoogstraten was the strangest of them all. Always polite, almost always smiling, he still seemed to carry with him that eerie coldness you find in haunted houses. Neither his obvious wealth nor his perfect tailoring, neither his patrician nose, sleek blond hair, and thick, impossibly yellow eyebrows, nor a voice as soft and gentle as a wooing dove’s could conceal it, at least from me.
I met him first in a Glastonbury pub. Every year, I’d go to England, buy an ancient van, and spend two months at least driving around and about, through Scotland and back down to Wales and Cornwall, buying big antiques and filling them with little antiques, then for the last third of my time crossing over to the continent and doing the same thing in France and the Low Countries. When the van was full, I’d ship it back as deckload on a freighter—this was in the days when you could do that—and drive it home to Saybrook from wherever it landed. It was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed every bit of it.
The Glastonbury pub was called the Weeping Nun—after some local ghost story—with an eighteenth-century sign that showed its dismal subject against a background of ancient tombstones and a silver moon—but inside it was the essence of English country hospitality, with all the dark wood and pewter and hunting prints you might expect, a great fireplace fit for roasting haunches of beef but cold now in the summertime, and neither a jukebox nor a telly to ruin the atmosphere. I went there with a local dealer, Tod Bardsley, with whom I had done business for several years, and we were just about to have lunch when Hoogstraten came in. He waved. He strode over to our table, carrying his cold aura with him.
“Mr. Bardsley, they said you’d be here, but I see you’re with a friend?” Bardsley nudged my foot under the table. He moved over. “Ah, do sit down, Mr. Hoogstraten,” he invited. “Charles here won’t mind. He’s a fellow dealer,” he chuckled, “always happy to meet another customer, like all of us.”
We were introduced. I shook Hoogstraten’s tense, cold hand. I was, I said, pleased to meet him. I was indeed a dealer, but I was a long way from home. Briefly, Bardsley told him about my yearly trips, while the girl brought us two half-and-halfs and took his order for a whiskey and soda.
“You really must get around,” he commented, looking at me intently. “I imagine you see a far greater variety of things than the average dealer, don’t you?”
“Rather!” Bardsley laughed. “There’s not a shop from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s Charlie’s not been in, to say nothing of across Channel. I daresay he’s probably seen a thing or two that’d strike your fancy.”
“What do you collect,” I asked.
He turned his head, and I found myself looking directly into his lashless eyes. They were almost a matte blue, reminding me of Wedgewood Parian ware, and they looked dry, as though they’d never known tears.
“What do I collect?” he said. “As our friend here will tell you, I buy anything I do not understand. I do not mean the expert’s understanding of antiques and works of art. If I do not know what a thing is, if I cannot imagine what it was made for, it intrigues me, and if it’s for sale I buy it. You see, if I do not know, and if nobody can tell me, it makes me determined to find out, to solve the problem. Where is your shop?”
“In Saybrook, in Connecticut.”
“Well, that’s certainly near enough to me. My apartment’s in New York.”
We exchanged cards, and he said he’d take a run up one of these days and have a look around and made me promise to keep my eyes peeled for any of his mysterious objects. He was, he told me, on his way to Istanbul and the Near East generally, and perhaps to Nepal and, now that the Chinese were letting down the barriers, to Tibet.
Shortly after our lunch arrived, he rose to go, saying he’d see Bardsley later at the shop, and once more he made me promise to look out for him. He left, and I asked Tod about him.
“He’s a rum one, Charlie. Buys anything if you can’t tell him what it is, and pays well too. Last time in my place, he saw a weird cast-iron tool with a lot of cogs and a twisty handle that somehow didn’t seem to connect with anything. He peered at it and peered at it, and finally took it with him looking like the cat fresh from the cream jug. A year or so back, too, I found him a painting—a dark thing like something seventeenth-century Dutch—but not like any you ever saw. The more you tried to make out what the subject was, the odder it looked. But it was done by a real artist, you could tell that. He paid me seven hundred without a quiver. And the real beauty of it is, he buys things that otherwise you’d have on hand forever—so what if he is strange looking, with those crazy eyebrows and blue-blue eyes?”
I told him then about the coldness, but he said the man had never affected him that way, so I put the thought aside as a quirk of my own.
Now I know that it was not.
Actually, Hoogstraten