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Ray Bradbury

7 Selected Books

RAY BRADBURY
FAHRENHEIT 451

This one, with gratitude, is for DON CONGDON.

FAHRENHEIT 451:
The temperature at which book-paper catches fire and burns




PART I
IT WAS A PLEASURE TO BURN
IT was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and
changed.
With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its
venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands
were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing
and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his
symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame
with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house
jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and
black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies.
He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in
the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn
of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a
wind turned dark with burning.
Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame.
He knew that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a
minstrel man, burnt-corked, in the mirror. Later, going to sleep, he would
feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never
went away, that. smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered.
He hung up his black-beetle-coloured helmet and shined it, he hung his
flameproof jacket neatly; he showered luxuriously, and then, whistling, hands
in pockets, walked across the upper floor of the fire station and fell down
the hole. At the last moment, when disaster seemed positive, he pulled his
hands from his pockets and broke his fall by grasping the golden pole. He slid
to a squeaking halt, the heels one inch from the concrete floor downstairs.
He walked out of the fire station and along the midnight street toward the
subway where the silent, air-propelled train slid soundlessly down its
lubricated flue in the earth and let him out with a great puff of warm air an

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to the cream-tiled escalator rising to the suburb.
Whistling, he let the escalator waft him into the still night air. He walked
toward the comer, thinking little at all about nothing in particular. Before
he reached the corner, however, he slowed as if a wind had sprung up from
nowhere, as if someone had called his name.
The last few nights he had had the most uncertain feelings about the sidewalk
just around the corner here, moving in the starlight toward his house. He had
felt that a moment before his making the turn, someone had been there. The air
seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there, quietly,
and only a moment before he came, simply turned to a shadow and let him
through. Perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume, perhaps the skin on the
backs of his hands, on his face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot
where a person's standing might raise

the immediate atmosphere ten degrees for an instant. There was no
understanding it.
Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling sidewalk,
with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across a lawn before
he could focus his eyes or speak.
But now, tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. His inner mind, reaching out to
turn the corner for him, had heard the faintest whisper. Breathing? Or was the
atmosphere compressed merely by someone standing very quietly there, waiting?
He turned the corner.
The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the
girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of
the wind and the leaves carry her forward. Her head was half bent to watch her
shoes stir the circling leaves. Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it
was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless
curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes were so
fixed to the world that no move escaped them.
Her dress was white and it whispered. He almost thought he heard the motion of
her hands as she walked, and the infinitely small sound now, the white stir of
her face turning when she discovered she was a moment away from a man who
stood in the middle of the pavement waiting.
The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain. The girl
stopped and looked as if she might pull back in surprise, but instead stood
regarding
Montag with eyes so dark and shining and alive, that he felt he had said
something quite wonderful. But he knew his mouth had only moved to say hello,
and then when she seemed hypnotized by the salamander on his arm and the
phoenix-disc on his chest, he spoke again.
"Of course," he said, "you're a new neighbour, aren't you?"
"And you must be"-she raised her eyes from his professional symbols-"the
fireman."
Her voice trailed off.
"How oddly you say that."
"I'd-I'd have known it with my eyes shut," she said, slowly.
"What-the smell of kerosene? My wife always complains," he laughed. "You never
wash it off completely."
"No, you don't," she said, in awe.
He felt she was walking in a circle about him, turning him end for end,
shaking him quietly, and emptying his pockets, without once moving herself.
"Kerosene," he said, because the silence had lengthened, "is nothing but
perfume to me."
"Does it seem like that, really?"
"Of course. Why not?"
She gave herself time to think of it. "I don't know." She turned to face the
sidewalk going toward their homes. "Do you mind if I walk back with you? I'm
Clarisse

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McClellan."
"Clarisse. Guy Montag. Come along. What are you doing out so late wandering
around? How old are you?"
They walked in the warm-cool blowing night on the silvered pavement and there
was the faintest breath of fresh apricots and strawberries in the air, and he
looked around and realized this was quite impossible, so late in the year.
There was only the girl walking with him now, her face bright as snow in the
moonlight, and he knew she was working his questions around, seeking the best
answers she could possibly give.
"Well," she said, "I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always
go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and
insane.

Isn't this a nice time of night to walk? I like to smell things and look at
things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise."
They walked on again in silence and finally she said, thoughtfully, "You know,
I'm not afraid of you at all."
He was surprised. "Why should you be?"
"So many people are. Afraid of firemen, I mean. But you're just a man, after
all..."
He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water,
himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything
there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might
capture and hold him intact. Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk
crystal with a soft and constant light in it. It was not the hysterical light
of electricity but-what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and gently
flattering light of the candle. One time, when he was a child, in a
power-failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a
brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast
dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone,
transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon ....
And then Clarisse McClellan said:
"Do you mind if I ask? How long have you worked at being a fireman?"
"Since I was twenty, ten years ago."
"Do you ever read any of the books you bum?"
He laughed. "That's against the law!"
"Oh. Of course."
"It's fine work. Monday bum Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn
'em to ashes, then bum the ashes. That's our official slogan."
They walked still further and the girl said, "Is it true that long ago firemen
put fires out instead of going to start them?"
"No. Houses. have always been fireproof, take my word for it."
"Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident
and they needed firemen to stop the flames."
He laughed.
She glanced quickly over. "Why are you laughing?"
"I don't know." He started to laugh again and stopped "Why?"
"You laugh when I haven't been funny and you answer right off. You never stop
to think what I've asked you."
He stopped walking, "You are an odd one," he said, looking at her. "Haven't
you any respect?"
"I don't mean to be insulting. It's just, I love to watch people too much, I
guess."
"Well, doesn't this mean anything to you?" He tapped the numerals 451 stitched
on his char-coloured sleeve.
"Yes," she whispered. She increased her pace. "Have you ever watched the jet
cars racing on the boulevards down that way?
"You're changing the subject!"
"I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they

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never see them slowly," she said. "If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh
yes! he'd say, that's grass! A pink blur? That's a rose-garden! White blurs
are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He
drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn't that funny,
and sad, too?"
"You think too many things," said Montag, uneasily.
"I rarely watch the 'parlour walls' or go to races or Fun Parks. So I've lots
of time for crazy thoughts, I guess. Have you seen the two-hundred-foot-long
billboards in the country beyond town? Did you know that once billboards were
only twenty feet long?

But cars started rushing by so quickly they had to stretch the advertising out
so it would last."
"I didn't know that!" Montag laughed abruptly.
"Bet I know something else you don't. There's dew on the grass in the
morning."
He suddenly couldn't remember if he had known this or not, and it made him
quite irritable.
"And if you look"-she nodded at the sky-"there's a man in the moon."
He hadn't looked for a long time.
They walked the rest of the way in silence, hers thoughtful, his a kind of
clenching and uncomfortable silence in which he shot her accusing glances.
When they reached her house all its lights were blazing.
"What's going on?" Montag had rarely seen that many house lights.
"Oh, just my mother and father and uncle sitting around, talking. It's like
being a pedestrian, only rarer. My uncle was arrested another time-did I tell
you?-for being a pedestrian. Oh, we're most peculiar."
"But what do you talk about?"
She laughed at this. "Good night!" She started up her walk. Then she seemed to
remember something and came back to look at him with wonder and curiosity.
"Are you happy?" she said.
"Am I what?" he cried.
But she was gone-running in the moonlight. Her front door shut gently.
"Happy! Of all the nonsense."
He stopped laughing.
He put his hand into the glove-hole of his front door and let it know his
touch. The front door slid open.
Of course I'm happy. What does she think? I'm not? he asked the quiet rooms.
He stood looking up at the ventilator grille in the hall and suddenly
remembered that something lay hidden behind the grille, something that seemed
to peer down at him now. He moved his eyes quickly away.
What a strange meeting on a strange night. He remembered nothing like it save
one afternoon a year ago when he had met an old man in the park and they had
talked ....
Montag shook his head. He looked at a blank wall. The girl's face was there,
really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin
face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle
of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the
hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all
certainty and knowing what it has to tell of the night passing swiftly on
toward further darknesses but moving also toward a new sun.
"What?" asked Montag of that other self, the subconscious idiot that ran
babbling at times, quite independent of will, habit, and conscience.
He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for
how many people did you know that refracted your own light to you? People were
more often-he searched for a simile, found one in his work-torches, blazing
away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you
and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling
thought?

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What incredible power of identification the girl had; she was like the eager
watcher of a marionette show, anticipating each flicker of an eyelid, each
gesture of his hand, each flick of a finger, the moment before it began. How
long had they walked together? Three minutes? Five? Yet how large that time
seemed now. How immense a figure she was on the stage before him; what a
shadow she threw on the wall with

her slender body! He felt that if his eye itched, she might blink. And if the
muscles of his jaws stretched imperceptibly, she would yawn long before he
would.
Why, he thought, now that I think of it, she almost seemed to be waiting for
me there, in the street, so damned late at night ... .
He opened the bedroom door.
It was like coming into the cold marbled room of a mausoleum after the moon
had set. Complete darkness, not a hint of the silver world outside, the
windows tightly shut, the chamber a tomb-world where no sound from the great
city could penetrate.
The room was not empty.
He listened.
The little mosquito-delicate dancing hum in the air, the electrical murmur of
a hidden wasp snug in its special pink warm nest. The music was almost loud
enough so he could follow the tune.
He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over, and down on itself like a
tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now
collapsing and now blown out. Darkness. He was not happy. He was not happy. He
said the words to himself.
He recognized this as the true state of affairs. He wore his happiness like a
mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no
way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.
Without turning on the light he imagined how this room would look. His wife
stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of
a tomb, her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel,
immovable. And in her ears the little
Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound,
of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her
unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and
bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward
morning.
There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that
sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time.
The room was cold but nonetheless he felt he could not breathe. He did not
wish to open the curtains and open the french windows, for he did not want the
moon to come into the room. So, with the feeling of a man who will die in the
next hour for lack of air,.he felt his way toward his open, separate, and
therefore cold bed.
An instant before his foot hit the object on the floor he knew he would hit
such an object. It was not unlike the feeling he had experienced before
turning the corner and almost knocking the girl down. His foot, sending
vibrations ahead, received back echoes of the small barrier across its path
even as the foot swung. His foot kicked.
The object gave a dull clink and slid off in darkness.
He stood very straight and listened to the person on the dark bed in the
completely featureless night. The breath coming out of the nostrils was so
faint it stirred only the furthest fringes of life, a small leaf, a black
feather, a single fibre of hair.
He still did not want outside light. He pulled out his igniter, felt the
salamander etched on its silver disc, gave it a flick....
Two moonstones looked up at him in the light of his small hand-held fire; two
pale moonstones buried in a creek of clear water over which the life of the

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world ran, not touching them.
"Mildred ! "
Her face was like a snow-covered island upon which rain might fall; but it
felt no rain;
over which clouds might pass their moving shadows, but she felt no shadow.
There was only the singing of the thimble-wasps in her tamped-shut ears, and
her eyes all glass, and breath going in and out, softly, faintly, in and out
of her nostrils, and her not caring whether it came or went, went or came.

The object he had sent tumbling with his foot now glinted under the edge of
his own bed. The small crystal bottle of sleeping-tablets which earlier today
had been filled with thirty capsules and which now lay uncapped and empty in
the light of the tiny flare.
As he stood there the sky over the house screamed. There was a tremendous
ripping sound as if two giant hands had torn ten thousand miles of black linen
down the seam. Montag was cut in half. He felt his chest chopped down and
split apart. The jet-bombs going over, going over, going over, one two, one
two, one two, six of them, nine of them, twelve of them, one and one and one
and another and another and another, did all the screaming for him. He opened
his own mouth and let their shriek come down and out between his bared teeth.
The house shook. The flare went out in his hand. The moonstones vanished. He
felt his hand plunge toward the telephone.
The jets were gone. He felt his lips move, brushing the mouthpiece of the
phone.
"Emergency hospital." A terrible whisper.
He felt that the stars had been pulverized by the sound of the black jets and
that in the morning the earth would be thought as he stood shivering in the
dark, and let his lips go on moving and moving.
They had this machine. They had two machines, really. One of them slid down
into your stomach like a black cobra down an echoing well looking for all the
old water and the old time gathered there. It drank up the green matter that
flowed to the top in a slow boil. Did it drink of the darkness? Did it suck
out all the poisons accumulated with the years? It fed in silence with an
occasional sound of inner suffocation and blind searching. It had an Eye. The
impersonal operator of the machine could, by wearing a special optical helmet,
gaze into the soul of the person whom he was pumping out. What did the Eye
see? He did not say. He saw but did not see what the
Eye saw. The entire operation was not unlike the digging of a trench in one's
yard.
The woman on the bed was no more than a hard stratum of marble they had
reached. Go on, anyway, shove the bore down, slush up the emptiness, if such a
thing could be brought out in the throb of the suction snake. The operator
stood smoking a cigarette. The other machine was working too.
The other machine was operated by an equally impersonal fellow in
non-stainable reddish-brown overalls. This machine pumped all of the blood
from the body and replaced it with fresh blood and serum.
"Got to clean 'em out both ways," said the operator, standing over the silent
woman.
"No use getting the stomach if you don't clean the blood. Leave that stuff in
the blood and the blood hits the brain like a mallet, bang, a couple of
thousand times and the brain just gives up, just quits."
"Stop it!" said Montag.
"I was just sayin'," said the operator.
"Are you done?" said Montag.
They shut the machines up tight. "We're done." His anger did not even touch
them.
They stood with the cigarette smoke curling around their noses and into their
eyes without making them blink or squint. "That's fifty bucks."
"First, why don't you tell me if she'll be all right?"

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"Sure, she'll be O.K. We got all the mean stuff right in our suitcase here, it
can't get at her now. As I said, you take out the old and put in the new and
you're O.K."
"Neither of you is an M.D. Why didn't they send an M.D. from Emergency?"
"Hell! " the operator's cigarette moved on his lips. "We get these cases nine
or ten a night. Got so many, starting a few years ago, we had the special
machines built. With the optical lens, of course, that was new; the rest is
ancient. You don't need an M.D., case like this; all you need is two handymen,
clean up the problem in half an hour.

Look"-he started for the door-"we gotta go. Just had another call on the old
ear-
thimble. Ten blocks from here. Someone else just jumped off the cap of a
pillbox.
Call if you need us again. Keep her quiet. We got a contra-sedative in her.
She'll wake up hungry. So long."
And the men with the cigarettes in their straight-lined mouths, the men with
the eyes of puff-adders, took up their load of machine and tube, their case of
liquid melancholy and the slow dark sludge of nameless stuff, and strolled out
the door.
Montag sank down into a chair and looked at this woman. Her eyes were closed
now, gently, and he put out his hand to feel the warmness of breath on his
palm.
"Mildred," he said, at last.
There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that's too
many.
Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut
your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those
men? I never saw them before in my life!
Half an hour passed.
The bloodstream in this woman was new and it seemed to have done a new thing
to her. Her cheeks were very pink and her lips were very fresh and full of
colour and they looked soft and relaxed. Someone else's blood there. If only
someone else's flesh and brain and memory. If only they could have taken her
mind along to the dry-
cleaner's and emptied the pockets and steamed and cleansed it and reblocked it
and brought it back in the morning. If only . . .
He got up and put back the curtains and opened the windows wide to let the
night air in. It was two o'clock in the morning. Was it only an hour ago,
Clarisse McClellan in the street, and him coming in, and the dark room and his
foot kicking the little crystal bottle? Only an hour, but the world had melted
down and sprung up in a new and colourless form.
Laughter blew across the moon-coloured lawn from the house of Clarisse and her
father and mother and the uncle who smiled so quietly and so earnestly. Above
all, their laughter was relaxed and hearty and not forced in any way, coming
from the house that was so brightly lit this late at night while all the other
houses were kept to themselves in darkness. Montag heard the voices talking,
talking, talking, giving, talking, weaving, reweaving their hypnotic web.
Montag moved out through the french windows and crossed the lawn, without even
thinking of it. He stood outside the talking house in the shadows, thinking he
might even tap on their door and whisper, "Let me come in. I won't say
anything. I just want to listen. What is it you're saying?"
But instead he stood there, very cold, his face a mask of ice, listening to a
man's voice (the uncle?) moving along at an easy pace:
"Well, after all, this is the age of the disposable tissue. Blow your nose on
a person, wad them, flush them away, reach for another, blow, wad, flush.
Everyone using everyone else's coattails. How are you supposed to root for the
home team when you don't even have a programme or know the names? For that
matter, what colour jerseys are they wearing as they trot out on to the

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field?"
Montag moved back to his own house, left the window wide, checked Mildred,
tucked the covers about her carefully, and then lay down with the moonlight on
his cheek-
bones and on the frowning ridges in his brow, with the moonlight distilled in
each eye to form a silver cataract there.
One drop of rain. Clarisse. Another drop. Mildred. A third. The uncle. A
fourth. The fire tonight. One, Clarisse. Two, Mildred. Three, uncle. Four,
fire, One, Mildred, two, Clarisse. One, two, three, four, five, Clarisse,
Mildred, uncle, fire, sleeping-tablets, men, disposable tissue, coat-tails,
blow, wad, flush, Clarisse, Mildred, uncle, fire,

tablets, tissues, blow, wad, flush. One, two, three, one, two, three! Rain.
The storm.
The uncle laughing. Thunder falling downstairs. The whole world pouring down.
The fire gushing up in a volcano. All rushing on down around in a spouting
roar and rivering stream toward morning.
"I don't know anything any more," he said, and let a sleep-lozenge dissolve on
his tongue.
At nine in the morning, Mildred's bed was empty.
Montag got up quickly, his heart pumping, and ran down the hall and stopped at
the kitchen door.
Toast popped out of the silver toaster, was seized by a spidery metal hand
that drenched it with melted butter.
Mildred watched the toast delivered to her plate. She had both ears plugged
with electronic bees that were humming the hour away. She looked up suddenly,
saw him, and nodded.
"You all right?" he asked.
She was an expert at lip-reading from ten years of apprenticeship at Seashell
ear-
thimbles. She nodded again. She set the toaster clicking away at another piece
of bread.
Montag sat down.
His wife said, "I don't know why I should be so hungry."
"You-?"
"I'm HUNGRY."
"Last night," he began.
"Didn't sleep well. Feel terrible," she said. "God, I'm hungry. I can't figure
it."
"Last night-" he said again.
She watched his lips casually. "What about last night?"
"Don't you remember?"
"What? Did we have a wild party or something? Feel like I've a hangover. God,
I'm hungry. Who was here?"
"A few people," he said.
"That's what I thought." She chewed her toast. "Sore stomach, but I'm hungry
as all-
get-out. Hope I didn't do anything foolish at the party."
"No," he said, quietly.
The toaster spidered out a piece of buttered bread for him. He held it in his
hand, feeling grateful.
"You don't look so hot yourself," said his wife.
In the late afternoon it rained and the entire world was dark grey. He stood
in the hall of his house, putting on his badge with the orange salamander
burning across it. He stood looking up at the air-conditioning vent in the
hall for a long time. His wife in the
TV parlour paused long enough from reading her script to glance up. "Hey," she
said.
"The man's THINKING!"

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"Yes," he said. "I wanted to talk to you." He paused. "You took all the pills
in your bottle last night."
"Oh, I wouldn't do that," she said, surprised.
"The bottle was empty."
"I wouldn't do a thing like that. Why would I do a thing like that?" she
asked.
"Maybe you took two pills and forgot and took two more, and forgot again and
took two more, and were so dopy you kept right on until you had thirty or
forty of them in you."
"Heck," she said, "what would I want to go and do a silly thing like that
for?"
"I don't know," he said.

She was quite obviously waiting for him to go. "I didn't do that," she said.
"Never in a billion years."
"All right if you say so," he said.
"That's what the lady said." She turned back to her script.
"What's on this afternoon?" he asked tiredly.
She didn't look up from her script again. "Well, this is a play comes on the
wall-to-
wall circuit in ten minutes. They mailed me my part this morning. I sent in
some box-
tops. They write the script with one part missing. It's a new idea. The
home-maker, that's me, is the missing part. When it comes time for the missing
lines, they all look at me out of the three walls and I say the lines: Here,
for instance, the man says, `What do you think of this whole idea, Helen?' And
he looks at me sitting here centre stage, see? And I say, I say --" She paused
and ran her finger under a line in the script. " `I think that's fine!' And
then they go on with the play until he says, `Do you agree to that, Helen!'
and I say, `I sure do!' Isn't that fun, Guy?"
He stood in the hall looking at her.
"It's sure fun," she said.
"What's the play about?"
"I just told you. There are these people named Bob and Ruth and Helen."
"Oh."
"It's really fun. It'll be even more fun when we can afford to have the fourth
wall installed. How long you figure before we save up and get the fourth wall
torn out and a fourth wall-TV put in? It's only two thousand dollars."
"That's one-third of my yearly pay."
"It's only two thousand dollars," she replied. "And I should think you'd
consider me sometimes. If we had a fourth wall, why it'd be just like this
room wasn't ours at all, but all kinds of exotic people's rooms. We could do
without a few things."
"We're already doing without a few things to pay for the third wall. It was
put in only two months ago, remember?"
"Is that all it was?" She sat looking at him for a long moment. "Well,
good-bye, dear."
.
"Good-bye," he said. He stopped and turned around. "Does it have a happy
ending?"
"I haven't read that far."
He walked over, read the last page, nodded, folded the script, and handed it
back to her. He walked out of the house into the rain.
The rain was thinning away and the girl was walking in the centre of the
sidewalk with her head up and the few drops falling on her face. She smiled
when she saw Montag.
"Hello! "
He said hello and then said, "What are you up to now?"
"I'm still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it.

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"I don't think I'd like that," he said.
"You might if you tried."
"I never have."
She licked her lips. "Rain even tastes good."
"What do you do, go around trying everything once?" he asked.
"Sometimes twice." She looked at something in her hand.
"What've you got there?" he said.
"I guess it's the last of the dandelions this year. I didn't think I'd find
one on the lawn this late. Have you ever heard of rubbing it under your chin?
Look." She touched her chin with the flower, laughing.
"Why?"
"If it rubs off, it means I'm in love. Has it?"

He could hardly do anything else but look.
"Well?" she said.
"You're yellow under there."
"Fine! Let's try YOU now."
"It won't work for me."
"Here." Before he could move she had put the dandelion under his chin. He drew
back and she laughed. "Hold still!"
She peered under his chin and frowned.
"Well?" he said.
"What a shame," she said. "You're not in love with anyone."
"Yes, I am ! "
"It doesn't show."
"I am very much in love!" He tried to conjure up a face to fit the words, but
there was no face. "I am ! "
"Oh please don't look that way."
"It's that dandelion," he said. "You've used it all up on yourself. That's why
it won't work for me."
"Of course, that must be it. Oh, now I've upset you, I can see I have; I'm
sorry, really I
am." She touched his elbow.
"No, no," he said, quickly, "I'm all right."
"I've got to be going, so say you forgive me. I don't want you angry with me."
"I'm not angry. Upset, yes."
"I've got to go to see my psychiatrist now. They make me go. I made up things
to say. I don't know what he thinks of me. He says I'm a regular onion! I keep
him busy peeling away the layers."
"I'm inclined to believe you need the psychiatrist," said Montag.
"You don't mean that."
He took a breath and let it out and at last said, "No, I don't mean that."
"The psychiatrist wants to know why I go out and hike around in the forests
and watch the birds and collect butterflies. I'll show you my collection some
day."
"Good."
"They want to know what I do with all my time. I tell them that sometimes I
just sit and think. But I won't tell them what. I've got them running. And
sometimes, I tell them, I
like to put my head back, like this, and let the rain fall into my mouth. It
tastes just like wine. Have you ever tried it?"
"No I--"
"You HAVE forgiven me, haven't you?"
"Yes." He thought about it. "Yes, I have. God knows why. You're peculiar,
you're aggravating, yet you're easy to forgive. You say you're seventeen?"
"Well-next month."
"How odd. How strange. And my wife thirty and yet you seem so much older at
times.
I can't get over it."

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"You're peculiar yourself, Mr. Montag. Sometimes I even forget you're a
fireman.
Now, may I make you angry again?"
"Go ahead."
"How did it start? How did you get into it? How did you pick your work and how
did you happen to think to take the job you have? You're not like the others.
I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something
about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night. The others would never do
that. The others would walk off and leave me talking. Or threaten me. No one
has time any more for anyone

else. You're one of the few who put up with me. That's why I think it's so
strange you're a fireman, it just doesn't seem right for you, somehow."
He felt his body divide itself into a hotness and a coldness, a softness and a
hardness, a trembling and a not trembling, the two halves grinding one upon
the other.
"You'd better run on to your appointment," he said.
And she ran off and left him standing there in the rain. Only after a long
time did he move.
And then, very slowly, as he walked, he tilted his head back in the rain, for
just a few moments, and opened his mouth....
The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its
gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark
corner of the firehouse. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight
from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on
the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light
flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the
nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently,
its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws.
Montag slid down the brass pole. He went out to look at the city and the
clouds had cleared away completely, and he lit a cigarette and came back to
bend down and look at the Hound. It was like a great bee come home from some
field where the honey is full of poison wildness, of insanity and nightmare,
its body crammed with that over-rich nectar and now it was sleeping the evil
out of itself.
"Hello," whispered Montag, fascinated as always with the dead beast, the
living beast.
At night when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the
brass poles, and set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the
Hound and let loose rats in the firehouse area-way, and sometimes chickens,
and sometimes cats that would have to be drowned anyway, and there would be
betting to see which the
Hound would seize first. The animals were turned loose. Three seconds later
the game was done, the rat, cat, or chicken caught half across the areaway,
gripped in gentling paws while a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down
from the proboscis of the Hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or
procaine. The pawn was then tossed in the incinerator. A new game began.
Montag stayed upstairs most nights when this went on. There had been a time
two years ago when he had bet with the best of them, and lost a week's salary
and faced
Mildred's insane anger, which showed itself in veins and blotches. But now at
night he lay in his bunk, face turned to the wall, listening to whoops of
laughter below and the piano-string scurry of rat feet, the violin squeaking
of mice, and the great shadowing, motioned silence of the Hound leaping out
like a moth in the raw light, finding, holding its victim, inserting the
needle and going back to its kennel to die as if a switch had been turned.
Montag touched the muzzle. .
The Hound growled.
Montag jumped back.

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The Hound half rose in its kennel and looked at him with green-blue neon light
flickering in its suddenly activated eyebulbs. It growled again, a strange
rasping combination of electrical sizzle, a frying sound, a scraping of metal,
a turning of cogs that seemed rusty and ancient with suspicion.
"No, no, boy," said Montag, his heart pounding.

He saw the silver needle extended upon the air an inch, pull back, extend,
pull back.
The growl simmered in the beast and it looked at him.
Montag backed up. The Hound took a step from its kennel.
Montag grabbed the brass pole with one hand. The pole, reacting, slid upward,
and took him through the ceiling, quietly. He stepped off in the half-lit deck
of the upper level. He was trembling and his face was green-white. Below, the
Hound had sunk back down upon its eight incredible insect legs and was humming
to itself again, its multi-faceted eyes at peace.
Montag stood, letting the fears pass, by the drop-hole. Behind him, four men
at a card table under a green-lidded light in the corner glanced briefly but
said nothing.
Only the man with the Captain's hat and the sign of the Phoenix on his hat, at
last, curious, his playing cards in his thin hand, talked across the long
room.
"Montag . . . ?"
"It doesn't like me," said Montag.
"What, the Hound?" The Captain studied his cards.
"Come off it. It doesn't like or dislike. It just `functions.' It's like a
lesson in ballistics. It has a trajectory we decide for it. It follows
through. It targets itself, homes itself, and cuts off. It's only copper wire,
storage batteries, and electricity."
Montag swallowed. "Its calculators can be set to any combination, so many
amino acids, so much sulphur, so much butterfat and alkaline. Right?"
"We all know that."
"All of those chemical balances and percentages on all of us here in the house
are recorded in the master file downstairs. It would be easy for someone to
set up a partial combination on the Hound's 'memory,' a touch of amino acids,
perhaps. That would account for what the animal did just now. Reacted toward
me."
"Hell," said the Captain.
"Irritated, but not completely angry. Just enough 'memory' set up in it by
someone so it growled when I touched it."
"Who would do a thing like that?." asked the Captain. "You haven't any enemies
here, Guy."
"None that I know of."
"We'll have the Hound checked by our technicians tomorrow.
"This isn't the first time it's threatened me," said Montag. "Last month it
happened twice."
"We'll fix it up. Don't worry"
But Montag did not move and only stood thinking of the ventilator grille in
the hall at home and what lay hidden behind the grille. If someone here in the
firehouse knew about the ventilator then mightn't they "tell" the Hound . . .
?
The Captain came over to the drop-hole and gave Montag a questioning glance.
"I was just figuring," said Montag, "what does the Hound think about down
there nights? Is it coming alive on us, really? It makes me cold."
"It doesn't think anything we don't want it to think."
"That's sad," said Montag, quietly, "because all we put into it is hunting and
finding and killing. What a shame if that's all it can ever know."'
Beatty snorted, gently. "Hell! It's a fine bit of craftsmanship, a good rifle
that can fetch its own target and guarantees the bull's-eye every time."
"That's why," said Montag. "I wouldn't want to be its next victim.

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"Why? You got a guilty conscience about something?"
Montag glanced up swiftly.
Beatty stood there looking at him steadily with his eyes, while his mouth
opened and began to laugh, very softly.

One two three four five six seven days. And as many times he came out of the
house and Clarisse was there somewhere in the world. Once he saw her shaking a
walnut tree, once he saw her sitting on the lawn knitting a blue sweater,
three or four times he found a bouquet of late flowers on his porch, or a
handful of chestnuts in a little sack, or some autumn leaves neatly pinned to
a sheet of white paper and thumb-
tacked to his door. Every day Clarisse walked him to the corner. One day it
was raining, the next it was clear, the day after that the wind blew strong,
and the day after that it was mild and calm, and the day after that calm day
was a day like a furnace of summer and Clarisse with her face all sunburnt by
late afternoon.
"Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you
so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you. And
because we know each other."
"You make me feel very old and very much like a father."
"Now you explain," she said, "why you haven't any daughters like me, if you
love children so much?"
"I don't know."
"You're joking!"
"I mean-" He stopped and shook his head. "Well, my wife, she . . . she just
never wanted any children at all."
The girl stopped smiling. "I'm sorry. I really, thought you were having fun at
my expense. I'm a fool."
"No, no," he said. "It was a good question. It's been a long time since anyone
cared enough to ask. A good question."
"Let's talk about something else. Have you ever smelled old leaves? Don't they
smell like cinnamon? Here. Smell."
"Why, yes, it is like cinnamon in a way."
She looked at him with her clear dark eyes. "You always seem shocked."
"It's just I haven't had time--"
"Did you look at the stretched-out billboards like I told you?"
"I think so. Yes." He had to laugh.
"Your laugh sounds much nicer than it did"
"Does it?"
"Much more relaxed."
He felt at ease and comfortable. "Why aren't you in school? I see you every
day wandering around."
"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm anti-social, they say. I don't mix.
It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by
social, doesn't it?
Social to me means talking about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts
that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange
the world is.
Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of
people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an
hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription
history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask
questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing,
bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's
not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down
the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not.
They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed
or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window

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Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball.
Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can
get to lamp-

posts, playing `chicken' and 'knock hub-caps.' I guess I'm everything they say
I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal.
But everyone I
know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another.
Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?"
"You sound so very old."
"Sometimes I'm ancient. I'm afraid of children my own age. They kill each
other. Did it always used to be that way? My uncle says no. Six of my friends
have been shot in the last year alone. Ten of them died in car wrecks. I'm
afraid of them and they don't like me because I'm afraid. My uncle says his
grandfather remembered when children didn't kill each other. But that was a
long time ago when they had things different. They believed in responsibility,
my uncle says. Do you know, I'm responsible. I was spanked when I needed it,
years ago. And I do all the shopping and house-cleaning by hand.
"But most of all," she said, "I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the
subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out
who they are and what they want and where they're going. Sometimes I even go
to the Fun Parks and ride in the jet cars when they race on the edge of town
at midnight and the police don't care as long as they're insured. As long as
everyone has ten thousand insurance everyone's happy. Sometimes I sneak around
and listen in subways. Or I
listen at soda fountains, and do you know what?"
"What?"
"People don't talk about anything."
"Oh, they must!"
"No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming-pools mostly
and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything
different from anyone else. And most of the time in the cafes they have the
jokeboxes on and the same jokes most of the time, or the musical wall lit and
all the coloured patterns running up and down, but it's only colour and all
abstract. And at the museums, have you ever been? All abstract. That's all
there is now. My uncle says it was different once. A long time back sometimes
pictures said things or even showed people."
"Your uncle said, your uncle said. Your uncle must be a remarkable man."
"He is. He certainly is. Well, I've got to be going. Goodbye, Mr. Montag."
"Good-bye."
"Good-bye...."
One two three four five six seven days: the firehouse.
"Montag, you shin that pole like a bird up a tree."
Third day.
"Montag, I see you came in the back door this time. The Hound bother you?"
"No, no."
Fourth day.
"Montag, a funny thing. Heard tell this morning. Fireman in Seattle, purposely
set a
Mechanical Hound to his own chemical complex and let it loose. What kind of
suicide would you call that?"
Five six seven days.
And then, Clarisse was gone. He didn't know what there was about the
afternoon, but it was not seeing her somewhere in the world. The lawn was
empty, the trees empty, the street empty, and while at first he did not even
know he missed her or was even looking for her, the fact was that by the time
he reached the subway, there were vague stirrings of un-ease in him. Something
was the matter, his routine had been disturbed. A simple routine, true,
established in a short few days, and yet . . . ? He almost turned back to make

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the walk again, to give her time to appear. He was

certain if he tried the same route, everything would work out fine. But it was
late, and the arrival of his train put a stop to his plan.
The flutter of cards, motion of hands, of eyelids, the drone of the time-voice
in the firehouse ceiling ". . . one thirty-five. Thursday morning, November
4th,... one thirty-
six . . . one thirty-seven a.m... " The tick of the playing-cards on the
greasy table-top, all the sounds came to Montag, behind his closed eyes,
behind the barrier he had momentarily erected. He could feel the firehouse
full of glitter and shine and silence, of brass colours, the colours of coins,
of gold, of silver: The unseen men across the table were sighing on their
cards, waiting.
". . .one forty-five..." The voice-clock mourned out the cold hour of a cold
morning of a still colder year.
"What's wrong, Montag?"
Montag opened his eyes.
A radio hummed somewhere. ". . . war may be declared any hour. This country
stands ready to defend its--"
The firehouse trembled as a great flight of jet planes whistled a single note
across the black morning sky.
Montag blinked. Beatty was looking at him as if he were a museum statue. At
any moment, Beatty might rise and walk about him, touching, exploring his
guilt and self-
consciousness. Guilt? What guilt was that?
"Your play, Montag."
Montag looked at these men whose faces were sunburnt by a thousand real and
ten thousand imaginary fires, whose work flushed their cheeks and fevered
their eyes.
These men who looked steadily into their platinum igniter flames as they lit
their eternally burning black pipes. They and their charcoal hair and
soot-coloured brows and bluish-ash-smeared cheeks where they had shaven close;
but their heritage showed. Montag started up, his mouth opened. Had he ever
seen a fireman that didn't have black hair, black brows, a fiery face, and a
blue-steel shaved but unshaved look? These men were all mirror-images of
himself! Were all firemen picked then for their looks as well as their
proclivities? The colour of cinders and ash about them, and the continual
smell of burning from their pipes. Captain Beatty there, rising in
thunderheads of tobacco smoke. Beatty opening a fresh tobacco packet,
crumpling the cellophane into a sound of fire.
Montag looked at the cards in his own hands. "I-I've been thinking. About the
fire last week. About the man whose library we fixed. What happened to him?"
"They took him screaming off to the asylum"
"He. wasn't insane."
Beatty arranged his cards quietly. "Any man's insane who thinks he can fool
the
Government and us."
"I've tried to imagine," said Montag, "just how it would feel. I mean to have
firemen burn our houses and our books."
"We haven't any books."
"But if we did have some."
"You got some?"
Beatty blinked slowly.
"No." Montag gazed beyond them to the wall with the typed lists of a million
forbidden books. Their names leapt in fire, burning down the years under his
axe and his hose which sprayed not water but kerosene. "No." But in his mind,
a cool wind started up and blew out of the ventilator grille at home, softly,
softly, chilling his face. And, again, he saw himself in a green park talking
to an old man, a very old man, and the wind from the park was cold, too.

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Montag hesitated, "Was-was it always like this? The firehouse, our work? I
mean, well, once upon a time..."
"Once upon a time!" Beatty said. "What kind of talk is THAT?"
Fool, thought Montag to himself, you'll give it away. At the last fire, a book
of fairy tales, he'd glanced at a single line. "I mean," he said, "in the old
days, before homes were completely fireproofed " Suddenly it seemed a much
younger voice was speaking for him. He opened his mouth and it was Clarisse
McClellan saying, "Didn't firemen prevent fires rather than stoke them up and
get them going?"
"That's rich!" Stoneman and Black drew forth their rulebooks, which also
contained brief histories of the Firemen of America, and laid them out where
Montag, though long familiar with them, might read:
"Established, 1790, to burn English-influenced books in the Colonies. First
Fireman:
Benjamin Franklin."
RULE 1. Answer the alarm swiftly.
2. Start the fire swiftly.
3. Burn everything.
4. Report back to firehouse immediately.
5. Stand alert for other alarms.
Everyone watched Montag. He did not move.
The alarm sounded.
The bell in the ceiling kicked itself two hundred times. Suddenly there were
four empty chairs. The cards fell in a flurry of snow. The brass pole
shivered. The men were gone.
Montag sat in his chair. Below, the orange dragon coughed into life.
Montag slid down the pole like a man in a dream.
The Mechanical Hound leapt up in its kennel, its eyes all green flame.
"Montag, you forgot your helmet!"
He seized it off the wall behind him, ran, leapt, and they were off, the night
wind hammering about their siren scream and their mighty metal thunder !
It was a flaking three-storey house in the ancient part of the city, a century
old if it was a day, but like all houses it had been given a thin fireproof
plastic sheath many years ago, and this preservative shell seemed to be the
only thing holding it in the sky.
"Here we are !"
The engine slammed to a stop. Beatty, Stoneman, and Black ran up the sidewalk,
suddenly odious and fat in the plump fireproof slickers. Montag followed.
They crashed the front door and grabbed at a woman, though she was not
running, she was not trying to escape. She was only standing, weaving from
side to side, her eyes fixed upon a nothingness in the wall as if they had
struck her a terrible blow upon the head. Her tongue was moving in her mouth,
and her eyes seemed to be trying to remember something, and then they
remembered and her tongue moved again:
" 'Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by
God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.' "
"Enough of that!" said Beatty. "Where are they?"
He slapped her face with amazing objectivity and repeated the question. The
old woman's eyes came to a focus upon Beatty. "You know where they are or you
wouldn't be here," she said.
Stoneman held out the telephone alarm card with the complaint signed in
telephone duplicate on the back
"Have reason to suspect attic; 11 No. Elm, City. --- E. B."

"That would be Mrs. Blake, my neighbour;" said the woman, reading the
initials.
"All right, men, let's get 'em!"

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Next thing they were up in musty blackness, swinging silver hatchets at doors
that were, after all, unlocked, tumbling through like boys all rollick and
shout. "Hey! " A
fountain of books sprang down upon Montag as he climbed shuddering up the
sheer stair-well. How inconvenient! Always before it had been like snuffing a
candle. The police went first and adhesive-taped the victim's mouth and
bandaged him off into their glittering beetle cars, so when you arrived you
found an empty house. You weren't hurting anyone, you were hurting only
things! And since things really couldn't be hurt, since things felt nothing,
and things don't scream or whimper, as this woman might begin to scream and
cry out, there was nothing to tease your conscience later.
You were simply cleaning up. Janitorial work, essentially. Everything to its
proper place. Quick with the kerosene! Who's got a match!
But now, tonight, someone had slipped. This woman was spoiling the ritual. The
men were making too much noise, laughing, joking to cover her terrible
accusing silence below. She made the empty rooms roar with accusation and
shake down a fine dust of guilt that was sucked in their nostrils as they
plunged about. It was neither cricket nor correct. Montag felt an immense
irritation. She shouldn't be here, on top of everything!
Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms, his upturned face A book alighted,
almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering. In the
dim, wavering light, a page hung.open and it was like a snowy feather, the
words delicately painted thereon. In all the rush and fervour, Montag had only
an instant to read a line, but it blazed in his mind for the next minute as if
stamped there with fiery steel. "Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon
sunshine." He dropped the book. Immediately, another fell into his arms.
"Montag, up here! "
Montag's hand closed like a mouth, crushed the book with wild devotion, with
an insanity of mindlessness to his chest. The men above were hurling
shovelfuls of magazines into the dusty air. They fell like slaughtered birds
and the woman stood below, like a small girl, among the bodies.
Montag had done nothing. His hand had done it all, his hand, with a brain of
its own, with a conscience and a curiosity in each trembling finger, had
turned thief.. Now, it plunged the book back under his arm, pressed it tight
to sweating armpit, rushed out empty, with a magician's flourish! Look here!
Innocent! Look!
He gazed, shaken, at that white hand. He held it way out, as if he were
far-sighted.
He held it close, as if he were blind.
"Montag! "
He jerked about.
"Don't stand there, idiot!"
The books lay like great mounds of fishes left to dry. The men danced and
slipped and fell over them. Titles glittered their golden eyes, falling, gone.
"Kerosene! They pumped the cold fluid from the numbered 451 tanks strapped to
their shoulders. They coated each book, they pumped rooms full of it.
They hurried downstairs, Montag staggered after them in the kerosene fumes.
"Come on, woman!"
The woman knelt among the books, touching the drenched leather and cardboard,
reading the gilt titles with her fingers while her eyes accused Montag.
"You can't ever have my books," she said.
"You know the law," said Beatty. "Where's your common sense? None of those
books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a
regular

damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived.
Come on now! "
She shook her head.
"The whole house is going up;" said Beatty, The men walked clumsily to the

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door. They glanced back at Montag, who stood near the woman.
"You're not leaving her here?" he protested.
"She won't come."
"Force her, then!"
Beatty raised his hand in which was concealed the igniter. "We're due back at
the house. Besides, these fanatics always try suicide; the pattern's
familiar."
Montag placed his hand on the woman's elbow. "You can come with me."
"No," she said. "Thank you, anyway."
"I'm counting to ten," said Beatty. "One. Two."
"Please," said Montag.
"Go on," said the woman.
"Three. Four."
"Here." Montag pulled at the woman.
The woman replied quietly, "I want to stay here"
"Five. Six."
"You can stop counting," she said. She opened the fingers of one hand slightly
and in the palm of the hand was a single slender object.
An ordinary kitchen match.
The sight of it rushed the men out and down away from the house. Captain
Beatty, keeping his dignity, backed slowly through the front door, his pink
face burnt and shiny from a thousand fires and night excitements. God, thought
Montag, how true!
Always at night the alarm comes. Never by day! Is it because the fire is
prettier by night? More spectacle, a better show? The pink face of Beatty now
showed the faintest panic in the door. The woman's hand twitched on the single
matchstick. The fumes of kerosene bloomed up about her. Montag felt the hidden
book pound like a heart against his chest.
"Go on," said the woman, and Montag felt himself back away and away out of the
door, after Beatty, down the steps, across the lawn, where the path of
kerosene lay like the track of some evil snail.
On the front porch where she had come to weigh them quietly with her eyes, her
quietness a condemnation, the woman stood motionless.
Beatty flicked his fingers to spark the kerosene.
He was too late. Montag gasped.
The woman on the porch reached out with contempt for them all, and struck the
kitchen match against the railing.
People ran out of houses all down the street.
They said nothing on their way back to the firehouse. Nobody looked at anyone
else.
Montag sat in the front seat with Beatty and Black. They did not even smoke
their pipes. They sat there looking out of the front of the great salamander
as they turned a corner and went silently on.
"Master Ridley," said Montag at last.
"What?" said Beatty.
"She said, `Master Ridley.' She said some crazy thing when we came in the
door.
`Play the man,' she said, `Master Ridley.' Something, something, something."

" `We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I
trust shall never be put out,"' said Beatty. Stoneman glanced over at the
Captain, as did
Montag, startled.
Beatty rubbed his chin. "A man named Latimer said that to a man named Nicholas
Ridley, as they were being burnt alive at Oxford, for heresy, on October 16,
1555."
Montag and Stoneman went back to looking at the street as it moved under the
engine wheels.
"I'm full of bits and pieces," said Beatty. "Most fire captains have to be.

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Sometimes I
surprise myself. WATCH it, Stoneman!"
Stoneman braked the truck.
"Damn!" said Beatty. "You've gone right by the comer where we turn for the
firehouse."
"Who is it?"
"Who would it be?" said Montag, leaning back against the closed door in the
dark.
His wife said, at last, "Well, put on the light."
"I don't want the light."
"Come to bed."
He heard her roll impatiently; the bedsprings squealed.
"Are you drunk?" she said.
So it was the hand that started it all. He felt one hand and then the other
work his coat free and let it slump to the floor. He held his pants out into
an abyss and let them fall into darkness. His hands had been infected, and
soon it would be his arms.
He could feel the poison working up his wrists and into his elbows and his
shoulders, and then the jump-over from shoulder-blade to shoulder-blade like a
spark leaping a gap. His hands were ravenous. And his eyes were beginning to
feel hunger, as if they must look at something, anything, everything.
His wife said, "What are you doing?"
He balanced in space with the book in his sweating cold fingers.
A minute later she said, "Well, just don't stand there in the middle of the
floor."
He made a small sound.
"What?" she asked.
He made more soft sounds. He stumbled towards the bed and shoved the book
clumsily under the cold pillow. He fell into bed and his wife cried out,
startled. He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by
an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked
about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he
had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building
word patterns, talking jargon, making pretty sounds in the air. But Montag
said nothing and after a long while when he only made the small sounds, he
felt her move in the room and come to his bed and stand over him and put her
hand down to feel his cheek. He knew that when she pulled her hand away from
his face it was wet.
Late in the night he looked over at Mildred. She was awake. There was a tiny
dance of melody in the air, her Seashell was tamped in her ear again and she
was listening to far people in far places, her eyes wide and staring at the
fathoms of blackness above her in the ceiling.
Wasn't there an old joke about the wife who talked so much on the telephone
that her desperate husband ran out to the nearest store and telephoned her to
ask what was for dinner? Well, then, why didn't he buy himself an
audio-Seashell broadcasting station and talk to his wife late at night,
murmur, whisper, shout, scream, yell? But what would he whisper, what would he
yell? What could he say?

And suddenly she was so strange he couldn't believe he knew her at all. He was
in someone else's house, like those other jokes people told of the gentleman,
drunk, coming home late at night, unlocking the wrong door, entering a wrong
room, and bedding with a stranger and getting up early and going to work and
neither of them the wiser.
"Millie.... ?" he whispered.
"What?"
"I didn't mean to startle you. What I want to know is ...."
"Well?"
"When did we meet. And where?"

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"When did we meet for what?" she asked.
"I mean-originally."
He knew she must be frowning in the dark.
He clarified it. "The first time we ever met, where was it, and when?"
"Why, it was at --"
She stopped.
"I don't know," she said.
He was cold. "Can't you remember?"
"It's been so long."
"Only ten years, that's all, only ten!"
"Don't get excited, I'm trying to think." She laughed an odd little laugh that
went up and up. "Funny, how funny, not to remember where or when you met your
husband or wife."
He lay massaging his eyes, his brow, and the back of his neck, slowly. He held
both hands over his eyes and applied a steady pressure there as if to crush
memory into place. It was suddenly more important than any other thing in a
life-time that he knew where he had met Mildred.
"It doesn't matter," She was up in the bathroom now, and he heard the water
running, and the swallowing sound she made.
"No, I guess not," he said.
He tried to count how many times she swallowed and he thought of the visit
from the two zinc-oxide-faced men with the cigarettes in their straight-lined
mouths and the electronic-eyed snake winding down into the layer upon layer of
night and stone and stagnant spring water, and he wanted to call out to her,
how many have you taken
TONIGHT! the capsules! how many will you take later and not know? and so on,
every hour! or maybe not tonight, tomorrow night! And me not sleeping, tonight
or tomorrow night or any night for a long while; now that this has started.
And he thought of her lying on the bed with the two technicians standing
straight over her, not bent with concern, but only standing straight, arms
folded. And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he
wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a
newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry,
not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near
a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty.
How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you? And that awful
flower the other day, the dandelion! It had summed up everything, hadn't it?
"What a shame! You're not in love with anyone !" And why not?
Well, wasn't there a wall between him and Mildred, when you came down to it?
Literally not just one, wall but, so far, three! And expensive, too! And the
uncles, the aunts, the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, that lived in those
walls, the gibbering pack of tree-apes that said nothing, nothing, nothing and
said it loud, loud, loud. He

had taken to calling them relatives from the very first. "How's Uncle Louis
today?"
"Who?" "And Aunt Maude?" The most significant memory he had of Mildred,
really, was of a little girl in a forest without trees (how odd!) or rather a
little girl lost on a plateau where there used to be trees (you could feel the
memory of their shapes all about) sitting in the centre of the "living-room."
The living-room; what a good job of labelling that was now. No matter when he
came in, the walls were always talking to
Mildred.
"Something must be done!I"
"Yes, something must be done!"
"Well, let's not stand and talk!"
"Let's do it! "
"I'm so mad I could SPIT!"
What was it all about? Mildred couldn't say. Who was mad at whom? Mildred

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didn't quite know. What were they going to do? Well, said Mildred, wait around
and see.
He had waited around to see.
A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at
such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons;
he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head. He was a victim of
concussion. When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a
cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and
fell into emptiness and emptiness and
never-quite-touched-bottom-never-never-quite-no not quite-touched-bottom ...
and you fell so fast you didn't touch the sides either ... never ... quite . .
. touched .
anything.
The thunder faded. The music died.
"There," said Mildred, And it was indeed remarkable. Something had happened.
Even though the people in the walls of the room had barely moved, and nothing
had really been settled, you had the impression that someone had turned on a
washing-machine or sucked you up in a gigantic vacuum. You drowned in music
and pure cacophony. He came out of the room sweating and on the point of
collapse. Behind him, Mildred sat in her chair and the voices went on again:
"Well, everything will be all right now," said an "aunt."
"Oh, don't be too sure," said a "cousin."
"Now, don't get angry!"
"Who's angry?"
"YOU are ! "
"You're mad!"
"Why should I be mad!"
"Because!"
"That's all very well," cried Montag, "but what are they mad about? Who are
these people? Who's that man and who's that woman? Are they husband and wife,
are they divorced, engaged, what? Good God, nothing's connected up."
"They--" said Mildred. "Well, they-they had this fight, you see. They
certainly fight a lot. You should listen. I think they're married. Yes,
they're married. Why?"
And if it was not the three walls soon to be four walls and the dream
complete, then it was the open car and Mildred driving a hundred miles an hour
across town, he shouting at her and she shouting back and both trying to hear
what was said, but hearing only the scream of the car. "At least keep it down
to the minimum !" he yelled: "What?" she cried. "Keep it down to fifty-five,
the minimum! " he shouted. "The what?" she shrieked. "Speed!" he shouted. And
she pushed it up to one hundred and five miles an hour and tore the breath
from his mouth.

When they stepped out of the car, she had the Seashells stuffed in her ears.
Silence. Onlv the wind blowing softlv.
"Mildred." He stirred in bed.
He reached over and pulled one of the tiny musical insects out of her ear.
"Mildred.
Mildred?"
"Yes." Her voice was faint.
He felt he was one of the creatures electronically inserted between the slots
of the phono-colour walls, speaking, but the speech not piercing the crystal
barrier. He could only pantomime, hoping she would turn his way and see him.
They could not touch through the glass.
"Mildred, do you know that girl I was telling you about?"
"What girl?" She was almost asleep.
"The girl next door."
"What girl next door?"
"You know, the high-school girl. Clarisse, her name is."

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"Oh, yes," said his wife.
"I haven't seen her for a few days-four days to be exact. Have you seen her?"
"No."
"I've meant to talk to you about her. Strange."
"Oh, I know the one you mean."
"I thought you would."
"Her," said Mildred in the dark room.
"What about her?" asked Montag.
"I meant to tell you. Forgot. Forgot."
"Tell me now. What is it?"
"I think she's gone."
"Gone?"
"Whole family moved out somewhere. But she's gone for good. I think she's
dead."
"We couldn't be talking about the same girl."
"No. The same girl. McClellan. McClellan, Run over by a car. Four days ago.
I'm not sure. But I think she's dead. The family moved out anyway. I don't
know. But I think she's dead."
"You're not sure of it! "
"No, not sure. Pretty sure."
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
"Forgot."
"Four days ago!"
"I forgot all about it."
"Four days ago," he said, quietly, lying there.
They lay there in the dark room not moving, either of them. "Good night," she
said.
He heard a faint rustle. Her hands moved. The electric thimble moved like a
praying mantis on the pillow, touched by her hand. Now it was in her ear
again, humming.
He listened and his wife was singing under her breath.
Outside the house, a shadow moved, an autumn wind rose up and faded away But
there was something else in the silence that he heard. It was like a breath
exhaled upon the window. It was like a faint drift of greenish luminescent
smoke, the motion of a single huge October leaf blowing across the lawn and
away.
The Hound, he thought. It's out there tonight. It's out there now. If I opened
the window . . .
He did not open the window.
He had chills and fever in the morning.

"You can't be sick," said Mildred.
He closed his eyes over the hotness. "Yes."
"But you were all right last night."
"No, I wasn't all right " He heard the "relatives" shouting in the parlour.
Mildred stood over his bed, curiously. He felt her there, he saw her without
opening his eyes, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes
with a kind of cataract unseen but suspect far behind the pupils, the reddened
pouting lips, the body as thin as a praying mantis from dieting, and her flesh
like white bacon. He could remember her no other way.
"Will you bring me aspirin and water?"
"You've got to get up," she said. "It's noon. You've slept five hours later
than usual."
"Will you turn the parlour off?" he asked.
"That's my family."
"Will you turn it off for a sick man?"
"I'll turn it down."
She went out of the room and did nothing to the parlour and came back. "Is
that better?"

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"Thanks."
"That's my favourite programme," she said.
"What about the aspirin?"
"You've never been sick before." She went away again.
"Well, I'm sick now. I'm not going to work tonight. Call Beatty for me."
"You acted funny last night." She returned, humming.
"Where's the aspirin?" He glanced at the water-glass she handed him.
"Oh." She walked to the bathroom again. "Did something happen?"
"A fire, is all."
"I had a nice evening," she said, in the bathroom.
"What doing?"
"The parlour."
"What was on?"
"Programmes."
"What programmes?"
"Some of the best ever."
"Who?".
"Oh, you know, the bunch."
"Yes, the bunch, the bunch, the bunch." He pressed at the pain in his eyes and
suddenly the odour of kerosene made him vomit.
Mildred came in, humming. She was surprised. "Why'd you do that?"
He looked with dismay at the floor. "We burned an old woman with her books."
"It's a good thing the rug's washable." She fetched a mop and worked on it. "I
went to
Helen's last night."
"Couldn't you get the shows in your own parlour?"
"Sure, but it's nice visiting."
She went out into the parlour. He heard her singing.
"Mildred?" he called.
She returned, singing, snapping her fingers softly.
"Aren't you going to ask me about last night?" he said.
"What about it?"
"We burned a thousand books. We burned a woman."
"Well?"
The parlour was exploding with sound.

"We burned copies of Dante and Swift and Marcus Aurelius."
"Wasn't he a European?"
"Something like that."
"Wasn't he a radical?"
"I never read him."
"He was a radical." Mildred fiddled with the telephone. "You don't expect me
to call
Captain Beatty, do you?"
"You must! "
"Don't shout!"
"I wasn't shouting." He was up in bed, suddenly, enraged and flushed, shaking.
The parlour roared in the hot air. "I can't call him. I can't tell him I'm
sick."
"Why?"
Because you're afraid, he thought. A child feigning illness, afraid to call
because after a moment's discussion, the conversation would run so: "Yes,
Captain, I feel better already. I'll be in at ten o'clock tonight."
"You're not sick," said Mildred.
Montag fell back in bed. He reached under his pillow. The hidden book was
still there.
"Mildred, how would it be if, well, maybe, I quit my job awhile?"
"You want to give up everything? After all these years of working, because,
one night, some woman and her books--"

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"You should have seen her, Millie! "
"She's nothing to me; she shouldn't have had books. It was her responsibility,
she should have thought of that. I hate her. She's got you going and next
thing you know we'll be out, no house, no job, nothing."
"You weren't there, you didn't see," he said. "There must be something in
books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there
must be something there. You don't stay for nothing."
"She was simple-minded."
"She was as rational as you and I, more so perhaps, and we burned her."
"That's water under the bridge."
"No, not water; fire. You ever seen a burned house? It smoulders for days.
Well, this fire'll last me the rest of my life. God! I've been trying to put
it out, in my mind, all night. I'm crazy with trying."
"You should have thought of that before becoming a fireman."
"Thought! " he said. "Was I given a choice? My grandfather and father were
firemen.
In my sleep, I ran after them."
The parlour was playing a dance tune.
"This is the day you go on the early shift," said Mildred. "You should have
gone two hours ago. I just noticed."
"It's not just the woman that died," said Montag. "Last night I thought about
all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books.
And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books.
A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on
paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before." He got out of bed.
"It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking
around at the world and life, and then I came along in two minutes and boom!
it's all over."
"Let me alone," said Mildred. "I didn't do anything."
"Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We
need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How
long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about
something real?"

And then he shut up, for he remembered last week and the two white stones
staring up at the ceiling and the pump-snake with the probing eye and the two
soap-faced men with the cigarettes moving in their mouths when they talked.
But that was another Mildred, that was a Mildred so deep inside this one, and
so bothered, really bothered, that the two women had never met. He turned
away.
Mildred said, "Well, now you've done it. Out front of the house. Look who's
here.".
"I don't care."
"There's a Phoenix car just driven up and a man in a black shirt with an
orange snake stitched on his arm coming up the front walk."
"Captain Beauty?" he said, "Captain Beatty."
Montag did not move, but stood looking into the cold whiteness of the wall
immediately before him.
"Go let him in, will you? Tell him I'm sick."
"Tell him yourself!" She ran a few steps this way, a few steps that, and
stopped, eyes wide, when the front door speaker called her name, softly,
softly, Mrs. Montag, Mrs.
Montag, someone here, someone here, Mrs. Montag, Mrs. Montag, someone's here.
Fading.
Montag made sure the book was well hidden behind the pillow, climbed slowly
back into bed, arranged the covers over his knees and across his chest,
half-sitting, and after a while Mildred moved and went out of the room and
Captain Beatty strolled in, his hands in his pockets.
"Shut the 'relatives' up," said Beatty, looking around at everything except

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Montag and his wife.
This time, Mildred ran. The yammering voices stopped yelling in the parlour.
Captain Beatty sat down in the most comfortable chair with a peaceful look on
his ruddy face. He took time to prepare and light his brass pipe and puff out
a great smoke cloud. "Just thought I'd come by and see how the sick man is."
"How'd you guess?"
Beatty smiled his smile which showed the candy pinkness of his gums and the
tiny candy whiteness of his teeth. "I've seen it all. You were going to call
for a night off."
Montag sat in bed.
"Well," said Beatty, "take the night off!" He examined his eternal matchbox,
the lid of which said GUARANTEED: ONE MILLION LIGHTS IN THIS IGNITER, and
began to strike the chemical match abstractedly, blow out, strike, blow out,
strike, speak a few words, blow out. He looked at the flame. He blew, he
looked at the smoke. "When will you be well?"
"Tomorrow. The next day maybe. First of the week."
Beatty puffed his pipe. "Every fireman, sooner or later, hits this. They only
need understanding, to know how the wheels run. Need to know the history of
our profession. They don't feed it to rookies like they used to. Damn shame."
Puff. "Only fire chiefs remember it now." Puff. "I'll let you in on it."
Mildred fidgeted.
Beatty took a full minute to settle himself in and think back for what he
wanted to say.
"When did it all start, you ask, this job of ours, how did it come about,
where, when?
Well, I'd say it really got started around about a thing called the Civil War.
Even though our rule-book claims it was founded earlier. The fact is we didn't
get along well until photography came into its own. Then--motion pictures in
the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass."
Montag sat in bed, not moving.

"And because they had mass, they became simpler," said Beatty. "Once, books
appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be
different.
The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and
mouths.
Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books
levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?"
"I think so."
Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. "Picture it.
Nineteenth-
century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth
century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests.
Tabloids.
Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending."
"Snap ending." Mildred nodded.
"Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a
two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary
resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many
were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly,
Montag; it is probably only a faint rumour of a title to you, Mrs. Montag)
whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that
claimed: 'now at least you can read all the classics;
keep up with your neighbours.' Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college
and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five
centuries or more."
Mildred arose and began to move around the room, picking things up and putting
them down. Beatty ignored her and continued
"Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here,

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There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh!
Bang!
Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests.
Politics?
One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl
man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers,
exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary,
time-wasting thought!"
Mildred smoothed the bedclothes. Montag felt his heart jump and jump again as
she patted his pillow. Right now she was pulling at his shoulder to try to get
him to move so she could take the pillow out and fix it nicely and put it
back. And perhaps cry out and stare or simply reach down her hand and say,
"What's this?" and hold up the hidden book with touching innocence.
"School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages
dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely
ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after
work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts
and bolts?"
"Let me fix your pillow," said Mildred.
"No! " whispered Montag, "The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just
that much time to think while dressing at. dawn, a philosophical hour, and
thus a melancholy hour."
Mildred said, "Here."
"Get away," said Montag.
"Life becomes one big pratfall, Montag; everything bang; boff, and wow!"
"Wow," said Mildred, yanking at the pillow.
"For God's sake, let me be!" cried Montag passionately.
Beatty opened his eyes wide.
Mildred's hand had frozen behind the pillow. Her fingers were tracing the
book's outline and as the shape became familiar her face looked surprised and
then stunned. Her mouth opened to ask a question . . .

"Empty the theatres save for clowns and furnish the rooms with glass walls and
pretty colours running up and down the walls like confetti or blood or sherry
or sauterne. You like baseball, don't you, Montag?"
"Baseball's a fine game."
Now Beatty was almost invisible, a voice somewhere behind a screen of smoke
"What's this?" asked Mildred, almost with delight. Montag heaved back against
her arms. "What's this here?"
"Sit down!" Montag shouted. She jumped away, her hands empty. "We're talking !
"
Beatty went on as if nothing had happened. "You like bowling, don't you,
Montag?"
"Bowling, yes."
"And golf?"
"Golf is a fine game."
"Basketball?"
"A fine game.".
"Billiards, pool? Football?"
"Fine games, all of them."
"More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don't have to think, eh?
Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in
books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full
of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline
refugee.
Towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place,
following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon
and I the night before."
Mildred went out of the room and slammed the door. The parlour "aunts" began

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to laugh at the parlour "uncles.", "Now let's take up the minorities in our
civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step
on the toes of the dog?lovers, the cat?lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants,
chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second?generation
Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people
from
Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not
meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The
bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!
All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors,
full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a
nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said,
were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the
public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic?books survive.
And the three?dimensional sex?magazines, of course.
There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was
no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass
exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today,
thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read
comics, the good old confessions, or trade?journals."
"Yes, but what about the firemen, then?" asked Montag.
"Ah." Beatty leaned forward in the faint mist of smoke from his pipe. "What
more easily explained and natural? With school turning out more runners,
jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead
of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word
`intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always
dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who
was exceptionally 'bright,' did most of the reciting and answering while the
others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him.
And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after
hours? Of

course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the
Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other;
then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge
themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn
it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be
the target of the well?read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so
when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were
correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of
firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of
our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being
inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That's you, Montag, and
that's me."
The door to the parlour opened and Mildred stood there looking in at them,
looking at
Beatty and then at Montag. Behind her the walls of the room were flooded with
green and yellow and orange fireworks sizzling and bursting to some music
composed almost completely of trap?drums, tom?toms, and cymbals. Her mouth
moved and she was saying something but the sound covered it.
Beatty knocked his pipe into the palm of his pink hand, studied the ashes as
if they were a symbol to be diagnosed and searched for meaning.
"You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our
minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country,
above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all
your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep
them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For
pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of
these."

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"Yes."
Montag could lip?read what Mildred was saying in the doorway. He tried not to
look at her mouth, because then Beatty might turn and read what was there,
too.
"Coloured people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't
feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on
tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Bum the
book. Serenity, Montag.
Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator.
Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a
person is dead he's on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by
helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man's a speck of
black dust. Let's not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them.
Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean."
The fireworks died in the parlour behind Mildred. She had stopped talking at
the same time; a miraculous coincidence. Montag held his breath.
"There was a girl next door," he said, slowly. "She's gone now, I think, dead.
I can't even remember her face. But she was different. How?how did she
happen?"
Beatty smiled. "Here or there, that's bound to occur. Clarisse McClellan?
We've a record on her family. We've watched them carefully. Heredity and
environment are funny things. You can't rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in
just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school.
That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're
almost snatching them from the cradle. We had some false alarms on the
McClellans, when they lived in Chicago.
Never found a book. Uncle had a mixed record; anti?social. The girl? She was a
time bomb. The family had been feeding her subconscious, I'm sure, from what I
saw of her school record. She didn't want to know how a thing was done, but
why. That can be embarrassing. You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up
very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead."

"Yes, dead."
"Luckily, queer ones like her don't happen, often. We know how to nip most of
them in the bud, early. You can't build a house without nails and wood. If you
don't want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don't want a man
unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give
him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as
war. If the Government is inefficient, top?heavy, and tax?mad, better it be
all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people
contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names
of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year.
Cram them full of non?combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts'
they feel stuffed, but absolutely `brilliant' with information. Then they'll
feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And
they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any
slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way
lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together
again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to
slide?rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or
equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I've tried it; to
hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians,
your dare-devils, jet cars, motor?cycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more
of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film
says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll
think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to
vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment."
Beatty got up. "I must be going. Lecture's over. I hope I've clarified things.
The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we're the Happiness Boys,

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the Dixie
Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who
want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our
fingers in the dyke. Hold steady. Don't let the torrent of melancholy and
drear philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don't think you realize
how important you are, to our happy world as it stands now."
Beatty shook Montag's limp hand. Montag still sat, as if the house were
collapsing about him and he could not move, in the bed. Mildred had vanished
from the door.
"One last thing," said Beatty. "At least once in his career, every fireman
gets an itch.
What do the books say, he wonders. Oh, to scratch that itch, eh? Well, Montag,
take my word for it, I've had to read a few in my time, to know what I was
about, and the books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe. They're
about non?existent people, figments of imagination, if they're fiction. And if
they're non?fiction, it's worse, one professor calling another an idiot, one
philosopher screaming down another's gullet. All of them running about,
putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun. You come away lost."
"Well, then, what if a fireman accidentally, really not, intending anything,
takes a book home with him?"
Montag twitched. The open door looked at him with its great vacant eye.
"A natural error. Curiosity alone," said Beatty. "We don't get over?anxious or
mad.
We let the fireman keep the book twenty?four hours. If he hasn't burned it by
then, we simply come and burn it for him."
"Of course." Montag's mouth was dry.
"Well, Montag. Will you take another, later shift, today? Will we see you
tonight perhaps?"
"I don't know," said Montag.
"What?" Beatty looked faintly surprised.

Montag shut his eyes. "I'll be in later. Maybe."
"We'd certainly miss you if you didn't show," said Beatty, putting his pipe in
his pocket thoughtfully.
I'll never come in again, thought Montag.
"Get well and keep well," said Beatty.
He turned and went out through the open door.
Montag watched through the window as Beatty drove away in his gleaming
yellow?flame?coloured beetle with the black, char?coloured tyres.
Across the street and down the way the other houses stood with their flat
fronts.
What was it Clarisse had said one afternoon? "No front porches. My uncle says
there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night,
talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn't
want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned
things over. My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because
they didn't look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the
real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn't want people sitting like
that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life.
People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the
porches. And the gardens, too. Not many gardens any more to sit around in. And
look at the furniture. No rocking?chairs any more. They're too comfortable.
Get people up and running around. My uncle says . . . and . . . my uncle
. . . and . . . my uncle . . ." Her voice faded.

Montag turned and looked at his wife, who sat in the middle of the parlour
talking to an announcer, who in turn was talking to her. "Mrs. Montag," he was
saying. This, that and the other. "Mrs. Montag?" Something else and still
another. The converter attachment, which had cost them one hundred dollars,

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automatically supplied her name whenever the announcer addressed his anonymous
audience, leaving a blank where the proper syllables could be filled in. A
special spot?wavex?scrambler also caused his televised image, in the area
immediately about his lips, to mouth the vowels and consonants beautifully. He
was a friend, no doubt of it, a good friend.
"Mrs. Montag?now look right here."
Her head turned. Though she quite obviously was not listening.
Montag said, "It's only a step from not going to work today to not working
tomorrow, to not working at the firehouse ever again." , "You are going to
work tonight, though, aren't you?" said Mildred.
"I haven't decided. Right now I've got an awful feeling I want to smash things
and kill things :'
"Go take the beetle."
"No thanks."
"The keys to the beetle are on the night table. I always like to drive fast
when I feel that way. You get it up around ninetyfive and you feel wonderful.
Sometimes I drive all night and come back and you don't know it. It's fun out
in the country. You hit rabbits, sometimes you hit dogs. Go take the beetle."
"No, I don't want to, this time. I want to hold on to this funny thing. God,
it's gotten big on me. I don't know what it is. I'm so damned unhappy, I'm so
mad, and I don't know why I feel like I'm putting on weight. I feel fat. I
feel like I've been saving up a lot of things, and don't know what. I might
even start reading books."
"They'd put you in jail, wouldn't they?" She looked at him as if he were
behind the glass wall.
He began to put on his clothes, moving restlessly about the bedroom. "Yes, and
it might be a good idea. Before I hurt someone. Did you hear Beatty? Did you
listen to

him? He knows all the answers. He's right. Happiness is important. Fun is
everything.
And yet I kept sitting there saying to myself, I'm not happy, I'm not happy."
"I am." Mildred's mouth beamed. "And proud of it."
"I'm going to do something," said Montag. "I don't even know what yet, but I'm
going to do something big."
"I'm tired of listening to this junk," said Mildred, turning from him to the
announcer again
Montag touched the volume control in the wall and the announcer was
speechless.
"Millie?" He paused. "This is your house as well as mine. I feel it's only
fair that I tell you something now. I should have told you before, but I
wasn't even admitting it to myself. I have something I want you to see,
something I've put away and hid during the past year, now and again, once in a
while, I didn't know why, but I did it and I
never told you."
He took hold of a straight?backed chair and moved it slowly and steadily into
the hall near the front door and climbed up on it and stood for a moment like
a statue on a pedestal, his wife standing under him, waiting. Then he reached
up and pulled back the grille of the air?conditioning system and reached far
back inside to the right and moved still another sliding sheet of metal and
took out a book. Without looking at it he dropped it to the floor. He put his
hand back up and took out two books and moved his hand down and dropped the
two books to the floor. He kept moving his hand and dropping books, small
ones, fairly large ones, yellow, red, green ones.
When he was done he looked down upon some twenty books lying at his wife's
feet.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't really think. But now it looks as if we're in
this together."
Mildred backed away as if she were suddenly confronted by a pack of mice that

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had come up out of the floor. He could hear her breathing rapidly and her face
was paled out and her eyes were fastened wide. She said his name over, twice,
three times.
Then moaning, she ran forward, seized a book and ran toward the kitchen
incinerator.
He caught her, shrieking. He held her and she tried to fight away from him,
scratching.
"No, Millie, no! Wait! Stop it, will you? You don't know . . . stop it!" He
slapped her face, he grabbed her again and shook her.
She said his name and began to cry.
"Millie! "' he said. "Listen. Give me a second, will you? We can't do
anything. We can't burn these. I want to look at them, at least look at them
once. Then if what the
Captain says is true, we'll burn them together, believe me, we'll burn them
together.
You must help me." He looked down into her face and took hold of her chin and
held her firmly. He was looking not only at her, but for himself and what he
must do, in her face. "Whether we like this or not, we're in it. I've never
asked for much from you in all these years, but I ask it now, I plead for it.
We've got to start somewhere here, figuring out why we're in such a mess, you
and the medicine at night, and the car, and me and my work. We're heading
right for the cliff, Millie. God, I don't want to go over. This isn't going to
be easy. We haven't anything to go on, but maybe we can piece it out and
figure it and help each other. I need you so much right now, I can't tell you.
If you love me at all you'll put up with this, twenty?four, forty?eight hours,
that's all I ask, then it'll be over. I promise, I swear! And if there is
something here, just one little thing out of a whole mess of things, maybe we
can pass it on to someone else."
She wasn't fighting any more, so he let her go. She sagged away from him and
slid down the wall, and sat on the floor looking at the books. Her foot
touched one and she saw this and pulled her foot away.

"That woman, the other night, Millie, you weren't there. You didn't see her
face. And
Clarisse. You never talked to her. I talked to her. And men like Beatty are
afraid of her. I can't understand it. Why should they be so afraid of someone
like her? But I
kept putting her alongside the firemen in the house last night, and I suddenly
realized
I didn't like them at all, and I didn't like myself at all any more. And I
thought maybe it would be best if the firemen themselves were burnt."
"Guy! "
The front door voice called softly:
"Mrs. Montag, Mrs. Montag, someone here, someone here, Mrs. Montag, Mrs.
Montag, someone here."
Softly.
They turned to stare at the door and the books toppled everywhere, everywhere
in heaps.
"Beatty!" said Mildred.
"It can't be him."
"He's come back!" she whispered.
The front door voice called again softly. "Someone here . . ."
"We won't answer." Montag lay back against the wall and then slowly sank to a
crouching position and began to nudge the books, bewilderedly, with his thumb,
his forefinger. He was shivering and he wanted above all to shove the books up
through the ventilator again, but he knew he could not face Beatty again. He
crouched and then he sat and the voice of the front door spoke again, more
insistently. Montag picked a single small volume from the floor. "Where do we
begin?" He opened the book half?way and peered at it. "We begin by beginning,

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I guess."
"He'll come in," said Mildred, "and burn us and the books!"
The front door voice faded at last. There was a silence. Montag felt the
presence of someone beyond the door, waiting, listening. Then the footsteps
going away down the walk and over the lawn.
"Let's see what this is," said Montag.
He spoke the words haltingly and with a terrible selfconsciousness. He read a
dozen pages here and there and came at last to this:
" `It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered
death rather than submit to break eggs at the smaller end."'
Mildred sat across the hall from him. "What does it mean? It doesn't mean
anything!
The Captain was right! "
"Here now," said Montag. "We'll start over again, at the beginning."



PART II
THE SIEVE AND THE SAND
THEY read the long afternoon through, while the cold November rain fell from
the sky upon the quiet house. They sat in the hall because the parlour was so
empty and grey-looking without its walls lit with orange and yellow confetti
and sky-rockets and women in gold-mesh dresses and men in black velvet pulling
one-hundred-pound rabbits from silver hats. The parlour was dead and Mildred
kept peering in at it with a blank expression as Montag paced the floor and
came back and squatted down and read a page as many as ten times, aloud.
" `We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling
a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over, so in
a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.'"

Montag sat listening to the rain.
"Is that what it was in the girl next door? I've tried so hard to figure."
"She's dead. Let's talk about someone alive, for goodness' sake."
Montag did not look back at his wife as he went trembling along the hall to
the kitchen, where he stood a long .time watching the rain hit the windows
before he came back down the hall in the grey light, waiting for the tremble
to subside.
He opened another book.
" `That favourite subject, Myself."'
He squinted at the wall. " `The favourite subject, Myself."'
"I understand that one," said Mildred.
"But Clarisse's favourite subject wasn't herself. It was everyone else, and
me. She was the first person in a good many years I've really liked. She was
the first person I
can remember who looked straight at me as if I counted." He lifted the two
books.
"These men have been dead a long time, but I know their words point, one way
or another, to Clansse."
Outside the front door, in the rain, a faint scratching.
Montag froze. He saw Mildred thrust herself back to the wall and gasp.
"I shut it off."
"Someone--the door--why doesn't the door-voice tell us--"
Under the door-sill, a slow, probing sniff, an exhalation of electric steam.
Mildred laughed. "It's only a dog, that's what! You want me to shoo him away?"
"Stay where you are!"
Silence. The cold rain falling. And the smell of blue electricity blowing
under the locked door.
"Let's get back to work," said Montag quietly.
Mildred kicked at a book. "Books aren't people. You read and I look around,

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but there isn't anybody!"
He stared at the parlour that was dead and grey as the waters of an ocean that
might teem with life if they switched on the electronic sun.
"Now," said Mildred, "my `family' is people. They tell me things; I laugh,
they laugh!
And the colours!"
"Yes, I know."
"And besides, if Captain Beatty knew about those books--" She thought about
it. Her face grew amazed and then horrified. "He might come and bum the house
and the
`family.' That's awful! Think of our investment. Why should I read? What for?"
"What for! Why!" said Montag. "I saw the damnedest snake in the world the
other night. It was dead but it was alive. It could see but it couldn't see.
You want to see that snake. It's at Emergency Hospital where they filed a
report on all the junk the snake got out of you! Would you like to go and
check their file? Maybe you'd look under Guy Montag or maybe under Fear or
War. Would you like to go to that house that burnt last night? And rake ashes
for the bones of the woman who set fire to her own house! What about Clarisse
McClellan, where do we look for her? The morgue!
Listen!"
The bombers crossed the sky and crossed the sky over the house, gasping,
murmuring, whistling like an immense, invisible fan, circling in emptiness.
"Jesus God," said Montag. "Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in
hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why
doesn't someone want to talk about it? We've started and won two atomic wars
since 1960.
Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is
it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't
care if they are? I've heard rumours; the world is starving, but we're
well-fed. Is it true, the

world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? I've heard the
rumours about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know
why? I
don't, that's sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just
might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes! I don't hear those
idiot bastards in your parlour talking about it. God, Millie, don't you see?
An hour a day, two hours, with these books, and maybe..."
The telephone rang. Mildred snatched the phone.
"Ann!" She laughed. "Yes, the White Clown's on tonight!"
Montag walked to the kitchen and threw the book down. "Montag," he said,
"you're really stupid. Where do we go from here? Do we turn the books in,
forget it?" He opened the book to read over Mildred's laughter.
Poor Millie, he thought. Poor Montag, it's mud to you, too. But where do you
get help, where do you find a teacher this late?
Hold on. He shut his eyes. Yes, of course. Again he found himself thinking of
the green park a year ago. The thought had been with him many times recently,
but now he remembered how it was that day in the city park when he had seen
that old man in the black suit hide something, quickly in his coat .
... The old man leapt up as if to run. And Montag said, "Wait ! "
"I haven't done anything! " cried the old man trembling.
"No one said you did."
They had sat in the green soft light without saying a word for a moment, and
then
Montag talked about the weather, and then the old man responded with a pale
voice.
It was a strange quiet meeting. The old man admitted to being a retired
English professor who had been thrown out upon the world forty years ago when
the last liberal arts college shut for lack of students and patronage. His

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name was Faber, and when he finally lost his fear of Montag, he talked in a
cadenced voice, looking at the sky and the trees and the green park, and when
an hour had passed he said something to Montag and Montag sensed it was a
rhymeless poem. Then the old man grew even more courageous and said something
else and that was a poem, too.
Faber held his hand over his left coat-pocket and spoke these words gently,
and
Montag knew if he reached out, he might pull a book of poetry from the man's
coat.
But he did not reach out. His. hands stayed on his knees, numbed and useless.
"I
don't talk things, sir," said Faber. "I talk the meaning of things. I sit here
and know I'm alive."
That was all there was to it, really. An hour of monologue, a poem, a comment,
and then without even acknowledging the fact that Montag was a fireman, Faber
with a certain trembling, wrote his address on a slip of paper. "For your
file," he said, "in case you decide to be angry with me."
"I'm not angry," Montag said, surprised.
Mildred shrieked with laughter in the hall.
Montag went to his bedroom closet and flipped through his file-wallet to the
heading:
FUTURE INVESTIGATIONS (?). Faber's name was there. He hadn't turned it in and
he hadn't erased it.
He dialled the call on a secondary phone. The phone on the far end of the line
called
Faber's name a dozen times before the professor answered in a faint voice.
Montag identified himself and was met with a lengthy silence. "Yes, Mr.
Montag?"
"Professor Faber, I have a rather odd question to ask. How many copies of the
Bible are left in this country?"
"I don't know what you're talking about! "
"I want to know if there are any copies left at all."
"This is some sort of a trap! I can't talk to just anyone on the phone!"

"How many copies of Shakespeare and Plato?"
"None ! You know as well as I do. None!"
Faber hung up.
Montag put down the phone. None. A thing he knew of course from the firehouse
listings. But somehow he had wanted to hear it from Faber himself.
In the hall Mildred's face was suffused with excitement. "Well, the ladies are
coming over!"
Montag showed her a book. "This is the Old and New Testament, and-"
"Don't start that again!"
"It might be the last copy in this part of the world."
"You've got to hand it back tonight, don't you know? Captain Beatty knows
you've got it, doesn't he?"
"I don't think he knows which book I stole. But how do I choose a substitute?
Do I
turn in Mr. Jefferson? Mr. Thoreau? Which is least valuable? If I pick a
substitute and
Beatty does know which book I stole, he'll guess we've an entire library
here!"
Mildred's mouth twitched. "See what you're doing? You'll ruin us! Who's more
important, me or that Bible?" She was beginning to shriek now, sitting there
like a wax doll melting in its own heat.
He could hear Beatty's voice. "Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the
petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes
a black butterfly.
Beautiful, eh? Light the third page from the second and so on, chainsmoking,

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chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false
promises, all the second-
hand notions and time-worn philosophies." There sat Beatty, perspiring gently,
the floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm
Mildred stopped screaming as quickly as she started. Montag was not listening.
"There's only one thing to do," he said. "Some time before tonight when I give
the book to Beatty, I've got to have a duplicate made."
"You'll be here for the White Clown tonight, and the ladies coming over?"
cried
Mildred.
Montag stopped at the door, with his back turned. "Millie?"
A silence "What?"
"Millie? Does the White Clown love you?"
No answer.
"Millie, does--" He licked his lips. "Does your `family' love you, love you
very much, love you with all their heart and soul, Millie?"
He felt her blinking slowly at the back of his neck.
"Why'd you ask a silly question like that?"
He felt he wanted to cry, but nothing would happen to his eyes or his mouth.
"If you see that dog outside," said Mildred, "give him a kick for me."
He hesitated, listening at the door. He opened it and stepped out.
The rain had stopped and the sun was setting in the clear sky. The street and
the lawn and the porch were empty. He let his breath go in a great sigh.
He slammed the door.
He was on the subway.
I'm numb, he thought. When did the numbness really begin in my face? In my
body?
The night I kicked the pill-bottle in the dark, like kicking a buried mine.
The numbness will go away, he thought. It'll take time, but I'll do it, or
Faber will do it for me. Someone somewhere will give me back the old face and
the old hands the way they were. Even the smile, he thought, the old burnt-in
smile, that's gone. I'm lost without it.

The subway fled past him, cream-tile, jet-black, cream-tile, jet-black,
numerals and darkness, more darkness and the total adding itself.
Once as a child he had sat upon a yellow dune by the sea in the middle of the
blue and hot summer day, trying to fill a sieve with sand, because some cruel
cousin had said, "Fill this sieve and you'll get a dime!" `And the faster he
poured, the faster it sifted through with a hot whispering. His hands were
tired, the sand was boiling, the sieve was empty. Seated there in the midst of
July, without a sound, he felt the tears move down his cheeks.
Now as the vacuum-underground rushed him through the dead cellars of town,
jolting him, he remembered the terrible logic of that sieve, and he looked
down and saw that he was carrying the Bible open. There were people in the
suction train but he held the book in his hands and the silly thought came to
him, if you read fast and read all, maybe some of the sand will stay in the
sieve. But he read and the words fell through, and he thought, in a few hours,
there will be Beatty, and here will be me handing this over, so no phrase must
escape me, each line must be memorized. I will myself to do it.
He clenched the book in his fists.
Trumpets blared.
"Denham's Dentrifice."
Shut up, thought Montag. Consider the lilies of the field.
"Denham's Dentifrice."
They toil not-
"Denham's--"
Consider the lilies of the field, shut up, shut up.
"Dentifrice ! "
He tore the book open and flicked the pages and felt them as if he were blind,

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he picked at the shape of the individual letters, not blinking.
"Denham's. Spelled : D-E.N "
They toil not, neither do they . . .
A fierce whisper of hot sand through empty sieve.
"Denham's does it!"
Consider the lilies, the lilies, the lilies...
"Denham's dental detergent."
"Shut up, shut up, shut up!" It was a plea, a cry so terrible that Montag
found himself on his feet, the shocked inhabitants of the loud car staring,
moving back from this man with the insane, gorged face, the gibbering, dry
mouth, the flapping book in his fist. The people who had been sitting a moment
before, tapping their feet to the rhythm of Denham's Dentifrice, Denham's
Dandy Dental Detergent, Denham's
Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice, one two, one two three, one two, one two
three. The people whose mouths had been faintly twitching the words Dentifrice
Dentifrice
Dentifrice. The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great
ton-load of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass. The people
wcre pounded into submission; they did not run, there was no place to run; the
great air-train fell down its shaft in the earth.
"Lilies of the field." "Denham's."
"Lilies, I said!"
The people stared.
"Call the guard."
"The man's off--"
"Knoll View!"
The train hissed to its stop.

"Knoll View!" A cry.
"Denham's." A whisper.
Montag's mouth barely moved. "Lilies..."
The train door whistled open. Montag stood. The door gasped, started shut.
Only then .did he leap past the other passengers, screaming in his mind,
plunge through the slicing door only in time. He ran on the white tiles up
through the tunnels, ignoring the escalators, because he wanted to feel his
feet-move, arms swing, lungs clench, unclench, feel his throat go raw with
air. A voice drifted after him, "Denham's
Denham's Denham's," the train hissed like a snake. The train vanished in its
hole.
"Who is it?"
"Montag out here."
"What do you want?"
"Let me in."
"I haven't done anything l"
"I'm alone, dammit ! "
"You swear it?"
"I swear!"
The front door opened slowly. Faber peered out, looking very old in the light
and very fragile and very much afraid. The old man looked as if he had not
been out of the house in years. He and the white plaster walls inside were
much the same. There was white in the flesh of his mouth and his cheeks and
his hair was white and his eyes had faded, with white in the vague blueness
there. Then his eyes touched on the book under Montag's arm and he did not
look so old any more and not quite as fragile. Slowly his fear went.
"I'm sorry. One has to be careful."
He looked at the book under Montag's arm and could not stop. "So it's true."
Montag stepped inside. The door shut.
"Sit down." Faber backed up, as if he feared the book might vanish if he took
his eyes from it. Behind him, the door to a bedroom stood open, and in that

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room a litter of machinery and steel tools was strewn upon a desk-top. Montag
had only a glimpse, before Faber, seeing Montag's attention diverted, turned
quickly and shut the bedroom door and stood holding the knob with a trembling
hand. His gaze returned unsteadily to Montag, who was now seated with the book
in his lap. "The book-where did you-?"
"I stole it."
Faber, for the first time, raised his eyes and looked directly into Montag's
face.
"You're brave."
"No," said Montag. "My wife's dying. A friend of mine's already dead. Someone
who may have been a friend was burnt less than twenty-four hours ago. You're
the only one I knew might help me. To see. To see. ."
Faber's hands itched on his knees. "May I?"
"Sorry." Montag gave him the book.
"It's been a long time. I'm not a religious man. But it's been a long time."
Faber turned the pages, stopping here and there to read. "It's as good as I
remember. Lord, how they've changed it- in our `parlours' these days. Christ
is one of the `family' now. I
often wonder it God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is
it dressed him down? He's a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar-crystal
and saccharine when he isn't making veiled references to certain commercial
products that every worshipper absolutely needs." Faber sniffed the book. "Do
you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I
loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books
once, before we let them

go." Faber turned the pages. "Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw
the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the
innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the
`guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally
they set the structure to burn the books, using the, firemen, I grunted a few
times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me, by
then. Now, it's too late." Faber closed the Bible.
"Well--suppose you tell me why you came here?"
"Nobody listens any more. I can't talk to the walls because they're yelling at
me. I
can't talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear
what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it'll make sense. And I
want you to teach me to understand what I read."
Faber examined Montag's thin, blue-jowled face. "How did you get shaken up?
What knocked the torch out of your hands?"
"I don't know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy.
Something's missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was
gone was the books I'd burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might
help."
"You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. "It would be funny if it were not
serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in
books. The same things could be in the `parlour families' today. The same
infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and
televisors, but are not. No, no, it's not books at all you're looking for!
Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures,
and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.
Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were
afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is
only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together
into one garment for us. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still
can't understand what I mean when I say all this. You are intuitively right,
that's what counts. Three things are missing.
"Number one: Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they

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have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture.
This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope.
You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The
more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you
can get on a sheet of paper, the more `literary' you are. That's my
definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life
often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and
leave her for the flies.
"So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the
face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless,
hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to
live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even
fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet
somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without
completing the cycle back to reality.
Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose
strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth. But when he
was held, rootless, in mid-air, by Hercules, he perished easily. If there
isn't something in that legend for us today, in this city, in our time, then I
am completely insane. Well, there we have the first thing I said we needed.
Quality, texture of information."
"And the second?"
"Leisure."
"Oh, but we've plenty of off-hours."

"Off-hours, yes. But time to think? If you're not driving a hundred miles an
hour, at a clip where you can't think of anything else but the danger, then
you're playing some game or sitting in some room where you can't argue with
the fourwall televisor. Why?
The televisor is 'real.' It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what
to think and blasts it in. It must be, right. It seems so right. It rushes you
on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, 'What
nonsense!'"
"Only the 'family' is 'people.'"
"I beg your pardon?"
"My wife says books aren't 'real.'"
"Thank God for that. You can shut them, say, 'Hold on a moment.' You play God
to it.
But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a
seed in a TV parlour? It grows you any shape it wishes! It is an environment
as real as the world. It becomes and is the truth. Books can be beaten down
with reason. But with all my knowledge and scepticism, I have never been able
to argue with a one-
hundred-piece symphony orchestra, full colour, three dimensions, and I being
in and part of those incredible parlours. As you see, my parlour is nothing
but four plaster walls. And here " He held out two small rubber plugs. "For my
ears when I ride the subway-jets."
"Denham's Dentifrice; they toil not, neither do they spin," said Montag, eyes
shut.
"Where do we go from here? Would books help us?"
"Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said,
quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three:
the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the inter-action of
the first two. And I hardly think a very old man and a fireman turned sour
could do much this late in the game..."
"I can get books."
"You're running a risk."
"That's the good part of dying; when you've nothing to lose, you run any risk
you want."

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"There, you've said an interesting thing," laughed Faber, "without having read
it!"
"Are things like that in books. But it came off the top of my mind!"
"All the better. You didn't fancy it up for me or anyone, even yourself."
Montag leaned forward. "This afternoon I thought that if it turned out that
books were worth while, we might get a press and print some extra copies--"
" We?"
"You and I"
"Oh, no ! " Faber sat up.
"But let me tell you my plan---"
"If you insist on telling me, I must ask you to leave."
"But aren't you interested?"
"Not if you start talking the sort of talk that might get me burnt for my
trouble. The only way I could possibly listen to you would be if somehow the
fireman structure itself could be burnt. Now if you suggest that we print
extra books and arrange to have them hidden in firemen's houses all over the
country, so that seeds of suspicion would be sown among these arsonists,
bravo, I'd say!"
"Plant the books, turn in an alarm, and see the firemen's houses bum, is that
what you mean?"
Faber raised his brows and looked at Montag as if he were seeing a new man. "I
was joking."
"If you thought it would be a plan worth trying, I'd have to take your word it
would help."

"You can't guarantee things like that! After all, when we had all the books we
needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do
need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we
might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses
and fools we are. They're Caesar's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade
roars down the avenue, `Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.' Most of us can't
rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't
time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are
in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per
cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be
saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of
saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore."
Faber got up and began to pace the room.
"Well?" asked Montag.
"You're absolutely serious?"
"Absolutely."
"It's an insidious plan, if I do say so myself." Faber glanced nervously at
his bedroom door. "To see the firehouses burn across the land, destroyed as
hotbeds of treason.
The salamander devours his tail! Ho, God! "
"I've a list of firemen's residences everywhere. With some sort of underground
"
"Can't trust people, that's the dirty part. You and I and who else will set
the fires?"
"Aren't there professors like yourself, former writers, historians, linguists
. . .?"
"Dead or ancient."
"The older the better; they'll go unnoticed. You know dozens, admit it ! "
"Oh, there are many actors alone who haven't acted Pirandello or Shaw or
Shakespeare for years because their plays are too aware of the world. We could
use their anger. And we could use the honest rage of those historians who
haven't written a line for forty years. True, we might form classes in
thinking and reading."
"Yes! "

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"But that would just nibble the edges. The whole culture's shot through. The
skeleton needs melting and re-shaping. Good God, it isn't as simple as just
picking up a book you laid down half a century ago. Remember, the firemen are
rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. You
firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and
crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but it's a small sideshow indeed, and
hardly necessary to keep things in line. So few want to be rebels any more.
And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily. Can you dance faster
than the White Clown, shout louder than `Mr. Gimmick' and the parlour
`families'? If you can, you'll win your way, Montag. In any event, you're a
fool. People are having fun"
"Committing suicide! Murdering!"
A bomber flight had been moving east all the time they talked, and only now
did the two men stop and listen, feeling the great jet sound tremble inside
themselves.
"Patience, Montag. Let the war turn off the `families.' Our civilization is
flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge."
"There has to be someone ready when it blows up."
"What? Men quoting Milton? Saying, I remember Sophocles? Reminding the
survivors that man has his good side, too? They will only gather up their
stones to hurl at each other. Montag, go home. Go to bed. Why waste your final
hours racing about your cage denying you're a squirrel?"
"Then you don't care any more?"
"I care so much I'm sick."
"And you won't help me?"

"Good night, good night."
Montag's hands picked up the Bible. He saw what his hands had done and he
looked surprised.
"Would you like to own this?"
Faber said, "I'd give my right arm."
Montag stood there and waited for the next thing to happen. His hands, by
themselves, like two men working together, began to rip the pages from the
book.
The hands tore the flyleaf and then the first and then the second page.
"Idiot, what're you doing!" Faber sprang up, as if he had been struck. He
fell, against
Montag. Montag warded him off and let his hands continue. Six more pages fell
to the floor. He picked them up and wadded the paper under Faber's gaze.
"Don't, oh, don't ! " said the old man.
"Who can stop me? I'm a fireman. I can bum you!"
The old man stood looking at him. "You wouldn't."
"I could ! "
"The book. Don't tear it any more." Faber sank into a chair, his face very
white, his mouth trembling. "Don't make me feel any more tired. What do you
want?"
"I need you to teach me."
"All right, all right."
Montag put the book down. He began to unwad the crumpled paper and flatten it
out as the old man watched tiredly.
Faber shook his head as if he were waking up.
"Montag, have you some money?"
"Some. Four, five hundred dollars. Why?"
"Bring it. I know a man who printed our college paper half a century ago. That
was the year I came to class at the start of the new semester and found only
one student to sign up for Drama from Aeschylus to O'Neill. You see? How like
a beautiful statue of ice it was, melting in the sun. I remember the
newspapers dying like huge moths.
No one wanted them back. No one missed them. And the Government, seeing how

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advantageous it was to have people reading only about passionate lips and the
fist in the stomach, circled the situation with your fire-eaters. So, Montag,
there's this unemployed printer. We might start a few books, and wait on the
war to break the pattern and give us the push we need. A few bombs and the
`families' in the walls of all the houses, like harlequin rats, will shut up!
In silence, our stage-whisper might carry."
They both stood looking at the book on the table.
"I've tried to remember," said Montag. "But, hell, it's gone when I turn my
head. God, how I want something to say to the Captain. He's read enough so he
has all the answers, or seems to have. His voice is like butter. I'm afraid
he'll talk me back the way I was. Only a week ago, pumping a kerosene hose, I
thought: God, what fun!"
The old man nodded. "Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history
and juvenile delinquents."
"So that's what I am."
"There's some of it in all of us."
Montag moved towards the front door. "Can you help me in any way tonight, with
the
Fire Captain? I need an umbrella to keep off the rain. I'm so damned afraid
I'll drown if he gets me again."
The old man said nothing, but glanced once more nervously, at his bedroom.
Montag caught the glance. "Well?"
The old man took a deep breath, held it, and let it out. He took another, eyes
closed, his mouth tight, and at last exhaled. "Montag..."

The old man turned at last and said, "Come along. I would actually have let
you walk right out of my house. I am a cowardly old fool."
Faber opened the bedroom door and led Montag into a small chamber where stood
a table upon which a number of metal tools lay among a welter of microscopic
wire-
hairs, tiny coils, bobbins, and crystals.
"What's this?" asked Montag.
"Proof of my terrible cowardice. I've lived alone so many years, throwing
images on walls with my imagination. Fiddling with electronics,
radio-transmission, has been my hobby. My cowardice is of such a passion,
complementing the revolutionary spirit that lives in its shadow, I was forced
to design this."
He picked up a small green-metal object no larger than a .22 bullet.
"I paid for all this-how? Playing the stock-market, of course, the last refuge
in the world for the dangerous intellectual out of a job. Well, I played the
market and built all this and I've waited. I've waited, trembling, half a
lifetime for someone to speak to me. I dared speak to no one. That day in the
park when we sat together, I knew that some day you might drop by, with fire
or friendship, it was hard to guess. I've had this little item ready for
months. But I almost let you go, I'm that afraid!"
"It looks like a Seashell radio."
"And something more! It listens! If you put it in your ear, Montag, I can sit
comfortably home, warming my frightened bones, and hear and analyse the
firemen's world, find its weaknesses, without danger. I'm the Queen Bee, safe
in the hive. You will be the drone, the travelling ear. Eventually, I could
put out ears into all parts of the city, with various men, listening and
evaluating. If the drones die, I'm still safe at home, tending my fright with
a maximum of comfort and a minimum of chance. See how safe I play it, how
contemptible I am?"
Montag placed the green bullet in his ear. The old man inserted a similar
object in his own ear and moved his lips.
"Montag! "
The voice was in Montag's head.
"I hear you! "

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The old man laughed. "You're coming over fine, too!" Faber whispered, but the
voice in Montag's head was clear. "Go to the firehouse when it's time. I'll be
with you. Let's listen to this Captain Beatty together. He could be one of us.
God knows. I'll give you things to say. We'll give him a good show. Do you
hate me for this electronic cowardice of mine? Here I am sending you out into
the night, while I stay behind the lines with my damned ears listening for you
to get your head chopped off."
"We all do what we do," said Montag. He put the Bible in the old man's hands.
"Here.
I'll chance turning in a substitute. Tomorrow--"
"I'll see the unemployed printer, yes; that much I can do."
"Good night, Professor."
"Not good night. I'll be with you the rest of the night, a vinegar gnat
tickling your ear when you need me. But good night and good luck, anyway."
The door opened and shut. Montag was in the dark street again, looking at the
world.
You could feel the war getting ready in the sky that night. The way the clouds
moved aside and came back, and the way the stars looked, a million of them
swimming between the clouds, like the enemy discs, and the feeling that the
sky might fall upon the city and turn it to chalk dust, and the moon go up in
red fire; that was how the night felt.
Montag walked from the subway with the money in his pocket (he had visited the
bank which was open all night and every night with robot tellers in
attendance) and as he walked he was listening to the Seashell radio in one
car... "We have mobilized

a million men. Quick victory is ours if the war comes .. .." Music flooded
over the voice quickly and it was gone.
"Ten million men mobilized," Faber's voice whispered in his other ear. "But
say one million. It's happier."
"Faber?"
"Yes?"
"I'm not thinking. I'm just doing like I'm told, like always. You said get the
money and I
got it. I didn't really think of it myself. When do I start working things out
on my own?"
"You've started already, by saying what you just said. You'll have to take me
on faith."
"I took the others on faith ! "
"Yes, and look where we're headed. You'll have to travel blind for a while.
Here's my arm to hold on to."
"I don't want to change sides and just be told what to do. There's no reason
to change if I do that."
"You're wise already!"
Montag felt his feet moving him on the sidewalk.toward his house. "Keep
talking."
"Would you like me to read? I'll read so you can remember. I go to bed only
five hours a night. Nothing to do. So if you like; I'll read you to sleep
nights. They say you retain knowledge even when you're sleeping, if someone
whispers it in your ear."
"Yes."
"Here." Far away across town in the night, the faintest whisper of a turned
page. "The
Book of Job."
The moon rose in the sky as Montag walked, his lips moving just a trifle.
He was eating a light supper at nine in the evening when the front door cried
out in the hall and Mildred ran from the parlour like a native fleeing an
eruption of Vesuvius.
Mrs. Phelps and Mrs. Bowles came through the front door and vanished into the

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volcano's mouth with martinis in their hands: Montag stopped eating. They were
like a monstrous crystal chandelier tinkling in a thousand chimes, he saw
their Cheshire
Cat smiles burning through the walls of the house, and now they were screaming
at each other above the din. Montag found himself at the parlour door with his
food still in his mouth.
"Doesn't everyone look nice!"
"Nice."
"You look fine, Millie! "
"Fine."
"Everyone looks swell."
"Swell!
"Montag stood watching them.
"Patience," whispered Faber.
"I shouldn't be here," whispered Montag, almost to himself. "I should be on my
way back to you with the money!" "Tomorrow's time enough. Careful!"
"Isn't this show wonderful?" cried Mildred. "Wonderful!"
On one wall a woman smiled and drank orange juice simultaneously. How does she
do both at once, thought Montag, insanely. In the other walls an X-ray of the
same woman revealed the contracting journey of the refreshing beverage on its
way to her delightful stomach! Abruptly the room took off on a rocket flight
into the clouds, it plunged into a lime-green sea where blue fish ate red and
yellow fish. A minute later, Three White Cartoon Clowns chopped off each
other's limbs to the accompaniment of immense incoming tides of laughter. Two
minutes more and the room whipped out

of town to the jet cars wildly circling an arena, bashing and backing up and
bashing each other again. Montag saw a number of bodies fly in the air.
"Millie, did you see that?"
"I saw it, I saw it! "
Montag reached inside the parlour wall and pulled the main switch. The images
drained away, as if the water had been let out from a gigantic crystal bowl of
hysterical fish.
The three women turned slowly and looked with unconcealed irritation and then
dislike at Montag.
"When do you suppose the war will start?" he said. "I notice your husbands
aren't here tonight?"
"Oh, they come and go, come and go," said Mrs. Phelps. "In again out again
Finnegan, the Army called Pete yesterday. He'll be back next week. The Army
said so. Quick war. Forty-eight hours they said, and everyone home. That's
what the
Army said. Quick war. Pete was called yesterday and they said he'd be, back
next week. Quick..."
The three women fidgeted and looked nervously at the empty mud-coloured walls.
"I'm not worried," said Mrs. Phelps. "I'll let Pete do all the worrying." She
giggled. "I'll let old Pete do all the worrying. Not me. I'm not worried."
"Yes," said Millie. "Let old Pete do the worrying."
"It's always someone else's husband dies, they say."
"I've heard that, too. I've never known any dead man killed in a war. Killed
jumping off buildings, yes, like Gloria's husband last week, but from wars?
No."
"Not from wars," said Mrs. Phelps. "Anyway, Pete and I always said, no tears,
nothing like that. It's our third marriage each and we're independent. Be
independent, we always said. He said, if I get killed off, you just go right
ahead and don't cry, but get married again, and don't think of me."
"That reminds me," said Mildred. "Did you see that Clara Dove five-minute
romance last night in your wall? Well, it was all about this woman who--"
Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women's faces as he had once
looked at the faces of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a

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child. The faces of those enamelled creatures meant nothing to him, though he
talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to be of that
religion, trying to know what that religion was, trying to get enough of the
raw incense and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his
blood to feel touched and concerned by the meaning of the colourful men and
women with the porcelain eyes and the blood-ruby lips. But there was nothing,
nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and
unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and
plaster and clay. So it was now, in his own parlour, with these women twisting
in their chairs under his gaze, lighting cigarettes, blowing smoke, touching
their sun-fired hair and examining their blazing fingernails as if they had
caught fire from his look. Their faces grew haunted with silence. They leaned
forward at the sound of Montag's swallowing his final bite of food. They
listened to his feverish breathing. The three empty walls of the room were
like the pale brows of sleeping giants now, empty of dreams. Montag felt that
if you touched these three staring brows you would feel a fine salt sweat on
your finger-tips. The perspiration gathered with the silence and the
sub-audible trembling around and about and in the women who were burning with
tension. Any moment they might hiss a long sputtering hiss and explode.
Montag moved his lips.
"Let's talk."

The women jerked and stared.
"How're your children, Mrs. Phelps?" he asked.
"You know I haven't any! No one in his right mind, the Good Lord knows; would
have children!" said Mrs. Phelps, not quite sure why she was angry with this
man.
"I wouldn't say that," said Mrs. Bowles. "I've had two children by Caesarian
section.
No use going through all that agony for a baby. The world must reproduce, you
know, the race must go on. Besides, they sometimes look just like you, and
that's nice. Two
Caesarians tamed the trick, yes, sir. Oh, my doctor said, Caesarians aren't
necessary; you've got the, hips for it, everything's normal, but I insisted."
"Caesarians or not, children are ruinous; you're out of your mind," said Mrs.
Phelps.
"I plunk the children in school nine days out of ten. I put up with them when
they come home three days a month; it's not bad at all. You heave them into
the 'parlour'
and turn the switch. It's like washing clothes; stuff laundry in and slam the
lid." Mrs.
Bowles tittered. "They'd just as soon kick as kiss me. Thank God, I can kick
back! "
The women showed their tongues, laughing.
Mildred sat a moment and then, seeing that Montag was still in the doorway,
clapped her hands. "Let's talk politics, to please Guy!"
"Sounds fine," said Mrs. Bowles. "I voted last election, same as everyone, and
I laid it on the line for President Noble. I think he's one of the
nicest-looking men who ever became president."
"Oh, but the man they ran against him!"
"He wasn't much, was he? Kind of small and homely and he didn't shave too
close or comb his hair very well."
"What possessed the 'Outs' to run him? You just don't go running a little
short man like that against a tall man. Besides -he mumbled. Half the time I
couldn't hear a word he said. And the words I did hear I didn't understand!"
"Fat, too, and didn't dress to hide it. No wonder the landslide was for
Winston Noble.
Even their names helped. Compare Winston Noble to Hubert Hoag for ten seconds
and you can almost figure the results."

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"Damn it!" cried Montag. "What do you know about Hoag and Noble?"
"Why, they were right in that parlour wall, not six months ago. One was always
picking his nose; it drove me wild."
"Well, Mr. Montag," said Mrs. Phelps, "do you want us to vote for a man like
that?"
Mildred beamed. "You just run away from the door, Guy, and don't make us
nervous."
But Montag was gone and back in a moment with a book in his hand.
"Guy!"
"Damn it all, damn it all, damn it!"
"What've you got there; isn't that a book? I thought that all special training
these days was done by film." Mrs. Phelps blinked. "You reading up on fireman
theory?"
"Theory, hell," said Montag. "It's poetry."
"Montag." A whisper.
"Leave me alone! " Montag felt himself turning in a great circling roar and
buzz and hum.
"Montag, hold on, don't..."
"Did you hear them, did you hear these monsters talking about monsters? Oh
God, the way they jabber about people and their own children and themselves
and the way they talk about their husbands and the way they talk about war,
dammit, I stand here and I can't believe it!"
"I didn't say a single word about any war, I'll have you know," said Mrs,
Phelps.
"As for poetry, I hate it," said Mrs. Bowles.

"Have you ever read any?"
"Montag," Faber's voice scraped away at him. "You'll ruin everything. Shut up,
you fool!"
"All three women were on their feet.
"Sit down!"
They sat.
"I'm going home," quavered Mrs. Bowles.
"Montag, Montag, please, in the name of God, what are you up to?" pleaded
Faber.
"Why don't you just read us one of those poems from your little book," Mrs.
Phelps nodded. "I think that'd he very interesting."
"That's not right," wailed Mrs. Bowles. "We can't do that!"
"Well, look at Mr. Montag, he wants to, I know he does. And if we listen nice,
Mr.
Montag will be happy and then maybe we can go on and do something else." She
glanced nervously at the long emptiness of the walls enclosing them.
"Montag, go through with this and I'll cut off, I'll leave." The beetle jabbed
his ear.
"What good is this, what'll you prove?"
"Scare hell out of them, that's what, scare the living daylights out!"
Mildred looked at the empty air. "Now Guy, just who are you talking to?"
A silver needle pierced his brain. "Montag, listen, only one way out, play it
as a joke, cover up, pretend you aren't mad at all. Then-walk to your
wall-incinerator, and throw the book in!"
Mildred had already anticipated this in a quavery voice. "Ladies, once a year,
every fireman's allowed to bring one book home, from the old days, to show his
family how silly it all was, how nervous that sort of thing can make you, how
crazy. Guy's surprise tonight is to read you one sample to show how mixed-up
things were, so none of us will ever have to bother our little old heads about
that junk again, isn't that right, darling?"
He crushed the book in his fists. "Say `yes.'"
His mouth moved like Faber's.
"Yes."

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Mildred snatched the book with a laugh. "Here! Read this one. No, I take it
back.
Here's that real funny one you read out loud today. Ladies, you won't
understand a word. It goes umpty-tumpty-ump. Go ahead, Guy, that page, dear."
He looked at the opened page.
A fly stirred its wings softly in his ear. "Read."
"What's the title, dear?"
"Dover Beach." His mouth was numb.
"Now read in a nice clear voice and go slow."
The room was blazing hot, he was all fire, he was all coldness; they sat in
the middle of an empty desert with three chairs and him standing, swaying, and
him waiting for
Mrs. Phelps to stop straightening her dress hem and Mrs. Bowles to take her
fingers away from her hair. Then he began to read in a low, stumbling voice
that grew firmer as he progressed from line to line, and his voice went out
across the desert, into the whiteness, and around the three sitting women
there in the great hot emptiness:
"`The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world."'
The chairs creaked under the three women. Montag finished it out:
"'Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath
really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help
for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash
by night.'"
Mrs. Phelps was crying.
The others in the middle of the desert watched her crying grow very loud as
her face squeezed itself out of shape. They sat, not touching her, bewildered
by her display.
She sobbed uncontrollably. Montag himself was stunned and shaken.
"Sh, sh," said Mildred. "You're all right, Clara, now, Clara, snap out of it!
Clara, what's wrong?"
"I-I,", sobbed Mrs. Phelps, "don't know, don't know, I just don't know, oh
oh..."
Mrs. Bowles stood up and glared at Montag. "You see? I knew it, that's what I
wanted to prove! I knew it would happen! I've always said, poetry and tears,
poetry and suicide and crying and awful feelings, poetry and sickness; all
that mush! Now I've had it proved to me. You're nasty, Mr. Montag, you're
nasty! "
Faber said, "Now..."
Montag felt himself turn and walk to the wall-slot and drop the book in
through the brass notch to the waiting flames.
"Silly words, silly words, silly awful hurting words," said Mrs. Bowles. "Why
do people want to hurt people? Not enough hurt in the world, you've got to
tease people with stuff like that ! "
"Clara, now, Clara," begged Mildred, pulling her arm. "Come on, let's be
cheery, you turn the `family' on, now. Go ahead. Let's laugh and be happy,
now, stop crying, we'll have a party!"
"No," said Mrs. Bowles. "I'm trotting right straight home. You want to visit
my house and `family,' well and good. But I won't come in this fireman's crazy

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house again in my lifetime! "
"Go home." Montag fixed his eyes upon her, quietly. "Go home and think of your
first husband divorced and your second husband killed in a jet and your third
husband blowing his brains out, go home and think of the dozen abortions
you've had, go home and think of that and your damn Caesarian sections, too,
and your children who hate your guts! Go home and think how it all happened
and what did you ever do to stop it? Go home, go home!" he yelled. "Before I
knock you down and kick you out of the door!"
Doors slammed and the house was empty. Montag stood alone in the winter
weather, with the parlour walls the colour of dirty snow.
In the bathroom, water ran. He heard Mildred shake the sleeping tablets into
her hand.
"Fool, Montag, fool, fool, oh God you silly fool..."
"Shut up!" He pulled the green bullet from his ear and jammed it into his
pocket.
It sizzled faintly. ". . . fool . . . fool . . ."
He searched the house and found the books where Mildred had stacked them
behind the refrigerator. Some were missing and he knew that she had started on
her own slow process of dispersing the dynamite in her house, stick by stick.
But he was not

angry now, only exhausted and bewildered with himself. He carried the books
into the backyard and hid them in the bushes near the alley fence. For tonight
only, he thought, in case she decides to do any more burning.
He went back through the house. "Mildred?" He called at the door of the
darkened bedroom. There was no sound.
Outside, crossing the lawn, on his way to work, he tried not to see how
completely dark and deserted Clarisse McClellan's house was ....
On the way downtown he was so completely alone with his terrible error that he
felt the necessity for the strange warmness and goodness that came from a
familiar and gentle voice speaking in the night. Already, in a few short
hours, it seemed that he had known Faber a lifetime. Now he knew that he was
two people, that he was above all Montag, who knew nothing, who did not even
know himself a fool, but only suspected it. And he knew that he was also the
old man who talked to him and talked to him as the train was sucked from one
end of the night city to the other on one long sickening gasp of motion. In
the days to follow, and in the nights when there was no moon and in the nights
when there was a very bright moon shining on the earth, the old man would go
on with this talking and this talking, drop by drop, stone by stone, flake by
flake. His mind would well over at last and he would not be Montag any more,
this the old man told him, assured him, promised him. He would be Montag-
plus-Faber, fire plus water, and then, one day, after everything had mixed and
simmered and worked away in silence, there would be neither fire nor water,
but wine. Out of two separate and opposite things, a third. And one day he
would look back upon the fool and know the fool. Even now he could feel the
start of the long journey, the leave-taking, the going away from the self he
had been.
It was good listening to the beetle hum, the sleepy mosquito buzz and delicate
filigree murmur of the old man's voice at first scolding him and then
consoling him in the late hour of night as he emerged from the steaming subway
toward the firehouse world.
"Pity, Montag, pity. Don't haggle and nag them; you were so recently one o f
them yourself. They are so confident that they will run on for ever. But they
won't run on.
They don't know that this is all one huge big blazing meteor that makes a
pretty fire in space, but that some day it'll have to hit. They see only the
blaze, the pretty fire, as you saw it.
"Montag, old men who stay at home, afraid, tending their peanut-brittle bones,
have no right to criticize. Yet you almost killed things at the start. Watch

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it! I'm with you, remember that. I understand how it happened. I must admit
that your blind raging invigorated me. God, how young I felt! But now-I want
you to feel old, I want a little of my cowardice to be distilled in you
tonight. The next few hours, when you see
Captain Beatty, tiptoe round him, let me hear him for you, let me feel the
situation out. Survival is our ticket. Forget the poor, silly women ...."
"I made them unhappier than they have been in years, Ithink," said Montag. "It
shocked me to see Mrs. Phelps cry. Maybe they're right, maybe it's best not to
face things, to run, have fun. I don't know. I feel guilty--"
"No, you mustn't! If there were no war, if there was peace in the world, I'd
say fine, have fun! But, Montag, you mustn't go back to being just a fireman.
All isn't well with the world."
Montag perspired.
"Montag, you listening?"
"My feet," said Montag. "I can't move them. I feel so damn silly. My feet
won't move!"
"Listen. Easy now," said the old man gently. "I know, I know. You're afraid of
making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young
I shoved my

ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty
my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide
your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn. Now, pick up your
feet, into the firehouse with you! We're twins, we're not alone any more,
we're not separated out in different parlours, with no contact between. If you
need help when Beatty pries at you, I'll be sitting right here in your eardrum
making notes!"
Montag felt his right foot, then his left foot, move.
"Old man," he said, "stay with me."
The Mechanical Hound was gone. Its kennel was empty and the firehouse stood
all about in plaster silence and the orange Salamander slept with its kerosene
in its belly and the firethrowers crossed upon its flanks and Montag came in
through the silence and touched the brass pole and slid up in the dark air,
looking back at the deserted kennel, his heart beating, pausing, beating.
Faber was a grey moth asleep in his ear, for the moment.
Beatty stood near the drop-hole waiting, but with his back turned as if he
were not waiting.
"Well," he said to the men playing cards, "here comes a very strange beast
which in all tongues is called a fool."
He put his hand to one side, palm up, for a gift. Montag put the book in it.
Without even glancing at the title, Beatty tossed the book into the
trash-basket and lit a cigarette. "`Who are a little wise, the best fools be.'
Welcome back, Montag. I hope you'll be staying, with us, now that your fever
is done and your sickness over. Sit in for a hand of poker?"
They sat and the cards were dealt. In Beatty's sight, Montag felt the guilt of
his hands. His fingers were like ferrets that had done some evil and now never
rested, always stirred and picked and hid in pockets, moving from under
Beatty's alcohol-
flame stare. If Beatty so much as breathed on them, Montag felt that his hands
might wither, turn over on their sides, and never be shocked to life again;
they would be buried the rest of his life in his coat-sleeves, forgotten. For
these were the hands that had acted on their own, no part of him, here was
where the conscience first manifested itself to snatch books, dart off with
job and Ruth and Willie Shakespeare, and now, in the firehouse, these hands
seemed gloved with blood.
Twice in half an hour, Montag had to rise from the game and go to the latrine
to wash his hands. When he came back he hid his hands under the table.
Beatty laughed. "Let's have your hands in sight, Montag.
Not that we don't trust you, understand, but--"

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They all laughed.
"Well," said Beatty, "the crisis is past and all is well, the sheep returns to
the fold.
We're all sheep who have strayed at times. Truth is truth, to the end of
reckoning, we've cried. They are never alone that are accompanied with noble
thoughts, we've shouted to ourselves. `Sweet food of sweetly uttered
knowledge,' Sir Philip Sidney said. But on the other hand: `Words are like
leaves and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely
found.' Alexander Pope. What do you think of that?"
"I don't know."
"Careful," whispered Faber, living in another world, far away.
"Or this? 'A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not
the Pierian spring; There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking
largely sobers us again.' Pope. Same Essay. Where does that put you?"
Montag bit his lip.

"I'll tell you," said Beatty, smiling at his cards. "That made you for a
little while a drunkard. Read a few lines and off you go over the cliff. Bang,
you're ready to blow up the world, chop off heads, knock down women and
children, destroy authority. I
know, I've been through it all."
"I'm all right," said Montag, nervously.
"Stop blushing. I'm not needling, really I'm not. Do you know, I had a dream
an hour ago. I lay down for a cat-nap and in this dream you and I, Montag, got
into a furious debate on books. You towered with rage, yelled quotes at me. I
calmly parried every thrust. Power, I said, And you, quoting Dr. Johnson, said
`Knowledge is more than equivalent to force!' And I said, `Well, Dr. Johnson
also said, dear boy, that "He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an
uncertainty.'" Stick with the fireman, Montag.
All else is dreary chaos!"
"Don't listen," whispered Faber. "He's trying to confuse. He's slippery. Watch
out!"
Beatty chuckled. "And you said, quoting, `Truth will come to light, murder
will not be hid long!' And I cried in good humour, 'Oh God, he speaks only of
his horse!' And
`The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.' And you yelled, 'This age
thinks better of a gilded fool, than of a threadbare saint in wisdom's
school!' And I whispered gently, 'The dignity of truth is lost with much
protesting.' And you screamed, 'Carcasses bleed at the sight of the murderer!'
And I said, patting your hand, 'What, do I give you trench mouth?' And you
shrieked, 'Knowledge is power!' and 'A dwarf on a giant's shoulders of the
furthest of the two!' and I summed my side up with rare serenity in, 'The
folly of mistaking a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring
of capital truths, and oneself as an oracle, is inborn in us, Mr. Valery once
said.'"
Montag's head whirled sickeningly. He felt beaten unmercifully on brow, eyes,
nose, lips, chin, on shoulders, on upflailing arms. He wanted to yell, "No!
shut up, you're confusing things, stop it!" Beatty's graceful fingers thrust
out to seize his wrist.
"God, what a pulse! I've got you going, have I, Montag. Jesus God, your pulse
sounds like the day after the war. Everything but sirens and bells! Shall I
talk some more? I like your look of panic. Swahili, Indian, English Lit., I
speak them all. A kind of excellent dumb discourse, Willie!"
"Montag, hold on! " The moth brushed Montag's ear. "He's muddying the waters!"
"Oh, you were scared silly," said Beatty, "for I was doing a terrible thing in
using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point!
What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on
you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the
moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives. And at the very end

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of my dream, along I came with the Salamander and said, Going my way? And you
got in and we drove back to the firehouse in beatific silence, all -dwindled
away to peace." Beatty let Montag's wrist go, let the hand slump limply on the
table. "All's well that is well in the end."
Silence. Montag sat like a carved white stone. The echo of the final hammer on
his skull died slowly away into the black cavern where Faber waited for the
echoes to subside. And then when the startled dust had settled down about
Montag's mind, Faber began, softly, "All right, he's had his say. You must
take it in. I'll say my say, too, in the next few hours. And you'll take it
in. And you'll try to judge them and make your decision as to which way to
jump, or fall. But I want it to be your decision, not mine, and not the
Captain's. But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy
of truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh, God, the
terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it's up
to you now to know with which ear you'll listen."

Montag opened his mouth to answer Faber and was saved this error in the
presence of others when the station bell rang. The alarm-voice in the ceiling
chanted. There was a tacking-tacking sound as the alarm-report telephone typed
out the address across the room. Captain Beatty, his poker cards in one pink
hand, walked with exaggerated slowness to the phone and ripped out the address
when the report was finished. He glanced perfunctorily at it, and shoved it in
his pocket. He came back and sat down. The others looked at him.
"It can wait exactly forty seconds while I take all the money away from you,"
said
Beatty, happily.
Montag put his cards down.
"Tired, Montag? Going out of this game?"
"Yes."
"Hold on. Well, come to think of it, we can finish this hand later. Just leave
your cards face down and hustle the equipment. On the double now." And Beatty
rose up again.
"Montag, you don't look well? I'd hate to think you were coming down with
another fever..."
"I'll be all right."
"You'll be fine. This is a special case. Come on, jump for it!"
They leaped into the air and clutched the brass pole as if it were the last
vantage point above a tidal wave passing below, and then the brass pole, to
their dismay slid them down into darkness, into the blast and cough and
suction of the gaseous dragon roaring to life!
"Hey !"
They rounded a corner in thunder and siren, with concussion of tyres, with
scream of rubber, with a shift of kerosene bulk in the glittery brass tank,
like the food in the stomach of a giant; with Montag's fingers jolting off the
silver rail, swinging into cold space, with the wind tearing his hair back
from his head, with the wind whistling in his teeth, and him all the while
thinking of the women, the chaff women in his parlour tonight, with the
kernels blown out from under them by a neon wind, and his silly damned reading
of a book to them. How like trying to put out fires with water-pistols, how
senseless and insane. One rage turned in for another. One anger displacing
another. When would he stop being entirely mad and be quiet, be very quiet
indeed?
"Here we go!"
Montag looked up. Beatty never drove, but he was driving tonight, slamming the
Salamander around corners, leaning forward high on the driver's throne, his
massive black slicker flapping out behind so that he seemed a great black bat
flying above the engine, over the brass numbers, taking the full wind.
"Here we go to keep the world happy, Montag !"
Beatty's pink, phosphorescent cheeks glimmered in the high darkness, and he

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was smiling furiously.
"Here we are!"
The Salamander boomed to a halt, throwing men off in slips and clumsy hops.
Montag stood fixing his raw eyes to the cold bright rail under his clenched
fingers.
I can't do it, he thought. How can I go at this new assignment, how can I go
on burning things? I can't go in this place.
Beatty, smelling of the wind through which he had rushed, was at Montag's
elbow.
"All right, Montag?"
The men ran like cripples in their clumsy boots, as quietly as spiders.
At last Montag raised his eyes and turned. Beatty was watching his face.
"Something the matter, Montag?"
"Why," said Montag slowly, "we've stopped in front of my house."

PART III
BURNING BRIGHT
LIGHTS flicked on and house-doors opened all down the street, to watch the
carnival set up. Montag and Beatty stared, one with dry satisfaction, the
other with disbelief, at the house before them, this main ring in which
torches would be juggled and fire eaten.
"Well," said Beatty, "now you did it. Old Montag wanted to fly near the sun
and now that he's burnt his damn wings, he wonders why. Didn't I hint enough
when I sent the
Hound around your place?"
Montag's face was entirely numb and featureless; he felt his head turn like a
stone carving to the dark place next door, set in its bright borders of
flowers.
Beatty snorted. "Oh, no! You weren't fooled by that little idiot's routine,
now, were you? Flowers, butterflies, leaves, sunsets, oh, hell! It's all in
her file. I'll be damned.
I've hit the bullseye. Look at the sick look on your face. A few grass-blades
and the quarters of the moon. What trash. What good did she ever do with all
that?"
Montag sat on the cold fender of the Dragon, moving his head half an inch to
the left, half an inch to the right, left, right, left right, left ....
"She saw everything. She didn't do anything to anyone. She just let them
alone."
"Alone, hell ! She chewed around you, didn't she? One of those damn
do-gooders with their shocked, holier-than-thou silences, their one talent
making others feel guilty. God damn, they rise like the midnight sun to sweat
you in your bed!"
The front door opened; Mildred came down the steps, running, one suitcase held
with a dream-like clenching rigidity in her fist, as a beetle-taxi hissed to
the curb.
"Mildred! "
She ran past with her body stiff, her face floured with powder, her mouth
gone, without lipstick.
"Mildred, you didn't put in the alarm!"
She shoved the valise in the waiting beetle, climbed in, and sat mumbling,
"Poor family, poor family, oh everything gone, everything, everything gone now
...."
Beatty grabbed Montag's shoulder as the beetle blasted away and hit seventy
miles an hour, far down the street, gone.
There was a crash like the falling parts of a dream fashioned out of warped
glass, mirrors, and crystal prisms. Montag drifted about as if still another
incomprehensible storm had turned him, to see Stoneman and Black wielding
axes, shattering window-
panes to provide cross-ventilation.

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The brush of a death's-head moth against a cold black screen. "Montag, this is
Faber. Do you hear me? What is happening
"This is happening to me," said Montag.
"What a dreadful surprise," said Beatty. "For everyone nowadays knows,
absolutely is certain, that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go
on. There are no consequences and no responsibilities. Except that there are.
But let's not talk about them, eh? By the time the consequences catch up with
you, it's too late, isn't it, Montag?"
"Montag, can you get away, run?" asked Faber.
Montag walked but did not feel his feet touch the cement and then the night
grasses.
Beatty flicked his igniter nearby and the small orange flame drew his
fascinated gaze.
"What is there about fire that's so lovely? No matter what age we are, what
draws us to it?" Beatty blew out the flame and lit it again. "It's perpetual
motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Or almost perpetual
motion. If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It's a
mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook

about friction and molecules. But they don't really know. Its real beauty is
that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too
burdensome, then into the furnace with it. Now, Montag, you're a burden. And
fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later.
Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical."
Montag stood looking in now at this queer house, made strange by the hour of
the night, by murmuring neighbour voices, by littered glass, and there on the
floor, their covers torn off and spilled out like swan-feathers, the
incredible books that looked so silly and really not worth bothering with, for
these were nothing but black type and yellowed paper, and ravelled binding.
Mildred, of course. She must have watched him hide the books in the garden and
brought them back in. Mildred. Mildred.
"I want you to do this job all by your lonesome, Montag. Not with kerosene and
a match, but piecework, with a flamethrower. Your house, your clean-up."
"Montag, can't you run, get away!"
"No!" cried Montag helplessly. "The Hound! Because of the Hound!"
Faber heard, and Beatty, thinking it was meant for him, heard. "Yes, the
Hound's somewhere about the neighbourhood, so don't try anything. Ready?"
"Ready." Montag snapped the safety-catch on the flamethrower.
"Fire!"
A great nuzzling gout of flame leapt out to lap at the books and knock them
against the wall. He stepped into the bedroom and fired twice and the twin
beds went up in a great simmering whisper, with more heat and passion and
light than he would have supposed them to contain. He burnt the bedroom walls
and the cosmetics chest because he wanted to change everything, the chairs,
the tables, and in the dining-
room the silverware and plastic dishes, everything that showed that he had
lived here in this empty house with a strange woman who would forget him
tomorrow, who had gone and quite forgotten him already, listening to her
Seashell radio pour in on her and in on her as she rode across town, alone.
And as before, it was good to burn, he felt himself gush out in the fire,
snatch, rend, rip in half with flame, and put away the senseless problem. If
there was no solution, well then now there was no problem, either. Fire was
best for everything!
"The books, Montag!"
The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and
yellow feathers.
And then he came to the parlour where the great idiot monsters lay asleep with
their white thoughts and their snowy dreams. And he shot a bolt at each of the
three blank walls and the vacuum hissed out at him. The emptiness made an even

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emptier whistle, a senseless scream. He tried to think about the vacuum upon
which the nothingness had performed, but he could not. He held his breath so
the vacuum could not get into his lungs. He cut off its terrible emptiness,
drew back, and gave the entire room a gift of one huge bright yellow flower of
burning. The fire-proof plastic sheath on everything was cut wide and the
house began to shudder with flame.
"When you're quite finished," said Beatty behind him. "You're under arrest."
The house fell in red coals and black ash. It bedded itself down in sleepy
pink-grey cinders and a smoke plume blew over it, rising and waving slowly
back and forth in the sky. It was three-thirty in the morning. The crowd drew
back into the houses; the great tents of the circus had slumped into charcoal
and rubble and the show was well over.
Montag stood with the flame-thrower in his limp hands, great islands of
perspiration drenching his armpits, his face smeared with soot. The other
firemen waited behind him, in the darkness, their faces illuminated faintly by
the smouldering foundation.

Montag started to speak twice and then finally managed to put his thought
together.
"Was it my wife turned in the alarm?"
Beatty nodded. "But her friends turned in an alarm earlier, that I let ride.
One way or the other, you'd have got it. It was pretty silly, quoting poetry
around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give a
man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You
think you can walk on water with your books.
Well, the world can get by just fine without them. Look where they got you, in
slime up to your lip. If I stir the slime with my little finger, you'll drown
! "
Montag could not move. A great earthquake had come with fire and levelled the
house and Mildred was under there somewhere and his entire life under there
and he could not move. The earthquake was still shaking and falling and
shivering inside him and he stood there, his knees half-bent under the great
load of tiredness and bewilderment and outrage, letting Beatty hit him without
raising a hand.
"Montag, you idiot, Montag, you damn fool; why did you really do it?"
Montag did not hear, he was far away, he was running with his mind, he was
gone, leaving this dead soot-covered body to sway in front of another raving
fool.
"Montag, get out of there! " said Faber.
Montag listened.
Beatty struck him a blow on the head that sent him reeling back. The green
bullet in which Faber's voice whispered and cried, fell to the sidewalk.
Beatty snatched it up, grinning. He held it half in, half out of his ear.
Montag heard the distant voice calling, "Montag, you all right?"
Beatty switched the green bullet off and thrust it in his pocket. "Well--so
there's more here than I thought. I saw you tilt your head, listening. First I
thought you had a
Seashell. But when you turned clever later, I wondered. We'll trace this and
drop it on your friend."
"No! " said Montag.
He twitched the safety catch on the flame-thrower. Beatty glanced instantly at
Montag's fingers and his eyes widened the faintest bit. Montag saw the
surprise there and himself glanced to his hands to see what new thing they had
done. Thinking back later he could never decide whether the hands or Beatty's
reaction to the hands gave him the final push toward murder. The last rolling
thunder of the avalanche stoned down about his ears, not touching him.
Beatty grinned his most charming grin. "Well, that's one way to get an
audience. Hold a gun on a man and force him to listen to your speech. Speech
away. What'll it be this time? Why don't you belch Shakespeare at me, you

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fumbling snob? `There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats, for I am arm'd
so strong in honesty that they pass by me as an idle wind, which I respect
not!' How's that? Go ahead now, you second-
hand litterateur, pull the trigger." He took one step toward Montag.
Montag only said, "We never burned right..."
"Hand it over, Guy," said Beatty with a fixed smile.
And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping, sprawling, gibbering mannikin,
no longer human or known, all writhing flame on the lawn as Montag shot one
continuous pulse of liquid fire on him. There was a hiss like a great mouthful
of spittle banging a redhot stove, a bubbling and frothing as if salt had been
poured over a monstrous black snail to cause a terrible liquefaction and a
boiling over of yellow foam. Montag shut his eyes, shouted, shouted, and
fought to get his hands at his ears to clamp and to cut away the sound. Beatty
flopped over and over and over, and at last twisted in on himself like a
charred wax doll and lay silent.
The other two firemen did not move.
Montag kept his sickness down long enough to aim the flame-thrower. "Turn
around!"

They turned, their faces like blanched meat, streaming sweat; he beat their
heads, knocking off their helmets and bringing them down on themselves. They
fell and lay without moving.
The blowing of a single autumn leaf.
He turned and the Mechanical Hound was there.
It was half across the lawn, coming from the shadows, moving with such
drifting ease that it was like a single solid cloud of black-grey smoke blown
at him in silence.
It made a single last leap into the air, coming down at Montag from a good
three feet over his head, its spidered legs reaching, the procaine needle
snapping out its single angry tooth. Montag caught it with a bloom of fire, a
single wondrous blossom that curled in petals of yellow and blue and orange
about the metal dog, clad it in a new covering as it slammed into Montag and
threw him ten feet back against the bole of a tree, taking the flame-gun with
him. He felt it scrabble and seize his leg and stab the needle in for a moment
before the fire snapped the Hound up in the air, burst its metal bones at the
joints, and blew out its interior in the single flushing of red colour like a
skyrocket fastened to the street. Montag lay watching the dead-alive thing
fiddle the air and die. Even now it seemed to want to get back at him and
finish the injection which was now working through the flesh of his leg. He
felt all of the mingled relief and horror at having pulled back only in time
to have just his knee slammed by the fender of a car hurtling by at ninety
miles an hour. He was afraid to get up, afraid he might not be able to gain
his feet at all, with an anaesthetized leg. A
numbness in a numbness hollowed into a numbness....
And now...?
The street empty, the house burnt like an ancient bit of stage-scenery, the
other homes dark, the Hound here, Beatty there, the three other firemen
another place, and the Salamander . . . ? He gazed at the immense engine. That
would have to go, too.
Well, he thought, let's see how badly off you are. On your feet now. Easy,
easy . . .
there.
He stood and he had only one leg. The other was like a chunk of burnt pine-log
he was carrying along as a penance for some obscure sin. When he put his
weight on it, a shower of silver needles gushed up the length of the calf and
went off in the knee.
He wept. Come on! Come on, you, you can't stay here!
A few house-lights were going on again down the street, whether from the
incidents just passed, or because of the abnormal silence following the fight,

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Montag did not know. He hobbled around the ruins, seizing at his bad leg when
it lagged, talking and whimpering and shouting directions at it and cursing it
and pleading with it to work for him now when it was vital. He heard a number
of people crying out in the darkness and shouting. He reached the back yard
and the alley. Beatty, he thought, you're not a problem now. You always said,
don't face a problem, bum it. Well, now I've done both. Good-bye, Captain.
And he stumbled along the alley in the dark.
A shotgun blast went off in his leg every time he put it down and he thought,
you're a fool, a damn fool, an awful fool, an idiot, an awful idiot, a damn
idiot, and a fool, a damn fool; look at the mess and where's the mop, look at
the mess, and what do you do? Pride, damn it, and temper, and you've junked it
all, at the very start you vomit on everyone and on yourself. But everything
at once, but everything one on top of another; Beatty, the women, Mildred,
Clarisse, everything. No excuse, though, no excuse. A fool, a damn fool, go
give yourself up!
No, we'll save what we can, we'll do what there is left to do. If we have to
burn, let's take a few more with us. Here!

He remembered the books and turned back. Just on the off chance.
He found a few books where he had left them, near the garden fence. Mildred,
God bless her, had missed a few. Four books still lay hidden where he had put
them.
Voices were wailing in the night and flashbeams swirled about. Other
Salamanders were roaring their engines far away, and police sirens were
cutting their way across town with their sirens.
Montag took the four remaining books and hopped, jolted, hopped his way down
the alley and suddenly fell as if his head had been cut off and only his body
lay there.
Something inside had jerked him to a halt and flopped him down. He lay where
he had fallen and sobbed, his legs folded, his face pressed blindly to the
gravel.
Beatty wanted to die.
In the middle of the crying Montag knew it for the truth. Beatty had wanted to
die. He had just stood there, not really trying to save himself, just stood
there, joking, needling, thought Montag, and the thought was enough to stifle
his sobbing and let him pause for air. How strange, strange, to want to die so
much that you let a man walk around armed and then instead of shutting up and
staying alive, you go on yelling at people and making fun of them until you
get them mad, and then ....
At a distance, running feet.
Montag sat up. Let's get out of here. Come on, get up, get up, you just can't
sit! But he was still crying and that had to be finished. It was going away
now. He hadn't wanted to kill anyone, not even Beatty. His flesh gripped him
and shrank as if it had been plunged in acid. He gagged. He saw Beatty, a
torch, not moving, fluttering out on the grass. He bit at his knuckles. I'm
sorry, I'm sorry, oh God, sorry ....
He tried to piece it all together, to go back to the normal pattern of life a
few short days ago before the sieve and the sand, Denham's Dentifrice,
moth-voices, fireflies, the alarms and excursions, too much for a few short
days, too much, indeed, for a lifetime.
Feet ran in the far end of the alley.
"Get up!" he told himself. "Damn it, get up!" he said to the leg, and stood.
The pains were spikes driven in the kneecap and then only darning needles and
then only common, ordinary safety pins, and after he had dragged along fifty
more hops and jumps, filling his hand with slivers from the board fence, the
prickling was like someone blowing a spray of scalding water on that leg. And
the leg was at last his own leg again. He had been afraid that running might
break the loose ankle. Now, sucking all the night into his open mouth, and
blowing it out pale, with all the blackness left heavily inside himself, he

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set out in a steady jogging pace. He carried the books in his hands.
He thought of Faber.
Faber was back there in the steaming lump of tar that had no name or identity
now.
He had burnt Faber, too. He felt so suddenly shocked by this that he felt
Faber was really dead, baked like a roach in that small green capsule shoved
and lost in the pocket of a man who was now nothing but a frame skeleton
strung with asphalt tendons.
You must remember, burn them or they'll burn you, he thought. Right now it's
as simple as that.
He searched his pockets, the money was there, and in his other pocket he found
the usual Seashell upon which the city was talking to itself in the cold black
morning.
"Police Alert. Wanted: Fugitive in city. Has committed murder and crimes
against the
State. Name: Guy Montag. Occupation: Fireman. Last seen . . ."
He ran steadily for six blocks, in the alley, and then the alley opened out on
to a wide empty thoroughfare ten lanes wide. It seemed like a boatless river
frozen there in the

raw light of the high white arc-lamps; you could drown trying to cross it, he
felt; it was too wide, it was too open. It was a vast stage without scenery,
inviting him to run across, easily seen in the blazing illumination, easily
caught, easily shot down.
The Seashell hummed in his ear.
"... watch for a man running ... watch for the running man . . . watch for a
man alone, on foot . . . watch..."
Montag pulled back into the shadows. Directly ahead lay a gas station, a great
chunk of porcelain snow shining there, and two silver beetles pulling in to
fill up. Now he must be clean and presentable if he wished, to walk, not run,
stroll calmly across that wide boulevard. It would give him an extra margin of
safety if he washed up and combed his hair before he went on his way to get
where . . . ?
Yes, he thought, where am I running?
Nowhere. There was nowhere to go, no friend to turn to, really. Except Faber.
And then he realized that he was indeed, running toward Faber's house,
instinctively. But
Faber couldn't hide him; it would be suicide even to try. But he knew that he
would go to see Faber anyway, for a few short minutes. Faber's would be the
place where he might refuel his fast draining belief in his own ability to
survive. He just wanted to know that there was a man like Faber in the world.
He wanted to see the man alive and not burned back there like a body shelled
in another body. And some of the money must be left with Faber, of course, to
be spent after Montag ran on his way.
Perhaps he could make the open country and live on or near the rivers and near
the highways, in the fields and hills.
A great whirling whisper made him look to the sky.
The police helicopters were rising so far away that it seemed someone had
blown the grey head off a dry dandelion flower. Two dozen of them flurried,
wavering, indecisive, three miles off, like butterflies puzzled by autumn, and
then they were plummeting down to land, one by one, here, there, softly
kneading the streets where, turned back to beetles, they shrieked along the
boulevards or, as suddenly, leapt back into the sir, continuing their search.
And here was the gas station, its attendants busy now with customers.
Approaching from the rear, Montag entered the men's washroom. Through the
aluminium wall he heard a radio voice saying, "War has been declared." The gas
was being pumped outside. The men in the beetles were talking and the
attendants were talking about the engines, the gas, the money owed. Montag
stood trying to make himself feel the shock of the quiet statement from the

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radio, but nothing would happen. The war would have to wait for him to come to
it in his personal file, an hour, two hours from now.
He washed his hands and face and towelled himself dry, making little sound. He
came out of the washroom and shut the door carefully and walked into the
darkness and at last stood again on the edge of the empty boulevard.
There it lay, a game for him to win, a vast bowling alley in the cool morning.
The boulevard was as clean as the surface of an arena two minutes before the
appearance of certain unnamed victims and certain unknown killers. The air
over and above the vast concrete river trembled with the warmth of Montag's
body alone; it was incredible how he felt his temperature could cause the
whole immediate world to vibrate. He was a phosphorescent target; he knew it,
he felt it. And now he must begin his little walk.
Three blocks away a few headlights glared. Montag drew a deep breath. His
lungs were like burning brooms in his chest. His mouth was sucked dry from
running. His throat tasted of bloody iron and there was rusted steel in his
feet.

What about those lights there? Once you started walking you'd have to gauge
how fast those beetles could make it down here. Well, how far was it to the
other curb? It seemed like a hundred yards. Probably not a hundred, but figure
for that anyway, figure that with him going very slowly, at a nice stroll, it
might take as much as thirty seconds, forty seconds to walk all the way. The
beetles? Once started, they could leave three blocks behind them in about
fifteen seconds. So, even if halfway across he started to run . . . ?
He put his right foot out and then his left foot and then his right. He walked
on the empty avenue.
Even if the street were entirely empty, of course, you couldn't be sure of a
safe crossing, for a car could appear suddenly over the rise four blocks
further on and be on and past you before you had taken a dozen breaths.
He decided not to count his steps. He looked neither to left nor right. The
light from the overhead lamps seemed as bright and revealing as the midday sun
and just as hot.
He listened to the sound of the car picking up speed two blocks away on his
right. Its movable headlights jerked back and forth suddenly, and caught at
Montag.
Keep going.
Montag faltered, got a grip on the books, and forced himself not to freeze.
Instinctively he took a few quick, running steps then talked out loud to
himself and pulled up to stroll again. He was now half across the street, but
the roar from the beetle's engines whined higher as it put on speed.
The police, of course. They see me. But slow now; slow, quiet, don't turn,
don't look, don't seem concerned. Walk, that's it, walls, walk.
The beetle was rushing. The beetle was roaring. The beetle raised its speed.
The beetle was whining. The beetle was in high thunder. The beetle came
skimming. The beetle came in a single whistling trajectory, fired from an
invisible rifle. It was up to
120 m.p.h. It was up to 130 at least. Montag clamped his jaws. The heat of the
racing headlights burnt his cheeks, it seemed, and jittered his eye-lids and
flushed the sour sweat out all over his body.
He began to shuffle idiotically and talk to himself and then he broke and just
ran. He put out his legs as far as they would go and down and then far out
again and down and back and out and down and back. God ! God! He dropped a
book, broke pace, almost turned, changed his mind, plunged on, yelling in
concrete emptiness, the beetle scuttling after its running food, two hundred,
one hundred feet away, ninety, eighty, seventy, Montag gasping, flailing his
hands, legs up down out, up down out, closer, closer, hooting, calling, his
eyes burnt white now as his head jerked about to confront the flashing glare,
now the beetle was swallowed in its own light, now it was nothing but a torch
hurtling upon him; all sound, all blare. Now-almost on top of him !

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He stumbled and fell.
I'm done! It's over!
But the falling made a difference. An instant before reaching him the wild
beetle cut and swerved out. It was gone. Montag lay flat, his head down. Wisps
of laughter trailed back to him with the blue exhaust from the beetle.
His right hand was extended above him, flat. Across the extreme tip of his
middle finger, he saw now as he lifted that hand, a faint sixteenth of an inch
of black tread where tyre had touched in passing. He looked at that black line
with disbelief, getting to his feet.
That wasn't the police, he thought.
He looked down the boulevard. It was clear now. A carful of children, all
ages, God knew, from twelve to sixteen, out

124 FAHRENHEIT 451
whistling, yelling, hurrahing, had seen a man, a very extraordinary sight, a
man strolling, a rarity, and simply said, "Let's get him," not knowing he was
the fugitive Mr.
Montag, simply a,number of children out for a long night of roaring five or
six hundred miles in a few moonlit hours, their faces icy with wind, and
coming home or not coming at dawn, alive or not alive, that made the
adventure.
They would have killed me, thought Montag, swaying, the air still torn and
stirring about him in dust, touching his bruised cheek. For no reason at all
in the world they would have killed me.
He walked toward the far kerb telling each foot to go and keep going. Somehow
he had picked up the spilled books; he didn't remember bending or touching
them. He kept moving them from hand to hand as if they were a poker hand he
could not figure.
I wonder if they were the ones who killed Clarisse?
He stopped and his mind said it again, very loud.
I wonder if they were the ones who killed Clarisse!
He wanted to run after them yelling.
His eyes watered.
The thing that had saved him was falling flat. The driver of that car, seeing
Montag down, instinctively considered the probability that running over a body
at that speed might turn the car upside down and spill them out. If Montag had
remained an upright target. . . ?
Montag gasped.
Far down the boulevard, four blocks away, the beetle had slowed, spun about on
two wheels, and was now racing back, slanting over on the wrong side of the
street, picking up speed.
But Montag was gone, hidden in the safety of the dark alley for which he had
set out on a long journey, an hour or was it a minute, ago? He stood shivering
in the night, looking back out as the beetle ran by and skidded back to the
centre of the avenue, whirling laughter in the air all about it, gone.
Further on, as Montag moved in darkness, he could see the helicopters falling,
falling, like the first flakes of snow in the long winter. to come....
The house was silent.
Montag approached from the rear, creeping through a thick night-moistened
scent of daffodils and roses and wet grass. He touched the screen door in
back, found it open, slipped in, moved across the porch, listening.
Mrs. Black, are you asleep in there? he thought. This isn't good, but your
husband did it to others and never asked and never wondered and never worried.
And now since you're a fireman's wife, it's your house and your turn, for all
the houses your husband burned and the people he hurt without thinking. .
The house did not reply.
He hid the books in the kitchen and moved from the house again to the alley
and looked back and the house was still dark and quiet, sleeping.
On his way across town, with the helicopters fluttering like torn bits of

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paper in the sky, he phoned the alarm at a lonely phone booth outside a store
that was closed for the night. Then he stood in the cold night air, waiting
and at a distance he heard the fire sirens start up and run, and the
Salamanders coming, coming to bum Mr. Black's house while he was away at work,
to make his wife stand shivering in the morning air while the roof let go and
dropped in upon the fire. But now, she was still asleep.
Good night, Mrs. Black, he thought. -

"Faber! "
Another rap, a whisper, and a long waiting. Then, after a minute, a small
light flickered inside Faber's small house. After another pause, the back door
opened.
They stood looking at each other in the half-light, Faber and Montag, as if
each did not believe in the other's existence. Then Faber moved and put out
his hand and grabbed Montag and moved him in and sat him down and went back
and stood in the door, listening. The sirens were wailing off in the morning
distance. He came in and shut the door.
Montag said, "I've been a fool all down the line. I can't stay long. I'm on my
way God knows where."
"At least you were a fool about the right things," said Faber. "I thought you
were dead. The audio-capsule I gave you--"
"Burnt."
"I heard the captain talking to you and suddenly there was nothing. I almost
came out looking for you."
"The captain's dead. He found the audio-capsule, he heard your voice, he was
going to trace it. I killed him with the flamethrower."
Faber sat down and did not speak for a time.
"My God, how did this happen?" said Montag. "It was only the other night
everything was fine and the next thing I know I'm drowning. How many times can
a man go down and still be alive? I can't breathe. There's Beatty dead, and he
was my friend once, and there's Millie gone, I thought she was my wife, but
now I don't know. And the house all burnt. And my job gone and myself on the
run, and I planted a book in a fireman's house on the way. Good Christ, the
things I've done in a single week! "
"You did what you had to do. It was coming on for a long time."
"Yes, I believe that, if there's nothing else I believe. It saved itself up to
happen. I
could feel it for a long time, I was saving something up, I went around doing
one thing and feeling another. God, it was all there. It's a wonder it didn't
show on me, like fat.
And now here I am, messing up your life. They might follow me here."
"I feel alive for the first time in years," said Faber. "I feel I'm doing what
I should have done a lifetime ago. For a little while I'm not afraid. Maybe
it's because I'm doing the right thing at last. Maybe it's because I've done a
rash thing and don't want to look the coward to you. I suppose I'll have to do
even more violent things, exposing myself so I won't fall down on the job and
turn scared again. What are your plans?"
"To keep running."
"You know the war's on?"
"I heard."
"God, isn't it funny?" said the old man. "It seems so remote because we have
our own troubles."
"I haven't had time to think." Montag drew out a hundred dollars. "I want this
to stay with you, use it any way that'll help when I'm gone."
"But-- "
"I might be dead by noon; use this."
Faber nodded. "You'd better head for the river if you can, follow along it,
and if you can hit the old railroad lines going out into the country, follow
them. Even though practically everything's airborne these days and most of the

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tracks are abandoned, the rails are still there, rusting. I've heard there are
still hobo camps all across the country, here and there; walking camps they
call them, and if you keep walking far enough and keep an eye peeled, they say
there's lots of old Harvard degrees on the tracks between here and Los
Angeles. Most of them are wanted and hunted in the cities. They survive, I
guess. There aren't many of them, and I guess the

Government's never considered them a great enough danger to go in and track
them down. You might hole up with them for a time and get in touch with me in
St. Louis, I'm leaving on the five a.m. bus this morning, to see a retired
printer there, I'm getting out into the open myself, at last. The money will
be put to good use. Thanks and God bless you. Do you want to sleep a few
minutes?"
"I'd better run."
"Let's check."
He took Montag quickly into the bedroom and lifted a picture frame aside,
revealing a television screen the size of a postal card. "I always wanted
something very small, something I could talk to, something I could blot out
with the palm of my hand, if necessary, nothing that could shout me down,
nothing monstrous big. So, you see."
He snapped it on. "Montag," the TV set said, and lit up. "M-O-N-T-A-G." The
name was spelled out by the voice. "Guy Montag. Still running. Police
helicopters are up. A
new Mechanical Hound has been brought from another district.. ."
Montag and Faber looked at each other.
". . . Mechanical Hound never fails. Never since its first use in tracking
quarry has this incredible invention made a mistake. Tonight, this network is
proud to have the opportunity to follow the Hound by camera helicopter as it
starts on its way to the target..."
Faber poured two glasses of whisky. "We'll need these."
They drank.
". . . nose so sensitive the Mechanical Hound can remember and identify ten
thousand odour-indexes on ten thousand men without re-setting! "
Faber trembled the least bit and looked about at his house, at the walls, the
door, the doorknob, and the chair where Montag now sat. Montag saw the look.
They both looked quickly about the house and Montag felt his nostrils dilate
and he knew that he was trying to track himself and his nose was suddenly good
enough to sense the path he had made in the air of the room and the sweat of
his hand hung from the doorknob, invisible, but as numerous as the jewels of a
small chandelier, he was everywhere, in and on and about everything, he was a
luminous cloud, a ghost that made breathing once more impossible. He saw Faber
stop up his own breath for fear of drawing that ghost into his own body,
perhaps, being contaminated with the phantom exhalations and odours of a
running man.
"The Mechanical Hound is now landing by helicopter at the site of the
Burning!"
And there on the small screen was the burnt house, and the crowd, and
something with a sheet over it and out of the sky, fluttering, came the
helicopter like a grotesque flower.
So they must have their game out, thought Montag. The circus must go on, even
with war beginning within the hour....
He watched the scene, fascinated, not wanting to move. It seemed so remote and
no part of him; it was a play apart and separate, wondrous to watch, not
without its strange pleasure. That's all for me, you thought, that's all
taking place just for me, by
God.
If he wished, he could linger here, in comfort, and follow the entire hunt on
through its swift. phases, down alleys across streets, over empty running
avenues, crossing lots and playgrounds, with pauses here or there for the

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necessary commercials, up other alleys to the burning house of Mr. and Mrs.
Black, and so on finally to this house with
Faber and himself seated, drinking, while the Electric Hound snuffed down the
last trail, silent as a drift of death itself, skidded to a halt outside that
window there. Then, if he wished, Montag might rise, walk to the window, keep
one eye on the TV screen, open the window, lean out, look back, and see
himself dramatized, described, made

over, standing there, limned in the bright small television screen from
outside, a drama to be watched objectively, knowing that in other parlours he
was large as life, in full colour, dimensionally perfect! And if he kept his
eye peeled quickly he would see himself, an instant before oblivion, being
punctured for the benefit of how many civilian parlour-sitters who had been
wakened from sleep a few minutes ago by the frantic sirening of their
living-room walls to come watch the big game, the hunt, the one-man carnival.
Would he have time for a speech? As the Hound seized him, in view of ten or
twenty or thirty million people, mightn't he sum up his entire life in the
last week in one single phrase or a word that would stay with them long after
the. Hound had turned, clenching him in its metal-plier jaws, and trotted off
in darkness, while the camera remained stationary, watching the creature
dwindle in the distance--a splendid fade-
out! What could he say in a single word, a few words, that would sear all
their faces and wake them up?
"There," whispered Faber.
Out of a helicopter glided something that was not machine, not animal, not
dead, not alive, glowing with a pale green luminosity. It stood near the
smoking ruins of
Montag's house and the men brought his discarded flame-thrower to it and put
it down under the muzzle of the Hound. There was a whirring, clicking,
humming.
Montag shook his head and got up and drank the rest of his drink. "It's time.
I'm sorry about this:"
"About what? Me? My house? I deserve everything. Run, for God's sake. Perhaps
I
can delay them here--"
"Wait. There's no use your being discovered. When I leave, burn the spread of
this bed, that I touched. Burn the chair in the living room, in your wall
incinerator. Wipe down the furniture with alcohol, wipe the door-knobs. Burn
the throwrug in the parlour. Turn the air-conditioning on full in all the
rooms and spray with moth-spray if you have it. Then, turn on your lawn
sprinklers as high as they'll go and hose off the sidewalks. With any luck at
all, we can kill the trail in here, anyway..'
Faber shook his hand. "I'll tend to it. Good luck. If we're both in good
health, next week, the week after, get in touch. General Delivery, St. Louis.
I'm sorry there's no way I can go with you this time, by ear-phone. That was
good for both of us. But my equipment was limited. You see, I never thought I
would use it. What a silly old man.
No thought there. Stupid, stupid. So I haven't another green bullet, the right
kind, to put in your head. Go now!"
"One last thing. Quick. A suitcase, get it, fill it with your dirtiest
clothes, an old suit, the dirtier the better, a shirt, some old sneakers and
socks . . . ."
Faber was gone and back in a minute. They sealed the cardboard valise with
clear tape. "To keep the ancient odour of Mr. Faber in, of course," said Faber
sweating at the job.
Montag doused the exterior of the valise with whisky. "I don't want that Hound
picking up two odours at once. May I take this whisky. I'll need it later.
Christ I hope this works!"
They shook hands again and, going out of the door, they glanced at the TV. The

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Hound was on its way, followed by hovering helicopter cameras, silently,
silently, sniffing the great night wind. It was running down the first alley.
"Good-bye ! "
And Montag was out the back door lightly, running with the half-empty valise.
Behind him he heard the lawn-sprinkling system jump up, filling the dark air
with rain that fell gently and then with a steady pour all about, washing on
the sidewalks, and draining

into the alley. He carried a few drops of this rain with him on his face. He
thought he heard the old man call good-bye, but he-wasn't certain.
He ran very fast away from the house, down toward the river.
Montag ran.
He could feel the Hound, like autumn, come cold and dry and swift, like a wind
that didn't stir grass, that didn't jar windows or disturb leaf-shadows on the
white sidewalks as it passed. The Hound did not touch the world. It carried
its silence with it, so you could feel the silence building up a pressure
behind you all across town.
Montag felt the pressure rising, and ran.
He stopped for breath, on his way to the river, to peer through dimly lit
windows of wakened houses, and saw the silhouettes of people inside watching
their parlour walls and there on the walls the Mechanical Hound, a breath of
neon vapour, spidered along, here and gone, here and gone! Now at Elm Terrace,
Lincoln, Oak, Park, and up the alley toward Faber's house.
Go past, thought Montag, don't stop, go on, don't turn in!
On the parlour wall, Faber's house, with its sprinkler system pulsing in the
night air.
The Hound paused, quivering.
No! Montag held to the window sill. This way! Here!
The procaine needle flicked out and in, out and in. A single clear drop of the
stuff of dreams fell from the needle as it vanished in the Hound's muzzle.
Montag held his breath, like a doubled fist, in his chest.
The Mechanical Hound turned and plunged away from Faber's house down the alley
again.
Montag snapped his gaze to the sky. The helicopters were closer, a great
blowing of insects to a single light source.
With an effort, Montag reminded himself again that this was no fictional
episode to be watched on his run to the river; it was in actuality his own
chess-game he was witnessing, move by move.
He shouted to give himself the necessary push away from this last house
window, and the fascinating seance going on in there! Hell! and he was away
and gone! The alley, a street, the alley, a street, and the smell of the
river. Leg out, leg down, leg out and down. Twenty million Montags running,
soon, if the cameras caught him. Twenty million Montags running, running like
an ancient flickery Keystone Comedy, cops, robbers, chasers and the chased,
hunters and hunted, he had seen it a thousand times. Behind him now twenty
million silently baying Hounds ricocheted across parlours, three-cushion
shooting from right wall to centre wall to left wall, gone, right wall, centre
wall, left wall, gone !
Montag jammed his Seashell to his ear.
"Police suggest entire population in the Elm Terrace area do as follows:
Everyone in every house in every street open a front or rear door or look from
the windows. The fugitive cannot escape if everyone in the next minute looks
from his house. Ready! "
Of course! Why hadn't they done it before! Why, in all the years, hadn't this
game been tried! Everyone up, everyone out! He couldn't be missed! The only
man running alone in the night city, the only man proving his legs!
"At the count of ten now! One! Two!"
He felt the city rise. Three .
He felt the city turn to its thousands of doors.

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Faster! Leg up, leg down !
"Four ! "
The people sleepwalking in their hallways.
"Five! "

He felt their hands on the doorknobs!
The smell of the river was cool and like a solid rain. His throat was burnt
rust and his eyes were wept dry with running. He yelled as if this yell would
jet him on, fling him the last hundred yards.
"Six, seven, eight ! "
The doorknobs turned on five thousand doors. "Nine!"
He ran out away from the last row of houses, on a slope leading down to a
solid moving blackness. "Ten!"
The doors opened.
He imagined thousands on thousands of faces peering into yards, into alleys,
and into the sky, faces hid by curtains, pale, night-frightened faces, like
grey animals peering from electric caves, faces with grey colourless eyes,
grey tongues and grey thoughts looking out through the numb flesh of the face.
But he was at the river.
He touched it, just to be sure it was real. He waded in and stripped in
darkness to the skin, splashed his body, arms, legs, and head with raw liquor;
drank it and snuffed some up his nose. Then he dressed in Faber's old clothes
and shoes. He tossed his own clothing into the river and watched it swept
away. Then, holding the suitcase, he walked out in the river until there was
no bottom and he was swept away in the dark.
He was three hundred yards downstream when the Hound reached the river.
Overhead the great racketing fans of the helicopters hovered. A storm of light
fell upon the river and Montag dived under the great illumination as if the
sun had broken the clouds. He felt the river pull him further on its way, into
darkness. Then the lights switched back to the land, the helicopters swerved
over the city again, as if they had picked up another trail. They were gone.
The Hound was gone. Now there was only the cold river and Montag floating in a
sudden peacefulness, away from the city and the lights and the chase, away
from everything.
He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had
left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an
unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was
new.
The black land slid by and he was going into the country among the hills: For
the first time in a dozen years the stars were coming out above him, in great
processions of wheeling fire. He saw a great juggernaut of stars form in the
sky and threaten to roll over and crush him.
He floated on his back when the valise filled and sank; the river was mild and
leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam
for lunch and vapours for supper. The river was very real; it held him
comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this
month, this year, and a lifetime of years. He listened to his heart slow. His
thoughts stopped rushing with his blood.
He saw the moon low in the sky now. The moon there, and the light of the moon
caused by what? By the sun, of course. And what lights the sun? Its own fire.
And the sun goes on, day after day, burning and burning. The sun and time. The
sun and time and burning. Burning. The river bobbled him along gently.
Burning. The sun and every clock on the earth. It all came together and became
a single thing in his mind.
After a long time of floating on the land and a short time of floating in the
river he knew why he must never burn again in his life.
The sun burned every day. It burned Time. The world rushed in a circle and
turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway,
without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen, and the sun

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burnt Time, that meant.that everything burned!

One of them had to stop burning. The sun wouldn't, certainly. So it looked as
if it had to be Montag and the people he had worked with until a few short
hours ago.
Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do
the saving and keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people's
heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silver-fish,
rust and dry-rot, and men with matches. The world was full of burning of all
types and sizes. Now the guild of the asbestos-weaver must open shop very
soon.
He felt his heel bump land, touch pebbles and rocks, scrape sand. The river
had moved him toward shore.
He looked in at the great black creature without eyes or light, without shape,
with only a size that went a thousand miles without wanting to stop, with its
grass hills and forests that were waiting for him.
He hesitated to leave the comforting flow of the water. He expected the Hound
there.
Suddenly the trees might blow under a great wind of helicopters.
But there was only the normal autumn wind high up, going by like another
river. Why wasn't the Hound running? Why had the search veered inland? Montag
listened.
Nothing. Nothing.
Millie, he thought. All this country here. Listen to it! Nothing and nothing.
So much silence, Millie, I wonder how you'd take it? Would you shout Shut up,
shut up! Millie, Millie. And he was sad.
Millie was not here and the Hound was not here, but the dry smell of hay
blowing from some distant field put Montag on the land. He remembered a farm
he had visited when he was very young, one of the rare times he had discovered
that somewhere behind the seven veils of unreality, beyond the walls of
parlours and beyond the tin moat of the city, cows chewed grass and pigs sat
in warm ponds at noon and dogs barked after white sheep on a hill.
Now, the dry smell of hay, the motion of the waters, made him think of
sleeping in fresh hay in a lonely barn away from the loud highways, behind a
quiet farmhouse, and under an ancient windmill that whirred like the sound of
the passing years overhead. He lay in the high barn loft all night, listening
to distant animals and insects and trees, the little motions and stirrings.
During the night, he thought, below the loft, he would hear a sound like feet
moving, perhaps. He would tense and sit up. The sound would move away, He
would lie back and look out of the loft window, very late in the night, and
see the lights go out in the farmhouse itself, until a very young and
beautiful woman would sit in an unlit window, braiding her hair. It would be
hard to see her, but her face would be like the face of the girl so long ago
in his past now, so very long ago, the girl who had known the weather and
never been burned by the fire-flies, the girl who had known what dandelions
meant rubbed off on your chin. Then, she would be gone from the warm window
and appear again upstairs in her moon-whitened room. And then, to the sound of
death, the sound of the jets cutting the sky into two black pieces beyond the
horizon, he would lie in the loft, hidden and safe, watching those strange new
stars over the rim of the earth, fleeing from the soft colour of dawn.
In the morning he would not have needed sleep, for all the warm odours and
sights of a complete country night would have rested and slept him while his
eyes were wide and his mouth, when he thought to test it, was half a smile.
And there at the bottom of the hayloft stair, waiting for him, would be the
incredible thing. He would step carefully down, in the pink light of early
morning, so fully aware of the world that he would be afraid, and stand over
the small miracle and at last bend to touch it.
A cool glass of fresh milk, and a few apples and pears laid at the foot of the
steps.

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This was all he wanted now. Some sign that the immense world would accept him
and give him the long time needed to think all the things that must be
thought.
A glass of milk, an apple, a pear.
He stepped from the river.
The land rushed at him, a tidal wave. He was crushed by darkness and the look
of the country and the million odours on a wind that iced his body. He fell
back under the breaking curve of darkness and sound and smell, his ears
roaring. He whirled.
The stars poured over his sight like flaming meteors. He wanted to plunge in
the river again and let it idle him safely on down somewhere. This dark land
rising was like that day in his childhood, swimming, when from nowhere the
largest wave in the history of remembering slammed him down in salt mud and
green darkness, water burning mouth and nose, retching his stomach, screaming!
Too much water!
Too much land!
Out of the black wall before him, a whisper. A shape. In the shape, two eyes.
The night looking at him. The forest, seeing him.
The Hound!
After all the running and rushing and sweating it out and half-drowning, to
come this far, work this hard, and think yourself safe and sigh with relief
and come out on the land at last only to find . . .
The Hound!
Montag gave one last agonized shout as if this were too much for any man.
The shape exploded away. The eyes vanished. The leafpiles flew up in a dry
shower.
Montag was alone in the wilderness.
A deer. He smelled the heavy musk-like perfume mingled with blood and the
gummed exhalation of the animal's breath, all cardamon and moss and ragweed
odour in this huge night where the trees ran at him, pulled away, ran, pulled
away, to the pulse of the heart behind his eyes.
There must have been a billion leaves on the land; he waded in them, a dry
river smelling of hot cloves and warm dust. And the other smells! There was a
smell like a cut potato from all the land, raw and cold and white from having
the moon on it most of the night. There was a smell like pickles from a bottle
and a smell like parsley on the table at home. There was a faint yellow odour
like mustard from a jar. There was a smell like carnations from the yard next
door. He put down his hand and felt a weed rise up like a child brushing him.
His fingers smelled of liquorice.
He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was
filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more
than enough here to fill him. There would always be more than enough.
He walked in the shallow tide of leaves, stumbling.
And in the middle of the strangeness, a familiarity.
His foot hit something that rang dully.
He moved his hand on the ground, a yard this way, a yard that.
The railroad track.
The track that came out of the city and rusted across the land, through
forests and woods, deserted now, by the river.
Here was the path to wherever he was going. Here was the single familiar
thing, the magic charm he might need a little while, to touch, to feel beneath
his feet, as he moved on into the bramble bushes and the lakes of smelling and
feeling and touching, among the whispers and the blowing down of leaves.
He walked on the track.
And he was surprised to learn how certain he suddenly was of a single fact he
could not prove.

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Once, long ago, Clarisse had walked here, where he was walking now.
Half an hour later, cold, and moving carefully on the tracks, fully aware of
his entire body, his face, his mouth, his eyes stuffed with blackness, his
ears stuffed with sound, his legs prickled with burrs and nettles, he saw the
fire ahead.
The fire was gone, then back again, like a winking eye. He stopped, afraid he
might blow the fire out with a single breath. But the fire was there and he
approached warily, from a long way off. It took the better part of fifteen
minutes before he drew very close indeed to it, and then he stood looking at
it from cover. That small motion, the white and red colour, a strange fire
because it meant a different thing to him.
It was not burning; it was warming!
He saw many hands held to its warmth, hands without arms, hidden in darkness.
Above the hands, motionless faces that were only moved and tossed and
flickered with firelight. He hadn't known fire could look this way. He had
never thought in his life that it could give as well as take. Even its smell
was different.
How long he stood he did not know, but there was a foolish and yet delicious
sense of knowing himself as an animal come from the forest, drawn by the fire.
He was a thing of brush and liquid eye, of fur and muzzle and hoof, he was a
thing of horn and blood that would smell like autumn if you bled it out on the
ground. He stood a long long time, listening to the warm crackle of the
flames.
There was a silence gathered all about that fire and the silence was in the
men's faces, and time was there, time enough to sit by this rusting track
under the trees, and look at the world and turn it over with the eyes, as if
it were held to the centre of the bonfire, a piece of steel these men were all
shaping. It was not only the fire that was different. It was the silence.
Montag moved toward this special silence that was concerned with all of the
world.
And then the voices began and they were talking, and he could hear nothing of
what the voices said, but the sound rose and fell quietly and the voices were
turning the world over and looking at it; the voices knew the land and the
trees and the city which lay down the track by the river. The voices talked of
everything, there was nothing they could not talk about, he knew from the very
cadence and motion and continual stir of curiosity and wonder in them.
And then one of the men looked up and saw him, for the first or perhaps the
seventh time, and a voice called to Montag:
"All right, you can come out now ! "
Montag stepped back into the shadows.
"It's all right," the voice said. "You're welcome here."
Montag walked slowly toward the fire and the five old men sitting there
dressed in dark blue denim pants and jackets and dark blue suits. He did not
know what to say to them.
"Sit down," said the man who seemed to be the leader of the small group. "Have
some coffee?"
He watched the dark steaming mixture pour into a collapsible tin cup, which
was handed him straight off. He sipped it gingerly and felt them looking at
him with curiosity. His lips were scalded, but that was good. The faces around
him were bearded, but the beards were clean, neat, and their hands were clean.
They had stood up as if to welcome a guest, and now they sat down again.
Montag sipped.
"Thanks," he said. "Thanks very much."
"You're welcome, Montag. My name's Granger." He held out a small bottle of
colourless fluid. "Drink this, too. It'll change the chemical index of your
perspiration.
Half an hour from now you'll smell like two other people. With the Hound after
you, the best thing is Bottoms up."

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Montag drank the bitter fluid.
"You'll stink like a bobcat, but that's all right," said Granger.
"You know my name;" said Montag.
Granger nodded to a portable battery TV set by the fire.
"We've watched the chase. Figured you'd wind up south along the river. When we
heard you plunging around out in the forest like a drunken elk, we didn't hide
as we usually do. We figured you were in the river, when the helicopter
cameras swung back in over the city. Something funny there. The chase is still
running. The other way, though."
"The other way?"
"Let's have a look."
Granger snapped the portable viewer on. The picture was a nightmare,
condensed, easily passed from hand to hand, in the forest, all whirring colour
and flight. A voice cried:
"The chase continues north in the city! Police helicopters are converging on
Avenue
87 and Elm Grove Park!"
Granger nodded. "They're faking. You threw them off at the river. They can't
admit it.
They know they can hold their audience only so long. The show's got to have a
snap ending, quick! If they started searching the whole damn river it might
take all night.
So they're sniffing for a scape-goat to end things with a bang. Watch. They'll
catch
Montag in the next five minutes! "
"But how--"
"Watch."
The camera, hovering in the belly of a helicopter, now swung down at an empty
street.
"See that?" whispered Granger. "It'll be you; right up at the end of that
street is our victim. See how our camera is coming in? Building the scene.
Suspense. Long shot.
Right now, some poor fellow is out for a walk. A rarity. An odd one. Don't
think the police don't know the habits of queer ducks like that, men who walk
mornings for the hell of it, or for reasons of insomnia Anyway, the police
have had him charted for months, years. Never know when that sort of
information might be handy. And today, it turns out, it's very usable indeed.
It saves face. Oh, God, look there!"
The men at the fire bent forward.
On the screen, a man turned a corner. The Mechanical Hound rushed forward into
the viewer, suddenly. The helicopter light shot down a dozen brilliant pillars
that built a cage all about the man.
A voice cried, "There's Montag ! The search is done!"
The innocent man stood bewildered, a cigarette burning in his hand. He stared
at the
Hound, not knowing what it was. He probably never knew. He glanced up at the
sky and the wailing sirens. The cameras rushed down. The Hound leapt up into
the air with a rhythm and a sense of timing that was incredibly beautiful. Its
needle shot out.
It was suspended for a moment in their gaze, as if to give the vast audience
time to appreciate everything, the raw look of the victim's face, the empty
street, the steel animal a bullet nosing the target.
"Montag, don't move!" said a voice from the sky.
The camera fell upon the victim, even as did the Hound. Both reached him
simultaneously. The victim was seized by Hound and camera in a great
spidering, clenching grip. He screamed. He screamed. He screamed!
Blackout.
Silence.
Darkness.

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Montag cried out in the silence and turned away.
Silence.
And then, after a time of the men sitting around the fire, their faces
expressionless, an announcer on the dark screen said, "The search is over,
Montag is dead; a crime against society has been avenged."
Darkness.
"We now take you to the Sky Room of the Hotel Lux for a half-hour of
Just-Before-
Dawn, a programme of-"
Granger turned it off.
"They didn't show the man's face in focus. Did you notice?

Even your best friends couldn't tell if it was you. They scrambled it just
enough to let the imagination take over. Hell," he whispered. "Hell."
Montag said nothing but now, looking back, sat with his eyes fixed to the
blank screen, trembling.
Granger touched Montag's arm. "Welcome back from the dead." Montag nodded.
Granger went on. "You might as well know all of us, now. This is Fred Clement,
former occupant of the Thomas Hardy chair at Cambridge in the years before it
became an Atomic Engineering School. This other is Dr. Simmons from U.C.L.A.,
a specialist in Ortega y Gasset; Professor West here did quite a bit for
ethics, an ancient study now, for Columbia University quite some years ago.
Reverend Padover here gave a few lectures thirty years ago and lost his flock
between one Sunday and the next for his views. He's been bumming with us some
time now. Myself: I wrote a book called The Fingers in the Glove; the Proper
Relationship between the Individual and Society, and here I am! Welcome,
Montag! "
"I don't belong with you," said Montag, at last, slowly. "I've been an idiot
all the way."
"We're used to that. We all made the right kind of mistakes, or we wouldn't be
here.
When we were separate individuals, all we had was rage. I struck a fireman
when he came to burn my library years ago. I've been running ever since. You
want to join us, Montag?"
"Yes."
"What have you to offer?"
"Nothing. I thought I had part of the Book of Ecclesiastes and maybe a little
of
Revelation, but I haven't even that now."
"The Book of Ecclesiastes would be fine. Where was it?"
"Here," Montag touched his head.
"Ah," Granger smiled and nodded.
"What's wrong? Isn't that all right?" said Montag.
"Better than all right; perfect!" Granger turned to the Reverend. "Do we have
a Book of Ecclesiastes?"
"One. A man named Harris of Youngstown."
"Montag." Granger took Montag's shoulder firmly. "Walk carefully. Guard your
health.
If anything should happen to Harris, you are the Book of Ecclesiastes. See how
important you've become in the last minute!"
"But I've forgotten!"
"No, nothing's ever lost. We have ways to shake down your clinkers for you."
"But I've tried to remember!"
"Don't try. It'll come when we need it. All of us have photographic memories,
but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in
there. Simmons here has worked on it for twenty years and now we've got the
method down to where

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we can recall anything that's been read once. Would you like, some day,
Montag, to read Plato's Republic?"
"Of course!"
"I am Plato's Republic. Like to read Marcus Aurelius? Mr. Simmons is Marcus."
"How do you do?" said Mr. Simmons.
"Hello," said Montag.
"I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book,
Gulliver's
Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and-this one is
Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr.
Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag.
Aristophanes and Mahatma
Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and
Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John."
Everyone laughed quietly.
"It can't be," said Montag.
"It is," replied Granger, smiling. " We're book-burners, too. We read the
books and burnt them, afraid they'd be found. Micro-filming didn't pay off; we
were always travelling, we didn't want to bury the film and come back later.
Always the chance of discovery. Better to keep it in the old heads, where no
one can see it or suspect it.
We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law,
Byron, Tom
Paine, Machiavelli, or Christ, it's here. And the hour is late. And the war's
begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own
coat of a thousand colours. What do you think, Montag?"
"I think I was blind trying to do things my way, planting books in firemen's
houses and sending in alarms."
"You did what you had to do. Carried out on a national scale, it might have
worked beautifully. But our way is simpler and, we think, better. All we want
to do is keep the knowledge we think we will need, intact and safe. We're not
out to incite or anger anyone yet. For if we are destroyed, the knowledge is
dead, perhaps for good. We are model citizens, in our own special way; we walk
the old tracks, we lie in the hills at night, and the city people let us be.
We're stopped and searched occasionally, but there's nothing on our persons to
incriminate us. The organization is flexible, very loose, and fragmentary.
Some of us have had plastic surgery on our faces and fingerprints. Right now
we have a horrible job; we're waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly,
end. It's not pleasant, but then we're not in control, we're the odd minority
crying in the wilderness. When the war's over, perhaps we can be of some use
in the world."
"Do you really think they'll listen then?"
"If not, we'll just have to wait. We'll pass the books on to our children, by
word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on the other people. A lot
will be lost that way, of course.
But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time,
wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can't last."
"How many of you are there?"
"Thousands on the roads, the abandoned railtracks, tonight, bums on the
outside, libraries inside. It wasn't planned, at first. Each man had a book he
wanted to remember, and did. Then, over a period of twenty years or so, we met
each other, travelling, and got the loose network together and set out a plan.
The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves was that we
were not important, we mustn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to
anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust-jackets for books, of
no significance otherwise. Some of us

live in small towns. Chapter One of Thoreau's Walden in Green River, Chapter

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Two in Willow Farm, Maine. Why, there's one town in Maryland, only
twenty-seven people, no bomb'll ever touch that town, is the complete essays
of a man named
Bertrand Russell. Pick up that town, almost, and flip the pages, so many pages
to a person. And when the war's over, some day, some year, the books can be
written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they
know and we'll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to
do the whole damn thing over again. But that's the wonderful thing about man;
he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over
again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing."
"What do we do tonight?" asked Montag.
"Wait," said Granger. "And move downstream a little way, just in case."
He began throwing dust and dirt on the fire.
The other men helped, and Montag helped, and there, in the wilderness, the men
all moved their hands, putting out the fire together.
They stood by the river in the starlight.
Montag saw the luminous dial of his waterproof. Five. Five o'clock in the
morning.
Another year ticked by in a single hour, and dawn waiting beyond the far bank
of the river.
"Why do you trust me?" said Montag.
A man moved in the darkness.
"The look of you's enough. You haven't seen yourself in a mirror lately.
Beyond that, the city has never cared so much about us to bother with an
elaborate chase like this to find us. A few crackpots with verses in their
heads can't touch them, and they know it and we know it; everyone knows it. So
long as the vast population doesn't wander about quoting the Magna Charta and
the Constitution, it's all right. The firemen were enough to check that, now
and then. No, the cities don't bother us. And you look like hell."
They moved along the bank of the river, going south. Montag tried to see the
men's faces, the old faces he remembered from the firelight, lined and tired.
He was looking for a brightness, a resolve, a triumph over tomorrow that
hardly seemed to be there.
Perhaps he had expected their faces to burn and glitter with the knowledge
they carried, to glow as lanterns glow, with the light in them. But all the
light had come from the camp fire, and these men had seemed no different from
any others who had run a long race, searched a long search, seen good things
destroyed, and now, very late, were gathering to wait for the end of the party
and the blowing out of the lamps.
They weren't at all certain that the things they carried in their heads might
make every future dawn glow with a purer light, they were sure of nothing save
that the books were on file behind their quiet eyes, the books were waiting,
with their pages uncut, for the customers who might come by in later years,
some with clean and some with dirty fingers.
Montag squinted from one face to another as they walked.
"Don't judge a book by its cover," someone said.
And they all laughed quietly, moving downstream.
There was a shriek and the jets from the city were gone overhead long before
the men looked up. Montag stared back at the city, far down the river, only a
faint glow now.
"My wife's back there."
"I'm sorry to hear that. The cities won't do well in the next few days," said
Granger.

"It's strange, I don't miss her, it's strange I don't feel much of anything,"
said Montag.
"Even if she dies, I realized a moment ago, I don't think I'll feel sad. It
isn't right.
Something must be wrong with me."

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"Listen," said Granger, taking his arm, and walking with him, holding aside
the bushes to let him pass. "When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was
a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the
world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us
and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his
hands. And when he died, I
suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I
cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece
of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin
the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he
died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the
way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over
his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because
he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing
pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the
world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he
passed on."
Montag walked in silence. "Millie, Millie," he whispered. "Millie."
"What?"
"My wife, my wife. Poor Millie, poor Millie. I can't remember anything. I
think of her hands but I don't see them doing anything at all. They just hang
there at her sides or they lie there on her lap or there's a cigarette in
them, but that's all."
Montag turned and glanced back.
What did you give to the city, Montag?
Ashes.
What did the others give to each other?
Nothingness.
Granger stood looking back with Montag. "Everyone must leave something behind
when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house
or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your
hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when
people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't
matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it
was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your
hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real
gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not
have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."
Granger moved his hand. "My grandfather showed me some V-2 rocket films once,
fifty years ago. Have you ever seen the atom-bomb mushroom from two hundred
miles up? It's a pinprick, it's nothing. With the wilderness all around it.
"My grandfather ran off the V-2 rocket film a dozen times and then hoped that
some day our cities would open up and let the green and the land and the
wilderness in more, to remind people that we're allotted a little space on
earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has
given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we
are not so big. When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my
grandpa said, some day it will come in and get us, for we will have forgotten
how terrible and real it can be. You see?" Granger turned to
Montag. "Grandfather's been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my
skull, by
God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his
thumbprint. He touched me. As I said earlier, he was a sculptor. 'I hate a
Roman named Status Quo!'

he said to me. 'Stuff your eyes with wonder,' he said, 'live as if you'd drop
dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or
paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was
such an animal.

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And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside
down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,'
he said, 'shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.'"
"Look!" cried Montag.
And the war began and ended in that instant.
Later, the men around Montag could not say if they had really seen anything.
Perhaps the merest flourish of light and motion in the sky. Perhaps the bombs
were there, and the jets, ten miles, five miles, one mile up, for the merest
instant, like grain thrown over the heavens by a great sowing hand, and the
bombs drifting with dreadful swiftness, yet sudden slowness, down upon the
morning city they had left behind. The bombardment was to all intents and
purposes finished, once the jets had sighted their target, alerted their
bombardiers at five thousand miles an hour; as quick as the whisper of a
scythe the war was finished. Once the bomb-release was yanked it was over.
Now, a full three seconds, all of the time in history, before the bombs
struck, the enemy ships themselves were gone half around the visible world,
like bullets in which a savage islander might not believe because they were
invisible;
yet the heart is suddenly shattered, the body falls in separate motions and
the blood is astonished to be freed on the air; the brain squanders its few
precious memories and, puzzled, dies.
This was not to be believed. It was merely a gesture. Montag saw the flirt of
a great metal fist over the far city and he knew the scream of the jets that
would follow, would say, after the deed, disintegrate, leave no stone on
another, perish. Die.
Montag held the bombs in the sky for a single moment, with his mind and his
hands reaching helplessly up at them. "Run!" he cried to Faber. To Clarisse,
"Run!" To
Mildred, "Get out, get out of there! " But Clarisse, he remembered, was dead.
And
Faber was out; there in the deep valleys of the country somewhere the five
a.m. bus was on its way from one desolation to another. Though the desolation
had not yet arrived, was still in the air, it was certain as man could make
it. Before the bus had run another fifty yards on the highway, its destination
would be meaningless, and its point of departure changed from metropolis to
junkyard.
And Mildred . . .
Get out, run!
He saw her in her hotel room somewhere now in the halfsecond remaining with
the bombs a yard, a foot, an inch from her building. He saw her leaning toward
the great shimmering walls of colour and motion where the family talked and
talked and talked to her, where the family prattled and chatted and said her
name and smiled at her and said nothing of the bomb that was an inch, now a
half-inch, now a quarter-inch from the top of the hotel. Leaning into the wall
as if all of the hunger of looking would find the secret of her sleepless
unease there. Mildred, leaning anxiously, nervously, as if to plunge, drop,
fall into that swarming immensity of colour to drown in its bright happiness.
The first bomb struck.
"Mildred! "
Perhaps, who would ever know? Perhaps the great broadcasting stations with
their beams of colour and light and talk and chatter went first into oblivion.
Montag, falling flat, going down, saw or felt, or imagined he saw or felt the
walls go dark in Millie's face, heard her screaming, because in the millionth
part of time left, she saw her own face reflected there, in a mirror instead
of a crystal ball, and it was

such a wildly empty face, all by itself in the room, touching nothing, starved
and eating of itself, that at last she recognized it as her own and looked
quickly up at the ceiling as it and the entire structure of the hotel blasted

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down upon her, carrying her with a million pounds of brick, metal, plaster,
and wood, to meet other people in the hives below, all on their quick way down
to the cellar where the explosion rid itself of them in its own unreasonable
way.
I remember. Montag clung to the earth. I remember. Chicago. Chicago, a long
time ago. Millie and I. That's where we met! I remember now. Chicago. A long
time ago.
The concussion knocked the air across and down the river, turned the men over
like dominoes in a line, blew the water in lifting sprays, and blew the dust
and made the trees above them mourn with a great wind passing away south.
Montag crushed himself down, squeezing himself small, eyes tight. He blinked
once. And in that instant saw the city, instead of the bombs, in the air. They
had displaced each other.
For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and
unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than
man had built it, erected at last in gouts of shattered concrete and sparkles
of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colours,
a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a
side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead.
Montag, lying there, eyes gritted shut with dust, a fine wet cement of dust in
his now shut mouth, gasping and crying, now thought again, I remember, I
remember, I
remember something else. What is it? Yes, yes, part of the Ecclesiastes and
Revelation. Part of that book, part of it, quick now, quick, before it gets
away, before the shock wears off, before the wind dies. Book of Ecclesiastes.
Here. He said it over to himself silently, lying flat to the trembling earth,
he said the words of it many times and they were perfect without trying and
there was no Denham's Dentifrice anywhere, it was just the Preacher by
himself, standing there in his mind, looking at him ....
"There," said a voice.
The men lay gasping like fish laid out on the grass. They held to the earth as
children hold to familiar things, no matter how cold or dead, no matter what
has happened or will happen, their fingers were clawed into the dirt, and they
were all shouting to keep their eardrums from bursting, to keep their sanity
from bursting, mouths open, Montag shouting with them, a protest against the
wind that ripped their faces and tore at their lips, making their noses bleed.
Montag watched the great dust settle and the great silence move down upon
their world. And lying there it seemed that he saw every single grain of dust
and every blade of grass and that he heard every cry and shout and whisper
going up in the world now. Silence fell down in the sifting dust, and all the
leisure they might need to look around, to gather the reality of this day into
their senses.
Montag looked at the river. We'll go on the river. He looked at the old
railroad tracks.
Or we'll go that way. Or we'll walk on the highways now, and we'll have time
to put things into ourselves. And some day, after it sets in us a long time,
it'll come out of our hands and our mouths. And a lot of it will be wrong, but
just enough of it will be right. We'll just start walking today and see the
world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks. I
want to see everything now. And while none of it will be me when it goes in,
after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me. Look at the
world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there
beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it's
finally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times
ten

thousand a day. I get hold of it so it'll never run off. I'll hold on to the
world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.
The wind died.

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The other men lay a while, on the dawn edge of sleep, not yet ready to rise up
and begin the day's obligations, its fires and foods, its thousand details of
putting foot after foot and hand after hand. They lay blinking their dusty
eyelids. You could hear them breathing fast, then slower, then slow ....
Montag sat up.
He did not move any further, however. The other men did likewise. The sun was
touching the black horizon with a faint red tip. The air was cold and smelled
of a coming rain.
Silently, Granger arose, felt his arms, and legs, swearing, swearing
incessantly under his breath, tears dripping from his face. He shuffled down
to the river to look upstream.
"It's flat," he said, a long time later. "City looks like a heap of
baking-powder. It's gone." And a long time after that. "I wonder how many knew
it was coming? I wonder how many were surprised?"
And across the world, thought Montag, how many other cities dead? And here in
our country, how many? A hundred, a thousand?
Someone struck a match and touched it to a piece of dry paper taken from their
pocket, and shoved this under a bit of grass and leaves, and after a while
added tiny twigs which were wet and sputtered but finally caught, and the fire
grew larger in the early morning as the sun came up and the men slowly turned
from looking up river and were drawn to the fire, awkwardly, with nothing to
say, and the sun coloured the backs of their necks as they bent down.
Granger unfolded an oilskin with some bacon in it. "We'll have a bite. Then
we'll turn around and walk upstream. They'll be needing us up that way."
Someone produced a small frying-pan and the bacon went into it and the
frying-pan was set on the fire. After a moment the bacon began to flutter and
dance in the pan and the sputter of it filled the morning air with its aroma.
The men watched this ritual silently.
Granger looked into the fire. "Phoenix."
"What?"
"There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ: every few
hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first
cousin to Man.
But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself
born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and
over, but we've got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn
silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a
thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we
can see it, some day we'll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping
into the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every
generation."
He took the pan off the fire and let the bacon cool and they ate it, slowly,
thoughtfully.
"Now, let's get on upstream," said Granger. "And hold on to one thought:
You're not important. You're not anything. Some day the load we're carrying
with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time
ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the
dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died
before us. We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the
next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can
say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And some
day we'll remember so much that we'll build the

biggest goddam steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time
and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we're going to go build a
mirror-factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and
take a long look in them."
They finished eating and put out the fire. The day was brightening all about
them as if a pink lamp had been given more wick. In the trees, the birds that

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had flown away now came back and settled down.
Montag began walking and after a moment found that the others had fallen in
behind him, going north. He was surprised, and moved aside to let Granger
pass, but
Granger looked at him and nodded him on. Montag went ahead. He looked at the
river and the sky and the rusting track going back down to where the farms
lay, where the barns stood full of hay, where a lot of people had walked by in
the night on their way from the city. Later, in a month or six months, and
certainly not more than a year, he would walk along here again, alone, and
keep right on going until he caught up with the people.
But now there was a long morning's walk until noon, and if the men were silent
it was because there was everything to think about and much to remember.
Perhaps later in the morning, when the sun was up and had warmed them, they
would begin to talk, or just say the things they remembered, to be sure they
were there, to be absolutely certain that things were safe in them. Montag
felt the slow stir of words, the slow simmer. And when it came to his turn,
what could he say, what could he offer on a day like this, to make the trip a
little easier? To everything there is a season. Yes. A
time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a
time to speak. Yes, all that. But what else. What else? Something, something .
. .
And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve
manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; And the leaves of the
tree were for the healing of the nations.
Yes, thought Montag, that's the one I'll save for noon. For noon...
When we reach the city.

THE END

PENDULUM
by Ray Bradbury and Henry Hasse


Prisoner of Time was he, outlawed from Life and Death alike the strange,
brooding creature who watched the ages roll by and waited half fearfully
for--eternity?



"I THINK," shrilled Erjas, "that this is our most intriguing discovery on any
of the worlds we have yet visited!"
His wide, green-shimmering wings fluttered, his beady bird eyes flashed
excitement. His several companions bobbed their heads in agreement, the
greenish-gold down on their slender necks ruffling softly. They were perched
on what had once been a moving sidewalk but was now only a twisted ribbon of
wreckage overlooking the vast expanse of a ruined city.
"Yes," Erjas continued, "it's baffling, fantastic! It--it has no reason for
being." He pointed unnecessarily to the object of their attention, resting on
the high stone plaza a short distance away. "Look at it! Just a huge tubular
pendulum hanging from that towering framework! And the machinery, the coggery
which must have once sent it swinging . . . I flew up there a while ago to
examine it, but it's hopelessly corroded."
"But the head of the pendulum!" another of the bird creatures said awedly. "A
hollow chamber--transparent, glassite--and that awful thing staring out of
it...."
Pressed close to the inner side of the pendulum head was a single human
skeleton. The whitened skull seemed to stare out over the desolate, crumbling
city as though regarding with amusement the heaps of powdery masonry and the
bare steel girders that drooped to the ground, giving the effect of huge

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spiders poised to spring.

"It's enough to make one shudder--the way that thing grins! Almost as
though--"
"The grin means nothing!" Erjas interrupted annoyedly. "That is only the
skeletal remains of one of the mammal creatures who once, undoubtedly,
inhabited this world." He shifted nervously from one spindly leg to the other,
as he glanced again at the grinning skull. "And yet, it does seem to be
almost--triumphant! And why are there no more of them around? Why is he the
only one . . . and why is he encased in that fantastic pendulum head?"
"We shall soon know," another of the bird creatures trilled softly, glancing
at their spaceship which rested amidst the ruins, a short distance away.
"Orfleew is even now deciphering the strange writing in the book he salvaged
from the pendulum head. We must not disturb him."
"How did he get the book? I see no opening in that transparent chamber."
"The long pendulum arm is hollow, apparently in order to vacuum out the cell.
The book was crumbling with age when Orfleew got it out, but he saved most of
it."

"I wish he would hurry! Why must he--"
"Shh! Give him time. Orfleew will decipher the writing; he has an amazing
genius for alien languages."
"Yes. I remember the metal tablets on that tiny planet in the constellation--"
"Here he comes now!"
"He's finished already!"
"We shall soon know the story...."
The bird creatures fairly quivered as Orfleew appeared in the open doorway of
their spaceship, carefully carrying a sheaf of yellowed pages. He waved to
them,

spread his wings and soared outward. A moment later he alighted beside his
companions on their narrow perch.
"The language is simple," Orfleew told them, "and the story is a sad one. I
will read it to you and then we must depart, for there is nothing we can do on
this world."

They edged closer to him there on the metal strand, eagerly awaiting the first
words. The pendulum hung very straight and very still on a windless world, the
transparent head only a few feet above the plaza floor. The grinning skull
still peered out as though hugely amused or hugely satisfied. Orfleew took one
more fleeting look at it . . . then he opened the crumbling notebook and began
to read.
MY NAME John Layeville. I am known as "The Prisoner of Time." People, tourists
from all over the world, come to look at me in my swinging pendulum. School
children, on the electrically moving sidewalks surrounding the plaza, stare at
me in childish awe. Scientists, studying me, stand out there and train their
instruments on the swinging pendulum head. Oh, they could stop the swinging,
they could release me--but now I know that will never happen. This all began
as a punishment for me, but now I am an enigma to science. I seem to be
immortal.
It is ironic.

A punishment for me! Now, as through a mist, my memory spins back to the day
when all this started. I remember I had found a way to bridge time gaps and
travel into futurity. I remember the time device I built. No, it did not in
any way resemble this pendulum--my device was merely a huge box-like affair of
specially treated metal and glassite, with a series of electric rotors of my
own design which set up conflicting, but orderly, fields of stress. I had
tested it to perfection no less than three times, but none of the others in

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the Council of
Scientists would believe me. They all laughed. And Leske laughed. Especially
Leske, for he has always hated me.
I offered to demonstrate, to prove. I invited the Council to bring others--all
the greatest minds in the scientific world. At last, anticipating an amusing
evening at my expense, they agreed.

I shall never forget that evening when a hundred of the world's greatest
scientists gathered in the main Council laboratory. But they had come to jeer,
not to cheer. I did not care, as I stood on the platform beside my ponderous
machine and listened to the amused murmur of voices. Nor did I care that
miliions of other unbelieving eyes were watching by television, Leske having
indulged in a campaign of mockery against the possibility of time travel. I
did not care, because I knew that in a few minutes Leske's campaign would be
turned into victory for me. I would set my rotors humming, I would pull the
control switch--and my machine would flash away into a time dimension and back
again, as
I had already seen it do three times. Later we would send a man out in the
machine.

The moment arrived. But fate had decreed it was to be my moment of doom.
Something went wrong, even now I do not know what or why. Perhaps the
television concentration in the room affected the stress of the time-fields my
rotors set up. The last thing I remember seeing, as I reached out and touched
the main control switch, were the neat rows of smiling white faces of the
important men seated in the laboratory. My hand came down on the switch....
Even now I shudder, remembering the vast mind-numbing horror of that moment. A
terrific sheet of electrical flame, greenish and writhing and alien, leaped
across the laboratory from wall to wall, blasting into ashes everything in its
path!

Before millions of television witnesses I had slain the world's greatest
scientists!
No, not all. Leske and myself and a few others who were behind the machine
escaped with severe burns. I was least injured of all, which seemed to
increase the fury of the populace against me. I was swept to a hasty trial,
faced jeering throngs who called out for my death.
"Destroy the time machine," was the watchword, "and destroy this murderer with
it!"
Murderer! I had only sought to help humanity. In vain I tried to explain the
accident, but popular resentment is a thing not to be reasoned with.
One day, weeks later, I was taken from my secret prison and hurried, under
heavy guard, to the hospital room where Leske lay. He raised himself on one
arm and his smouldering eyes looked at me. That's all I could see of him, just
his eyes;
the rest of him was swathed in bandages. For a moment he just looked; and if
ever I saw insanity, but a cunning insanity, in a man's eyes, it was then, For
about ten seconds he looked, then with a great effort he pointed a bulging,
bandaged arm at me.

"No, do not destroy him," he mumbled to the authorities gathered around.
"Destroy his machine, yes, but save the parts. I have a better plan, a fitting
one, for this man who murdered the world's greatest scientists. "
I remembered Leske's old hatred of me, and I shuddered.
IN THE weeks that followed, one of my guards told me with a sort of malicious
pleasure of my time device being dismantled, and secret things being done with
it. Leske was directing the operations from his bed.
At last came the day when I was led forth and saw the huge pendulum for the
first time. As I looked at it there, fantastic and formidible, I realized as

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never before the extent of Leske's insane revenge. And the populace seemed
equally vengeful, equally cruel, like the ancient Romans on a gladiatorial
holiday. In a sudden panic of terror, I shrieked and tried to leap away.
That only amused the people who crowded the electrical sidewalks around the
plaza. They laughed and shrieked derisively.

My guards thrust me into the glass pendulum head and I lay there quivering,
realizing the irony of my fate. This pendulum had been built from the precious
metal and glassite of my own time device! It was intended as a monument to my
slaughtering! I was being put on exhibition for life within my own
executioning device! The crowd roared thunderous approval, damning me.
Then a little click and a whirring above me, and my glass prison began to
move.
It increased in speed. The arc of the pendulum's swing lengthened. I remember
how I pounded at the glass, futilely screaming, and how my hands bled. I
remember the rows of faces becoming blurred white blobs before me....
I did not become insane, as I had thought at first I would. I did not mind it
so much; that first night. I couldn't sleep but it wasn't uncomfortable. The
lights of the city were comets with tails that pelted from right to left like
foaming fireworks. But as the night wore on I felt a gnawing in my stomach
that grew worse until I became very sick. The next day was the same and I
couldn't eat anything. In the days that followed they never stopped the
pendulum, not once.
They slid my food down the hollow pendulum stem in little round parcels that
plunked at my feet. The first time I attempted eating I was unsuccessful; it
wouldn't stay down. In desperation I hammered against the cold glass with my
fists until they bled again, and I cried hoarsely, but heard nothing but my
own weak words muffled in my ears.

After an infinitude of misery, I began to eat and even sleep while traveling
back and forth this way . . . they had allowed me small glass loops on the
floor with which I fastened myself down at night and slept a soundless
slumber,

without sliding. I even began to take an interest in the world outside,
watching it tip one way and another, back and forth and up and down, dizzily
before my eyes until they ached. The monotonous movements never changed. So
huge was the pendulum that it shadowed one hundred feet or more with every
majestic sweep of its gleaming shape, hanging from the metal intestines of the
machine overhead. I
estimated that it took four or five seconds for it to traverse the arc.
On and on like this--for how long would it be? I dared not think of it....
DAY by day I began to concentrate on the gaping, curiosity-etched faces
outside--faces that spoke soundless words, laughing and pointing at me, the
prisoner of time, traveling forever nowhere. Then after a time--was it weeks
or months or years?--the town people ceased to come and it was only tourists
who came to stare....
Once a day the attendants sent down my food, once a day they sent down a tube
to vacuum out the cell. The days and nights ran together in my memory until
time came to mean very little to me....
IT WAS not until I knew, inevitably, that I was doomed forever to this
swinging chamber, that the thought occurred to me to leave a written record.
Then the idea obsessed me and I could think of nothing else.
I had noticed that once a day an attendant climbed into the whirring coggery
overhead in order to drop my food down the tube. I began to tap code signals
along the tube, a request for writing materials. For days, weeks, months, my
signals remained unanswered. I became infuriated--and more persistent.
Then, at long last, the day when not only my packet of food came down the
tube, but with it a heavy notebook, and writing materials! I suppose the

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attendant above became weary at last of my tappings! I was in a perfect
ecstasy of joy at this slight luxury.

I have spent the last few days in recounting my story, without any undue
elaboration. I am weary now of writing, but I shall continue from time to
time--in the present tense instead of the past.
My pendulum still swings in its unvarying arc. I am sure it has been not
months, but years! I am accustomed to it now. I think if the pendulum were to
stop suddenly, I should go mad at the motionless existence!
(Later): There is unusual activity on the electrically moving sidewalks
surrounding me. Men are coming, scientists, and setting up peculiar looking
instruments with which to study me at a distance. I think I know the reason. I
guessed it some time ago. I have not recorded the years, but I suspect that I
have already outlived Leske and all the others! I know my cheeks have
developed a short beard which suddenly ceased growing, and I feel a curious,
tingling vitality. I feel that I shall outlive them all! I cannot account for
it, nor can they out there, those scientists who now examine me so
scrupulously. And they dare not stop my pendulum, my little world, for fear of
the effect it may have on me!
(Still later): These men, these puny scientists, have dropped a microphone
down the tube to me! They have actually remembered that I was once a great
scientist, encased here cruelly. In vain they have sought the reason for my
longevity; now they want me to converse with them, giving my symptoms and
reactions and suggestions! They are perplexed, but hopeful, desiring the
secret of eternal life to which they feel I can give them a clue. I have
already been here two hundred years, they tell me; they are the fifth
generation.
At first I said not a word, paying no attention to the microphone. I merely
listened to their babblings and pleadings until I weared of it. Then I grasped
the microphone and looked up and saw their tense, eager faces, awaiting my
words.

"One does not easily forgive such an injustice as this," I shouted. "And I do
not believe I shall be ready to until five more generations."

Then I laughed. Oh, how I laughed.
"He's insane!" I heard one of them say: "The secret of immortality may lie
somehow with him, but I feel we shall never learn it; and we dare not stop the
pendulum--that might break the timefield, or whatever it is that's holding him
in thrall...."
(MUCH LATER): It has been a longer time than I care to think, since I wrote
those last words. Years . . . I know not how many. I have almost forgotten how
to hold a pencil in my fingers to write.
Many things have transpired, many changes have come in the crazy world out
there.
Once I saw wave after wave of planes, so many that they darkened the sky, far
out in the direction of the ocean, moving toward the city; and a host of
planes arising from here, going out to meet them; and a brief, but lurid and
devastating battle in which planes fell like leaves in the wind; and some
planes triumphantly returning, I know not which ones...
But all that was very long ago, and it matters not to me. My daily parcels of
food continue to come down the pendulem stem; I suspect that it has become a
sort of ritual, and the inhabitants of the city, whoever they are now, have
long since forgotten the legend of why I was encased here. My little world
continues to swing in its arc, and I continue to observe the puny little
creatures out there who blunder through their brief span of life.
Already I have outlived generations! Now I want to outlive the very last one
of them! I shall!

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. . . Another thing, too, I have noticed. The attendants who daily drop the
parcels of food for me, and vacuum out the cell, are robots! Square, clumsy,
ponderous and four-limbed things--unmistakably metal robots, only vaguely
human in shape.
. . . I begin to see more and more of these clumsy robots about the city. Oh,
yes, humans too--but they only come on sight-seeing tours and pleasure jaunts
now; they live, for the most part, in luxury high among the towering
buildings.
Only the robots occupy the lower level now, doing all the menial and
mechanical tasks necessary to the operation of the city. This, I suppose, is
progress as these self centered beings have willed it.
. . . robots are becoming more complicated, more human in shape and movements
.
. . and more numerous . . . uncanny ... I have a premonition....
(Later): It has come! I knew it! Vast, surging activity out there . . . the
humans, soft from an aeon of luxury and idleness, could not even escape . . .
those who tried, in their rocket planes, were brought down by the pale, rosy
electronic beams of the robots . . . others of the humans, more daring or
desperate, tried to sweep low over the central robot base and drop thermite
bombs--but the robots had erected an electronic barrier which hurled the bombs
back among the planes, causing inestimable havoc....
The revolt was brief, but inevitably successful. I suspect that all human life
except mine has been swept from the earth. I begin to see, now, how cunningly
the robots devised it.

The humans had gone forward recklessly and blindly to achieve their Utopia;
they had designed their robots with more and more intricacy, more and more
finesse, until the great day when they were able to leave the entire operation
of the city to the robots--under the guidance perhaps of one or two humans.
But somewhere, somehow, one of those robots was imbued with a spark of
intelligence;
it began to think, slowly but precisely; it began to add unto itself, perhaps
secretly; until finally it had evolved itself into a terribly efficient unit
of inspired intelligence, a central mechanical Brain which planned this
revolt.
At least, so I pictured it. Only the robots are left now--but very intelligent
robots. A group of them came yesterday and stood before my swinging pendulum
and

seemed to confer among themselves. They surely must recognize me as one of the
humans, the last one left. Do they plan to destroy me too?
No. I must have become a legend, even among the robots. My pendulum still
swings. They have now encased the operating mechanism beneath a protective
glassite dome. They have erected a device whereby my daily parcel of food is
dropped to me mechanically. They no longer come near me; they seem to have
forgotten me.
This infuriates me! Well, I shall outlast them too! After all, they are but
products of the human brain . . . I shall outlast everything even remotely
human! I swear it!
(MUCH LATER): Is this the end? I have seen the end of the reign of the robots!
Yesterday, just as the sun was crimsoning in the west, I perceived the hordes
of things that came swarming out of space, expanding in the heavens . . .
alien creatures fluttering down, great gelatinous masses of black that
clustered thickly over everything....
I saw the robot rocket planes criss-crossing the sky on pillars of scarlet
flame, blasting into the black masses with their electronic beams--but the
alien things were unperturbed and unaffected! Closer and closer they pressed
to earth, until the robot rockets began to dart helplessly for shelter.
To no avail. The silvery robot ships began crashing to earth in ghastly

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devastation, like drops of mercury splashing on tiles....
And the black gelatinous masses came ever closer, to spread over the earth, to
crumble the city and corrode whatever metal was left exposed.

Except my pendulum. They came dripping darkly down over it, over the glassite
dome which protects the whirring wheels and roaring bowels of the mechanism.
The city has crumbled, the robots are destroyed, but my pendulum still moves,
the only moving thing on this world now . . . and I know that fact puzzles
these alien things and they will not be content until they have stopped it....
This all happened yesterday. I am lying very still now, watching them. Most of
them are gathering out there over the ruins of the city, preparing to leave--
except a few of the black quivering things that are still hanging to my
pendulum, almost blotting out the sunlight; and a few more above, near the
operating machinery, concentrating those same emanations by which they
corroded the robots. They are determined to do a complete job here. I know
that in a few minutes they will begin to take effect, even through the
glassite shield. I
shall continue to write until my pendulum stops swinging. .... it is happening
now. I can feel a peculiar grinding and grating in the coggery above. Soon my
tiny glassite world will cease its relentless arc.

I feel now only a fierce elation flaming ithin me, for after all, this is my
victory ! I have conquered over the men who planned this punishment for me,
and over countless other generations, and over the final robots themselves!
There is nothing more I desire except annihilation, and I am sure that will
come automatically when my pendulum ceases, bringing me to a state of
unendurable motionlessness....

It is coming now. Those black, gelatinous shapes above are drifting away to
join their companions. The mechanism is grinding raucously. My arc is
narrowing ...
smaller ... smaller....
I feel ... so strange....


THE END

QUICKER
THAN
THE EYE


Ray Bradbury


AVON BOOKS NEW YORK




QUICKER THAN THE EYE is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has
never before appeared in hook form. This is a collection of fiction. Any
similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

Page 262 is an extension of this copyright page.

AVON BOOKS
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The Hearst Corporation

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1350 Avenue of the Americas
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Collection copyright (c) 1996 by Ray Bradbury
Author photograph by Torn Victor
Interior design by Kellan Peck
Published by arrangement with the author
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-20481
ISBN: 0-380-97380-4

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this hook or
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Copyright Law. For information address Don Congdon Associates, Inc., 156 Fifth
Avenue, Suite 625, New York. New York 10010.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:
Bradbury, Ray, 1920
Quicker than the eye~ Ray Bradbuty.-lst ed.
p.
cm.
I.
Title.
P53503.R167Q53
1996 96-20481
8l3'.54-dc20

CIP

First Avon Books Hardcover Printing: December 1996

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To Donn Albright, my Golden Retriever, with love

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CONTENTS

UNTERDERSEABOAT DOKTOR
ZAHAROFF/RICHTER MARK V
REMEMBER SASCHA?
ANOTHER FINE MESS
THE ELECTROCUTION
HOPSCOTCH
THE FINNEGAN
THAT WOMAN ON THE LAWN
THE VERY GENTLE MURDERS
QUICKER THAN THE EYE
DORIAN IN EXCELSUS
NO NEWS, OR WHAT KILLED THE DOG?
THE WITCH DOOR
THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE
AT THE END OF THE NINTH YEAR
BUG
ONCE MORE, LEGATO
EXCHANGE
FREE DIRT
LAST RITES
THE OTHER HIGHWAY
MAKE HASTE TO LIVE:
AN AFTERWORD

QUICKER THAN THE EYE






Unterderseaboat Doktor

The incredible event occurred during my third visit to Gustav Von Seyfertitz,
my foreign psychoanalyst.
I should have guessed at the strange explosion before it came.
After all, my alienist, truly alien, had the coincidental name, Von
Seyfertitz, of the tall, lean, aquiline, menacing, and therefore beautiful
actor who played the high priest in the 1935 film She.
In She, the wondrous villain waved his skeleton fingers, hurled insults,
summoned sulfured flames, destroyed slaves, and knocked the world into
earthquakes.
After that, "At Liberty," he could be seen riding the Hollywood Boulevard
trolley cars as calm as a mummy, as quiet as an unwired telephone pole.
Where was I? Ah, yes!
It was my third visit to my psychiatrist. He had called that day and cried,
"Douglas, you stupid goddamn son of a bitch, it's time for beddy-bye!
Beddy-bye was, of course, his couch of pain and humiliation where I lay

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writhing in agonies of assumed Jewish guilt and Northern Baptist stress as he
from time to time muttered, "A fruitcake remark!" or "Dumb!" or "If you ever
do that again, I'll kill you!"
As you can see, Gustav Von Seyfertitz was a most unusual mine specialist.
Mine?
Yes. Our problems are land mines in our heads. Step on them! Shock-troop
therapy, he once called it, searching for words. "Blitzkrieg?" I offered.
"Ja!" He grinned his shark grin. "That's it!"
Again, this was my third visit to his strange, metallic-looking room with a
most odd series of locks on a roundish door. Suddenly, as I was maundering and
treading dark waters, I heard his spine stiffen behind me. He gasped a great
death rattle, sucked air, and blew it out in a yell that curled and bleached
my hair:
"Dive! Dive!"
I dove.
Thinking that the room might be struck by a titanic iceberg, I fell, to
scuttle beneath the lion-claw-footed couch.
"Dive!" cried the old man.
"Dive?" I whispered, and looked up.
To see a submarine periscope, all polished brass, slide up to vanish in the
ceiling.
Gustav Von Seyfertitz stood pretending not to notice me, the sweat-oiled
leather couch, or the vanished brass machine. Very calmly, in the fashion of
Conrad
Veidt in Casablanca, or Erich Von like Jack Nicklaus hits a ball? Bamm. A hand
grenade!
That was the sound my Germanic friend's boots made as he knocked them together
in a salute Crrrack!
"Gustav Mannerheim Auschlitz Von Seyfertitz Baron Woldstein, at your service!"
He lowered his voice. "Unterderseaboat-"
I thought he might say "Doktor." But:
"Unterderseaboat Captain!"
I scrambled off the floor.
Another crrrack and-The periscope slid calmly down out of the

ceiling, the most beautiful Freudian cigar I had ever seen.
"No!" I gasped.
"Have I ever lied to you?" "Many times!"
"But' '-he shrugged-' 'little white ones." He stepped to the periscope,
slapped two handles in place, slammed one eye shut, and crammed the other
angrily against the view piece, turning the periscope in a slow roundabout of
the room, the couch, and me.
"Fire one," he ordered.
I almost heard the torpedo leave its tube. "Fire two!" he said.
And a second soundless and invisible bomb motored on its way to infinity.
Struck midships, I sank to the couch.
"You, you!" I said mindlessly. "It!" I pointed at the brass machine. "This!" I
touched couch. "Why?"
"Sit down," said Von Seyfertitz.
"I am." "Lie down."
"I'd rather not," I said uneasily.
Von Seyfertitz turned the periscope so its topmost eye, raked at an angle,
glared at me. It had an uncanny resemblance, in its glassy coldness, his own
fierce hawk's gaze.
His voice, from behind the periscope, echoed. "So you want to know, eh, how
Gustav Von Seyfertitz, Baron Woldstein, suffered to leave the cold ocean
depths, depart his dear North Sea ship, flee his destroyed and beaten
fatherland, to become the Unterderseaboat Doktor-"
"Now that you mention-"

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"I never mention! I declare. And my declarations are sea-battle commands."
"So I noticed . .
"Shut up. Sit back-"
"Not just now . . ." I said uneasily.
His heels knocked as he let his right hand spider to his top coat pocket and
slip forth yet a forth eye with which to fasten me: a bright, thin monocle
which he screwed into his stare as if decupping a boiled egg. I winced. For
now the monocle was part of his glare and regarded me with cold fire.
"Why the monocle?" I said.
"Idiot! It is to cover my good eye so that neither there eye can see and my
intuition is free to work!"
"Oh," I said.
And he began his monologue. And as he talked I realized his need had been pent
up, capped, years, so he talked on and on, forgetting me.
And it was during this monologue that a strange thing occurred. I rose slowly
to my feet as Herr Doktor Von Seyfertitz circled, his long, slim cigar
printing smoke cumuli on the air, which read like white Rorschach blots.
With each implantation of his foot, a word ca out, and then another, in a sort
of plodding grammar. Sometimes he stopped and stood poised with one leg raised
and one word stopped in his mouth to be turned on his tongue and examined.
Then the shoe went down, the noun slid forth and the verb and object in good
time.
Until at last, circling, I found myself in a chair stunned, for I saw:
Herr Doktor Von Seyfertitz stretched on his couch, his long spider fingers
laced on his chest.
"It has been no easy thing to come forth on land," he sibilated. "Some days I
was the jellyfish, frozen. Others, the shore-strewn octopi, at least with
tentacles, or the crayfish sucked back into my skull. But I have built my
spine, year on year, and now I walk among the land men and survive."
He paused to take a trembling breath, then continued:
"I moved in stages from the depths to a houseboat, to a wharf bungalow, to a
shore-tent and then back to a canal in a city and at last to New York

an island surrounded by water, eh? But where, where, in all this, I wondered,
would a submarine commander find his place, his work, his mad love and
activity?
"It was one afternoon in a building with the world's longest elevator that it
struck me like a hand grenade in the ganglion. Going down, down, down, other
people crushed around me, and the numbers descending and the floors whizzing
by the glass windows, rushing by flicker-flash, flicker-flash, conscious,
subconscious, id, ego-id, life, death, lust, kill, lust, dark, light,
plummeting, falling, ninety, eighty, fifty, lower depths, high exhilaration,
id, ego, id, until this shout blazed from my raw throat in a great
all-accepting, panic-manic shriek:
"'Dive! Dive!'
"I remember," I said.
'Dive!' I screamed so loudly that my fellow passengers, in shock, peed
merrily.
Among stunned faces, I stepped out of the lift to find one-sixteenth of an
inch of pee on the floor. 'Have a nice day!' I said, jubilant with
self-discovery, then ran to self-employment, to hang a shingle and next my
periscope, carried from the mutilated, divested, castrated unterderseaboat all
these years. Too stupid to see in it my psychological future and my final
downfall, my beautiful artifact, the brass genitalia of psychotic research,
the Von Seyfertitz Mark
Nine Periscope!"
"That's quite a story," I said.
"Damn right," snorted the alienist, eyes shut.
"And more than half of it true. Did you listen? What have you learned?"

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"That more submarine captains should become psychiatrists."
"So? I have often wondered: did Nemo really die when his submarine was
destroyed? Or did he run off to become my great-grandfather and were his
psychological bacteria passed along until I came into the world, thinking to
command the ghostlike mechanisms that haunt the under tides, to wind up with
the fifty-minute vaudeville routine in this sad, psychotic city?"
I got up and touched the fabulous brass symbol that hung like a scientific
stalactite in mid-ceiling.
"May I look?"
"I wouldn't if I were you." He only half heard me, lying in the midst of his
depression as in a dark cloud.
"It's only a periscope-"
"But a good cigar is a smoke."
I remembered Sigmund Freud's quote about cigars, laughed, and touched the
periscope again.
"Don't!" he said.
"Well, you don't actually use this for anything, do you? It's just a
remembrance of your past, from your last sub, yes?"
"You think that?" He sighed. "Look!"
I hesitated, then pasted one eye to the viewer, shut the other, and cried:
"Oh, Jesus!"
"I warned you!" said Von Seyfertitz.
For they were there.
Enough nightmares to paper a thousand cinema screens. Enough phantoms to haunt
ten thousand castle walls. Enough panics to shake forty cities into ruin.
My God, I thought, he could sell the film rights to this worldwide!
The first psychological kaleidoscope in history.
And in the instant another thought came: how much of that stuff in there is
me?
Or Von Seyfertitz? Or both? Are these strange shapes my maundering daymares,
sneezed out in the past weeks? When I talked, eyes shut, did my mouth spray
invisible founts of small beasts which, caught in the periscope chambers, grew
outsize? Like the microscopic photos of those germs that hide in eyebrows and
pores, magnified a million times to become elephants on Scientific American

covers? Are these images from other lost souls trapped on that couch and
caught in the submarine device, or leftovers from my eyelashes and psyche?
"It's worth millions!" I cried. "Do you know what this is!?"
"Collected spiders, Gila monsters, trips to the Moon without gossamer wings,
iguanas, toads out of bad sisters' mouths, diamonds out of good fairies ears,
crippled shadow dancers from Bali, cut-string puppets from Geppetto's attic,
little-boy statues that pee white wine, sexual trapeze performers' alley-oop,
obscene finger-pantomimes, evil clown faces, gargoyles that talk when it rains
and whisper when the wind rises, basement bins full of poisoned honey,
dragonflies that sew every fourteen-year-old's orifices to keep them neat
until they rip the sutures, aged eighteen. Towers with mad witches, garrets
with mummies for lumber-"
He ran out of steam.
"You get the general drift."
"Nuts," I said. "You're bored. I could get you a five-million-dollar deal with
Amalgamated Fruit-cakes Inc. And the Sigmund F. Dreamboats, split three ways!"
"You don't understand," said Von Seyfertitz. "I am keeping myself busy, busy,
so
I won't remember all the people I torpedoed, sank, drowned mid-Atlantic in
1944.
I am not in the Amalgamated Fruitcake Cinema business. I only wish to keep
myself occupied by paring fingernails, cleaning earwax, and erasing inkblots
from odd bean-bags like you. If I stop, I will fly apart. That periscope
contains all and everything I have seen and known in the past forty years of

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observing pecans, cashews, and almonds. By staring at them I lose my own
terrible life lost in the tides. If you won my periscope in some shoddy
fly-by-
night Hollywood strip poker, I would sink three times in my waterbed, never to
be seen again. Have I shown you my waterbed? Three times as large as any pool.
I
do eighty laps asleep each night. Some-times forty when I catnap noons. To
answer your million fold offer, no."
And suddenly he shivered all over. His hands clutched at his heart.
"My God!" he shouted.
Too late, he was realizing he had let me step into his mind and life. Now he
was on his feet between me and the periscope, staring at it and me, as if we
were both terrors.
"You saw nothing in that! Nothing at all!"
"I did!"
"You lie! How could you be such a liar? Do you know what would happen if this
got out, if you ran around making accusations-?
"My God," he raved on, "If the world knew, if someone said' '-His words gummed
shut in his mouth as if he were tasting the truth of what he said, as if he
saw me for the first time and I was a gun fired full in his face. "I would
be...
laughed out of the city. Such a goddamn ridiculous . . . hey, wait a minute.
You!"
It was as if he had slipped a devil mask over his face. His eyes grew wide.
His mouth gaped.
I examined his face and saw murder. I sidled toward the door.
"You wouldn't say anything to anyone?" he said.
"No"
"How come you suddenly know everything about me?"
"You told me!"
"Yes," he admitted, dazed, looking around for a weapon. "Wait."
"if you don't mind," I said, "I'd rather not." And I was out the door and down
the hall, my knees jumping to knock my jaw.
"Come back!" cried Von Seyfertitz, behind me. "I must kill you!"
"I was afraid of that!"
I reached the elevator first and by a miracle it flung wide its doors when I
banged the Down button. I jumped in.
"Say good-bye!" cried Von Seyfertitz, raising his fist as if it held a bomb.

"Good-bye!" I said. The doors slammed.
I did not see Von Seyfertitz again for a year.
Meanwhile, I dined out often, not without guilt, telling friends, and
strangers on street corners, of my collision with a submarine commander become
phrenologist (he who feels your skull to count the beans).
So with my giving one shake of the ripe fruit tree, nuts fell. Overnight they
brimmed the Baron's lap to flood his bank account. His Grand Slam will be
recalled at century's end: appearances on Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey, and
Gerarldo in one single cyclonic afternoon, with interchangeable hyperboles,
positive-negative-positive every hour. There were Von Seyfertitz laser games
and duplicates of his submarine periscope sold at the Museum of Modern Art and
the
Smithsonian. With the super inducement of a half-million dollars, he force-fed
and easily sold a bad book. Duplicates of the animalcules, lurks, and curious
critters trapped in his brass viewer arose in pop-up coloring books, paste-on
tattoos, and inkpad rubberstamp nightmares at Beasts-R-Us.
I had hoped that all this would cause him to forgive and forget. No.
One noon a year and a month later, my doorbell rang and there stood Gustav Von
Seyfertitz, F Baron Woldstein, tears streaming down his cheeks.
"How come I didn't kill you that day?" he mourned.

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"You didn't catch me," I said.
"Oh, ja. That was it."
I looked into the old man's rain-washed, tear-ravened face and said, "Who
died?"
"Me. Or is it I? Ah, to hell with it: me. You see before you," he grieved, "a
creature who suffers from the Rumpelstiltskin Syndrome!"
"Rumpel-"
"-stiltskin! Two halves with a rip from chin to fly. Yank my forelock, go
ahead!
Watch me fall apart at the seam. Like zipping a psychotic zipper, I fall, two
Herr Doktor Admirals for the sick price of one. And which is the Doktor who
heals and which the sellout best-seller Admiral? It takes two mirrors to tell.
Not to mention the smoke!"
He stopped and looked around, holding his head together with his hands.
"Can you see the crack? Am I splitting again to become this crazy sailor who
desires richness and fame, being sieved through the hands of crazed ladies
with ruptured libidos? Suffering fish, I call them! But take their money,
spit, spend! You should have such a year. Don't laugh."
"I'm not laughing."
"Then cheer up while I finish. Can I lie down? Is that a couch? Too short.
What do I do with my legs?"
"Sit sidesaddle."
Von Seyfertitz laid himself out with his legs draped over one side. "Hey, not
bad. Sit behind. Don't look over my shoulder. Avert your gaze. Neither smirk
nor pull long faces as I get out the crazy-glue and paste Rumpel back with
Stiltskin, the name of my next book, God help me. Damn you to hell, you and
your damned periscope!"
"Not mine. Yours. You wanted me to discover it that day. I suppose you had
been whispering Dive, Dive, for years to patients, half asleep. But you
couldn't resist the loudest scream ever: Dive! That was your captain speaking,
wanting fame and money enough to chock a horse show."
"God," murmured Von Seyfertitz, "How I hate it when you're honest. Feeling
better already. How much do I owe you?"
He arose.
"Now we go kill the monsters instead of you."
"Monsters?"
"At my office. If we can get in past the lunatics."
"You have lunatics outside as well as in, now?"
"Have I ever lied to you?"
"Often. But," I added, "little white ones."

"Come," he said.

We got out of the elevator to be confronted by a long line of worshippers and
supplicants. There must have been seventy people strung out between the
elevator and the Baron's door, waiting with copies of books by Madame
Blavatsky, Krishna murti, and
Shirley MacLaine under their arms. There was a roar like a suddenly opened
furnace door when they saw the Baron. We beat it on the double and got inside
his office before anyone could surge to follow.
"See what you have done to me!" Von Seyfertitz pointed.
The office walls were covered with expensive teak paneling. The desk was from
Napoleon's age an exquisite Empire piece worth at least fifty thousand
dollars.
The couch was the best soft leather I had ever seen, and the two pictures on
the wall were originals-a Renoir and a Monet. My God, millions! I thought.
"Okay," I said. "The beasts, you said. You'll kill them, not me?"
The old man wiped his eyes with the back of one hand, then made a fist.
"Yes!" he cried, stepping up to the fine periscope, which reflected his face,

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madly distorted, in its elongated shape. "Like this. Thus and so!"
And before I could prevent, he gave the brass machine a terrific slap with his
hand and then a blow and another blow and another, with both fists, cursing.
Then he grabbed the periscope as if it were the neck of a spoiled child and
throttled and shook it.
I cannot say what I heard in that instant. Perhaps real sounds, perhaps
imagined temblors, like a glacier cracking in the spring, or icicles in
mid-night. Perhaps it was a sound like a great kite breaking its skeleton in
the wind and collapsing in folds of tissue.
Maybe I thought I heard a vast breath in sucked, a cloud dissolving up inside
itself. Or did I sense clock machineries spun so wildly they smoked off their
foundations and fell like brass snowflakes?
I put my eye to the periscope.
I looked in upon-
Nothing.
It was just a brass tube with some crystal lenses and a view of an empty
couch.
No more.
I seized the view piece and tried to screw it into some new focus on a far
place and some dream bacteria that might fibrillate across an unimaginable
horizon.
But the couch remained only a couch, and the wall beyond looked back at me
with its great blank face.
Von Seyfertitz leaned forward and a tear ran off the tip of his nose to fall
on one rusted fist.
"Are they dead?" he whispered.
"Gone."
"Good, they deserved to die. Now I can return to some kind of normal, sane
world."
And with each word his voice fell deeper within his throat, his chest, his
soul, until it, like the vaporous haunts within the peri-kaleidoscope, melted
into silence.
He clenched his fists together in a fierce clasp of prayer, like one who
beseeches God to deliver him from plagues. And whether he was once again
praying for my death, eyes shut, or whether he simply wished me gone with the
visions within the brass device, I could not say.
I only knew that my gossip had done a terrible and irrevocable thing. Me and
my wild enthusiasm for a psychological future and the fame of this incredible
captain from beneath Nemo's tidal seas.
"Gone," murmured Gustav Von Seyfertitz, Baron Woldstein, whispered for the
last time. "Gone."
That was almost the end.

I went around a month later. The landlord reluctantly let me look over the
premises, mostly because I hinted that I might be renting.
We stood in the middle of the empty room where I could see the dent marks
where the couch had once stood.
I looked up at the ceiling. It was empty.
"What's wrong?" said the landlord. "Didn't they fix it so you can't see? Damn
fool Baron made a damn big hole up into the office above. Rented that, too,
but never used it for anything I knew of. There was just that big damn hole he
left when he went away."
I sighed with relief.
"Nothing left upstairs?"
"Nothing."
I looked up at the perfectly blank ceiling.
"Nice job of repair," I said.
"Thank God," said the landlord.
What, I often wonder, ever happened to Gustav Von Seyfertitz? Did he move to

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Vienna, to take up residence, perhaps, in or near dear Sigmund's very own
address? Does he live in Rio, aerating fellow Unterderseaboat Captains who
can't sleep for seasickness, roiling on their waterbeds under the shadow of
the Andes
Cross? Or is he in South Pasadena, within striking distance of the fruit
larder nut farms disguised as film studios?
I cannot guess.
All I know is that some nights in the year, oh, once or twice, in a deep sleep
I
hear this terrible shout, his cry, "Dive! Dive! Dive!"
And wake to find myself, sweating, far und my bed.


Zaharoff/Richtcr Mark V

In the twilight just before sunrise, it was the most ordinary-looking building
he had seen since the chicken farm of his youth. It stood in the middle of an
empty field full of cricket weeds and cacti, mostly dust and some neglected
footpaths in the half darkness.
Charlie Crowe left the Rolls-Royce engine run-fling at the curb behind him and
babbled going along the shadowed path, leading the way for Rank Gibson, who
glanced back at the gently purring car.
"Shouldn't you-"
"No, no," Charlie Crowe cut in. "No one would steal a Rolls-Royce, now, would
they? How far would they get, to the next corner? Before someone else stole it
from them! Come along!"
"What's the hurry, we've got all morning!"
"That's what you think, chum. We've got-' Charlie Crowe eyed his watch.
"Twenty minutes, maybe fifteen for the fast tour, the coming disaster, the
revelations, the whole bit!"

"Don't talk so fast and slow down, you'll give me a heart attack."
"Save it for breakfast. Here. Put this in your pocket."
Hank Gibson looked at the coupon-green diploma.
"Insurance?"
"On your house, as of yesterday."
"But we don't need-"
"Yes, you do, but don't know it. Sign the duplicate. Here. Can you see? Here's
my flashlight and my pen. Thatsa boy. Give one to me. One for you-"
"Christ-''
"No swearing. You're all protected now, no matter what. Jig time."

And before he knew it, Hank Gibson was elbow-fetched through a paint-flaked
door inside to yet another locked door, which opened when Charlie Crowe
pointed his electric laser at it. They stepped into-
"An elevator! What's an elevator doing in a shack in an empty lot at five in
the morning-"
"Hush."
The floor sank under them and they traveled what might have been seventy or
eighty feet straight down to where another door whispered aside and they
stepped out into a long hall of a dozen doors on each side with a few dozen
pleasantly glowing lights above. Before he could exclaim again, Hank Gibson
was hustled past these doors that bore the names of cities and countries.
"Damn," cried Hank Gibson, "I hate being rushed through one god-awful mystery
after an-other. I'm working on a novel and a feature for my newspaper. I've no
time-"
"For the biggest story in the world? Bosh! You and I will write it, share the
profits! You can't resist. Calamities. Chaos. Holocausts !"
"You were always great for hyperbole-"

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"Quiet. It's my turn to show and tell." Charlie Crowe displayed his
wristwatch.
"We're wasting time. Where do we start?" He waved at the two dozen shut doors
surrounding them with labels marked CONSTANTINOPLE, MEXICO CITY, LIMA, SAN
FRANCISCO on one side.
Eighteen ninety-seven, 1914, 1938, 1963 on the other. Also, a special door
marked HAUSSMANN, 1870.
"Places and dates, dates and places. How in hell should I know why or how to
choose?"
"Don't these cities and dates ring any bells, stir any dust? Peek here. Glance
there. Go on."
Hank Gibson peeked.
To one side, through a glass window on the topmost part of a door marked 1789,
he saw:
"Looks like Paris."
"Press the button there under the glass."
Hank Gibson pressed the button.
"Now look!"
Hank Gibson looked.
"My God, Paris. In flames. And there's the guillotine!"
"Correct. Now. Next door. Next window."
Hank Gibson moved and peeked.
"Paris again, by God. Do I press the button?"
"Why not?"
He pressed.
"Jesus, it's still burning. But this time it's 1870. The Commune?"
"Paris fighting Hessians outside the city, Parisians killing Parisians inside
the city. Nothing like the French, eh? Move!"
They reached a third window. Gibson peered.
"Paris. But not burning. There go the taxicabs. I know. Nineteen sixteen.
Paris saved by one thousand Paris taxis carrying troops to fend off the
Germans outside the city!"
"A-One! Next?"
At a fourth window.
"Paris intact. But over here. Dresden? Berlin? London? All destroyed."
"Right. How do you like the three-dimension virtual reality? Superb! Enough of
cities and war. Across the hall. Go down the line. All those doors with
different kinds of devastation."
"Mexico City? I was there once, in '46."
"Press."
Hank Gibson pressed the button.

The city fell, shook, fell.
"The earthquake of '84?"
"Eight-five, to be exact."
"Christ, those poor people. Bad enough they're poor. But thousands killed,
maimed, made poorer. And the government-"
"Not giving a damn. Move."
They stopped at a door marked ARMENIA 1988.
Gibson squinted in, pressed the button.
"Major country, Armenia. Major country-gone."
"Biggest quake in that territory in half a century."
They paused at two more windows: TOKYO, 1932, and SAN FRANCISCO, 1905. Both
whole, entire, intact at first glance. Touch the button: all fall down!
Gibson turned away, shaken and pale.
"Well?" said his friend Charlie. "What's the sum?"
Gibson stared along the hall to left and right.
"War and Peace? Or Peace destroying itself without War?"
"Touche' !"

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"Why are you showing me all this?"
"For your future and mine, untold riches, in-credible revelations, amazing
truths. Andale. Vamoose!"
Charlie Crowe flashed his laser pen at the largest door at the far end of the
hall. The double locks hissed; the door sank away to one side, revealing a
large boardroom with a huge table forty feet in length, surrounded by twenty
leather chairs on each side and something like a throne, some-what elevated,
at the far end.
"Go sit up at the end," said Charlie.
Hank Gibson moved slowly
"Oh, for Christ sake, shake a leg. We've only seven more minutes before the
end of the world."
"End-?"
"Just joking. Ready?"
Hank Gibson sat. "Fire away."
The table, the chairs, and the room shook.
Gibson leaped up.
"What was that?"
"Nothing." Charlie Crowe checked his watch. "At least not yet. Sit back. What
have you seen?"
Gibson settled in his chair uneasily, grasping the arms. "Damned if I know.
History?"
"Yes, but what kind?"
"War and Peace. Peace and War. Bad Peace, of course. Earthquakes and fire."
"Admirable. Now, who's responsible for all that destruction, two kinds?"
"What, war? Politicians, I guess. Ethnic mobs. Greed. Jealousy. Munitions
manufacturers. The Krupp works in Germany. Zaharoff, wasn't that his name? The
big munitions king, the grand mullah of all the warmongers, films of him on
the newsreels in cinemas when I was a kid. Zaharoff?"
"Yes! What about the other side of the hall? The earthquakes."
"God did it."
"Only God? No helpers?"
"How can anyone help an earthquake?"
"Partially. Indirectly. Collaboratively."
"An earthquake is an earthquake. A city just happens to be in its way.
Underfoot."
"Wrong, Hank."
"Wrong!?"
"What if I told you that those cities were not accidentally built there? What
if
I told you w had planned to build them there, on purpose, to be destroyed?"

"Nuts!"
"No, Hank, creative annihilation. We were up to these tricks as far back as
the
Tang dynasty earthquakewise on the one hand. Citywise? Paris 1789 warwise."
"We? We? Who's we?"
"Me, Hank, and my cohorts, not in crimson and gold, but good dark cloth and
decent ties and fine architectural school graduates. We did it, Hank We built
the cities so as to tear them down. To knock them apart with earthquakes or
kill their with bombs and war, war and bombs."
"We? We!?"
"In this room or rooms like it, all across the world, men sat in those chairs
on the left and right, with the grand mucky-muck of all architects there where
you sit-"
"Architects!"
"You don't think all of those earthquakes, all of those wars, happened by mere
accident, pure chance? We did it, Hank, the blueprint urban-plan architects of
the world. Not the munitions makers Or politicians, oh, we used them as

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puppets, marionettes, useful idiots, but we, the superb hired city architects,
set out to build and then destroy our pets, our buildings, our cities!"
"For God's sake, how insane! Why?"
"Why? So that every forty, fifty, sixty, ninety years we could start over with
fresh projects, new concepts, renewed jobs, cash on the line for everyone -
blueprinters, planners, craftsmen, builders, stonemasons, diggers, carpenters,
glaziers, gardeners. Knock it all down, start new!"
"You mean you-?"
"Studied where the earthquakes hid, where they might erupt, every seam, crack,
and fault in every territory, stage, land in the world! That's where we built
the cities! Or most of them."
"B.S.! You couldn't do that, you and your planners! People would find out!"
"They never knew or found out. We met in secret, covered our tracks. A small
klan, a wee band of conspirators in every country in every age. Like the
Masons, eh? Or some Inquisitional Catholic sect? Or an underground Muslim
grot. It doesn't take many or much. And the average politician, dumb or
stupid, took our word for it. This is the site, here's the very place, plant
your capital here, your town there. Perfectly safe. Until the next quake, eh,
Hank?"
"Poppycock!"
"Watch your language!"
"I refuse to believe-"
The room shook. The chairs trembled. Half out of his chair, Hank Gibson sank
back. The color in his face sank, too.
"Two minutes to go," said Charlie Crowe. "Shall I talk fast? Well, you don't
think the destiny of the world would be left to your ordinary farm-beast
politico, do you? Have you ever sat at a Rotary/Lions lunch with those sweet
imbecile Chamber of Commerce stallions?
Sleep an dreams! Would you let the world jog along wit Zaharoff and his gun-
maker-powder experts? Hell no. They only know how to fire steel and package
nitro. So our people, the same people who built the cities on the earthquake
fault lines to ensure new work to build more cities, we planned the wars,
secretly.
"We provoked, guided, steered, influenced the politicians to boil over, one
way or t'other, and Paris and the Terror followed, dogged by Napoleon, trailed
by the Paris Commune in which Haussmann, taking advantage of the chaos, tore
down and rebuilt the City to the madness of some delight of others. Consider
Dresden, London, Tokyo, Hiroshima. We architects paid cold cash to get Hitler
out of jail in 1922! Then we architect mosquito-pestered the Japanese to
invade Manchuria, import junk iron, antagonize Roosevelt, bomb Pearl Harbor.
Sure, the Emperor approved, sure the Generals knew delight, sure the kamikazes

took off for oblivion, joyously happy. But behind the scenes, we architects,
clapping hands, rubbing palms for the moola, shoved them up! Not the
politicians, not the military, not the arms merchants, but the sons of
Haussmann and the future sons of Frank Lloyd Wright sent them on there way.
Glory hallelujah!"
Hank Gibson exhaled a great gust and sat weighted with an ounce of information
and a ton of confusion, at the head of this table. He stared down its length.
"There were meetings here-"
"In 1932, 1936, 1939 to fester Tokyo, poison Washington for war. And at the
same time make sure that San Francisco was built in the best way for a new
downfall, and that California cities all up and down the cracks and seams
nursed at the mother fault, San Andreas, so when the Big One came, it would
rain money for forty days."
"Son of a bitch," said Hank Gibson.
"Yes, aren't I? Aren't we?"
"Son of a bitch," Hank Gibson repeated in a whisper. "Man's wars and God's
earthquakes."

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"What a collaboration, eh? All done by the secret government, the government
of surprise architects across the world and into the next century."
The floor shook. The table and the chair and the ceiling did likewise.
"Time?" said Hank Gibson.
Charlie Crowe laughed, glancing at his watch.
''Time. Out!''
They ran for the door, ran down the hall past the doors marked TOKYO and
London and Dresden, past the doors marked 1789 and 1870 and 1940 and past the
doors marked ARMENIA and MEXICO CITY and SAN Francisco and shot up in the
elevator, and along the way, Hank Gibson said:
"Again, why've you told me this?"
"I'm retiring. The others are gone. We won't use this place again. It'll be
gone. Maybe now.
You write the book about all this fabulous stuff, I edit it, we'll grab the
money and run."
"But who'll believe it!?"
"No one. But it's so sensational, everyone will buy. Millions of copies. And
no one will investigate, for they're all guilty, city fathers, Chambers of
Commerce, real estate salesmen, Army generals who thought they made up and
fought their own wars, or made up and built their own cities! Pompous freaks!
Here we are. Out."
They made it out of the elevator and the shack as the next quake came. Both
fell and got up, with nervous laughter.
"Good old California, yes? Is my Rolls still there? Yep. No carjackers. In!"
With his hand on the Rolls doorframe, Gibson stared over at his friend. "Does
the San Andreas Fault come through this block?"
"You better believe. Wanna go see your home?"
Gibson shut his eyes. "Christ, I'm afraid."
"Take courage from the insurance policy in your coat pocket. Shall we go?"
"In a moment." Gibson swallowed hard "What will we name our book?"
"What time is it and date?"
Gibson looked at the sun about to rise. "Early Six-thirty. And the date on my
watch reads February fifth."
"Nineteen ninety-four?"
'Six-thirty a.m. February fifth, 1994."
'Then that's the title of our book. Or why not
Zaharoff add Richter for the earthquake Richter scale at Cal-Tech.
Zaharoff/Richter Mark V? Okay?"
"Okay."

The doors slammed. The motor roared.
"Do we go home?" "Go fast. Jesus. Fast." They went.
Fast.






Remember Sascha?


Remember? Why, how could they forget? Although they knew him for only a little
while, years later his name would arise and they would smile or even laugh and
reach out to hold hands, remembering.
Sascha. What a tender, witty comrade, what a sly, hidden individual, what a
child of talent; teller of tales, bon vivant, late-night companion,
ever-present illumination on foggy noons.
Sascha!

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He, whom they had never seen, to whom they spoke often at three a.m. in their
small bedroom, away from friends who might roll their eyeballs under their
lids, doubting their sanity, hearing his name.
Well, then, who and what was Sascha, and where did they meet or perhaps only
dream him, and who were they?
Quickly: they were Maggie and Douglas Spaulding and they lived by the loud sea
and the warm sand and the rickety bridges over the almost dead canals of
Venice, California. Though lacking money in the bank or Goodwill furniture in
their tiny two-room apartment, they were incredibly happy. He was a writer,
and she worked to support him while he finished the great American novel.
Their routine was: she would arrive home each night from downtown Los Angeles
and he would have hamburgers waiting or they would walk down the beach to eat
hot dogs, spend ten or twenty cents in the Penny Arcade, go home, make love,
go to sleep, and repeat the whole wondrous routine the next night: hot dogs,
Penny
Arcade, love, sleep, work, etc. It was all glorious in that year of being very
young and in love; therefore it would go on forever
Until he appeared.
The nameless one. For then he had no name. He had threatened to arrive a few
months after their marriage to destroy their economy and scare off the novel,
but then he had melted away, leaving only his echo of a threat.
But now the true collision loomed.
One night over a ham omelet with a bottle of cheap red and the conversation
loping quietly, leaning on the card table and promising each other grander and
more ebullient futures, Maggie suddenly said, "I feel faint."
"What?" said Douglas Spaulding.
"I've felt funny all day. And I was sick, a little bit, this morning."
"Oh, my God." He rose and came around the card table and took her head in his
hands and pressed her brow against his side, and looked down at the beautiful
part in her hair, suddenly smiling.
"Well, now," he said, "don't tell me that Sascha is back?"
"Sascha! Who's that?"
"When he arrives, he'll tell us."
"Where did that name come from?"
"Don't know. It's been in my mind all year."
"Sascha?" She pressed his hands to her cheeks, laughing. "Sascha!"
"Call the doctor tomorrow," he said.

"The doctor says Sascha has moved in for light housekeeping," she said over
the phone the next day.
"Great!" He stopped. "I guess." He considered their bank deposits. "No. First
thoughts count. Great! When do we meet the Martian invader?"
"October. He's infinitesimal now, tiny, I can barely hear his voice. But now
that he has a name, I hear it. He promises to grow, if we take care."
"The Fabulous Invalid! Shall I stock up on carrots, spinach, broccoli for what
date?"
"Halloween."
"Impossible!"
"True!"
"People will claim we planned him and my vampire book to arrive that week,
things that go bump and cry in the night."
"Oh, Sascha will surely do that! Happy?"
"Frightened, yes, but happy, Lord, yes. Come home, Mrs. Rabbit, and bring him
along!"

It must be explained that Maggie and Douglas Spaulding were best described as
crazed roman-tics. Long before the interior christening of Sascha, they,
loving
Laurel and Hardy, had called each other Stan and Ollie. The machines, the

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dustbusters and can openers around the apartment, had names, as did various
parts of their anatomy, revealed to no one.
So Sascha, as an entity, a presence growing toward friendship, was not
unusual.
And when he actually began to speak up, they were not surprised. The gentle
demands of their marriage, with love as currency instead of cash, made it
inevitable.
Someday, they said, if they owned a car, it too would be named.
They spoke on that and a dozen score of things late at night. When
hyperventilating about life, they propped themselves up on their pillows as if
the future might happen right now. They waited, anticipating, in seance, for
the silent small offspring to speak his first words before dawn.
"I love our lives," said Maggie, lying there, "all the games. I hope it never
stops. You're not like other men, who drink beer and talk poker. Dear God, I
wonder, how many other marriages play like us?"
"No one, nowhere. Remember?"
"What?"
He lay back to trace his memory on the ceiling. "The day we were married-"
"Yes!"
"Our friends driving and dropping us off here and we walked down to the
drugstore by the pier and bought a tube of toothpaste and two toothbrushes,
big bucks, for our honeymoon . . . ? One red toothbrush, one green, to
decorate our empty bathroom. And on the way back along the beach, holding
hands, suddenly, behind us, two little girls and a boy followed us and sang:

"Happy marriage day to you, Happy marriage day to you.
Happy marriage day, happy marriage day, Happy marriage day to you...

She sang it now, quietly. He chimed in, remembering how they had blushed with
pleasure at the children's voices, but walked on, feeling ridiculous but happy
and wonderful.
"How did they guess? Did we look married?"
"It wasn't our clothes! Our faces, don't you think? Smiles that made our jaws
ache. We were exploding. They got the concussion."
"Those dear children. I can still hear their voices."
"And so here we are, seventeen months later." He put his arm around her and
gazed at their future on the dark ceiling.
"'And here I am," a voice murmured.

"Who?" Douglas said.
"Me," the voice whispered. "Sascha."
Douglas looked down at his wife's mouth, which had barely trembled.
"So, at last, you've decided to speak?" said Douglas.
"Yes," came the whisper.
"We wondered," said Douglas, "when we would hear from you." He squeezed his
wife gently.
"It's time," the voice murmured. "So here I am."
"Welcome, Sascha," both said.
"Why didn't you talk sooner?" asked Douglas Spaulding.
"I wasn't sure that you liked me," the voice whispered.
"Why would you think that?"
"First I was, then I wasn't. Once I was only a name. Remember, last year, I
was ready to come and stay. Scared you."
"We were broke," said Douglas quietly. "And nervous."
"What's so scary about life?" said Sascha. Maggie's lips twitched. "It's that
other thing. Not being, ever. Not being wanted."
"On the contrary." Douglas Spaulding moved down on his pillow so he could
watch his wife's profile, her eyes shut, but her mouth breathing softly. "We
love you.

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But last year it was bad timing. Understand?"
"No," whispered Sascha. "I only understand you didn't want me. And now you do.
I should leave."
"But you just got here!"
"Here I go, anyway."
Don't, Sascha! Stay!"
"Good-bye." The small voice faded. "Oh, good-bye."
And then silence. Maggie opened her eyes with "Sascha's gone," she said.
"He can't be!" The room was still.
"Can't be," he said. "It's only a game."
"More than a game. Oh, God, I feel cold. Hold me."
He moved to hug her.
"It's okay."
"No. I had the funniest feeling just now, as if he were real."
"He is. He's not gone."
"Unless we do something. Help me."
"Help?" He held her even tighter, then shut his eyes, and at last called:
"Sascha?"
Silence.
"I know you're there. You can't hide."
His hand moved to where Sascha might be.
"Listen. Say something. Don't scare us, Sascha. We don't want to be scared or
scare you. We need each other. We three against the world. Sascha?"
Silence.
"Well?" whispered Douglas.
Maggie breathed in and out.
They waited.
"Yes?"
There was a soft flutter, the merest exhalation on the night air.
"Yes."
"You're back!" both cried.
Another silence.
"Welcome?" asked Sascha.
"Welcome!" both said.

And that night passed and the next day and the night and day after that, until
there were many days, but especially midnights when he dared to declare
himself, pipe opinions, grow stronger and firmer and longer in half-heard
declarations,

as they lay in anticipatory awareness, now she moving her lips, now he taking
over, both open as warm, live ventriloquists' mouthpieces. The small voice
shifted from one tongue to the other, with soft bouts of laughter at how
ridiculous but loving it all seemed, never knowing what Sascha might say next,
but letting him speak on until dawn and a smiling sleep.
"What's this about Halloween?" he asked, somewhere in the sixth month.
"Halloween?" both wondered.
"Isn't that a death holiday?" Sascha murmured.
"Well, yes . .
"I'm not sure I want to be born on a night

like that."
"Well, what night would you like to be born on?"
Silence as Sascha floated a while.
"Guy Fawkes," he finally whispered.
"Guy Fawkes??!!"
"That's mainly fireworks, gunpowder plots, Houses of Parliament, yes? Please
to remember the fifth of November?"
"Do you think you could wait until then?"

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"I could try. I don't think I want to start out with skulls and bones.
Gunpowder's more like it. I could write about that."
"Will you be a writer, then?"
"Get me a typewriter and a ream of paper."
"And keep us awake with the typing?"
"Pen, pencil, and pad, then?"
"Done!"
So it was agreed and the nights passed into weeks and the weeks leaned from
summer into the first days of autumn and his voice grew stronger, as did the
sound of his heart and the small commotions of his limbs. Sometimes as Maggie
slept, his voice would stir her awake and she would reach up to touch her
mouth, where the surprise of his dreaming came forth.
"There, there, Sascha. Rest now. Sleep."
"Sleep," he whispered drowsily, "sleep." And faded away.

"Pork chops, please, for supper."
"No pickles with ice cream?" both said, almost at once.
"Pork chops," he said, and more days passed and more dawns arose and he said:
"Hamburgers!"
"For breakfast?"
"With onions," he said.
October stood still for one day and then...
Halloween departed.
"Thanks," said Sascha, "for helping me past that. What's up ahead in five
nights?"
"Guy Fawkes!"
"Ah, yes!" he cried.
And at one minute after midnight five days later, Maggie got up, wandered to
the bathroom, and wandered back, stunned.
"Dear," she said, sitting on the edge of the bed.
Douglas Spaulding turned over, half awake. "Yes?"
"What day is it?" whispered Sascha.
"Guy Fawkes, at last. So?"
"I don't feel well," said Sascha. "Or, no, I feel fine. Full of pep. Ready to
go. It's time to say good-bye. Or is it hello? What do I mean?"
"Spit it out."
"Are there neighbors who said, no matter when, they'd take us to the
hospital?"
''Yes.''
"Call the neighbors," said Sascha.

They called the neighbors.
At the hospital, Douglas kissed his and listened.
"It's been nice," said Sascha.
"Only the best."
"We won't talk again. Good-bye,"

said Sascha.
"Good-bye," both said.
At dawn there was a small clear cry somewhere. Not long after, Douglas entered
his wife's hospital room. She looked at him and said
"Sascha's gone."
"I know," he said quietly.
"But he left word and someone else is here.
Look."
He approached the bed as she pulled back a coverlet.
"Well, I'll be damned."
He looked down at a small pink face and eyes that for a brief moment flickered
bright blue and then shut.

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"Who's that?" he asked.
"Your daughter. Meet Alexandra."
"Hello, Alexandra," he said.
"And do you know what the nickname for Alexandra is?" she said.
"What?''
"Sascha," she said.
He touched the small cheek very gently.
"Hello, Sascha," he said.







ANOTHER FINE MESS




The sounds began in the middle of summer in the middle of the night.
Bella Winters sat up in bed about three a.m. and listened and then lay back
down. Ten minutes later she heard the sounds again, out in the night, down the
hill.
Bella Winters lived in a first-floor apartment on top of Vendome Heights, near
Effie Street in Los Angeles, and had lived there now for only a few days, so
it was all new to her, this old house on an old street with an old staircase,
made of concrete, climbing steeply straight up from the low-lands below, one
hundred and twenty steps, count them. And right now ...
"Someone's on the steps," said Bella to herself.
"What?" said her husband, Sam, in his sleep.
"There are some men out on the steps," said Bella. "Talking, yelling, not
fighting, but almost. I heard them last night, too, and the night before, but
.
.
"What?" Sam muttered.
"Shh, go to sleep. I'll look."
She got out of bed in the dark and went to the window, and yes, two men were
indeed talking out there, grunting, groaning, now loud, now soft. And there
was

another noise, a kind of bumping, sliding, thumping, like a huge object being
carted up the hill.
"No one could be moving in at this hour of the night, could they?" asked Bella
of the darkness, the window, and herself.
"No," murmured Sam.
"It sounds like . .
"Like what?" asked Sam, fully awake now.
"Like two men moving-"
"Moving what, for God's sake?"
"Moving a piano. Up those steps.''
"At three in the morning!?"
"A piano and two men. Just listen."
The husband sat up, blinking, alert.
Far off, in the middle of the hill, there was a kind harping strum, the noise
a piano makes when suddenly thumped and its harp strings hum.
"There, did you hear?"
"Jesus, you're right. But why would anyone steal-"
"They're not stealing, they're delivering."

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"A piano?"
"I didn't make the rules, Sam. Go out and ask. No, don't; I will."
And she wrapped herself in her robe and was out the door and on the sidewalk.
"Bella," Sam whispered fiercely behind the porch screen. "Crazy."
"So what can happen at night to a woman fifty-five, fat, and ugly?" she
wondered.
Sam did not answer.
She moved quietly to the rim of the hill. Somewhere down there she could hear
the two men wrestling with a huge object. The piano on occasion gave a
strumming hum and fell silent. occasionally one of the men yelled or gave
orders.
"The voices," said Bella. "I know them from somewhere," she whispered and
moved in utter dark on stairs that were only a long pale ribbon going down, as
a voice echoed:
"Here's another fine mess you've got us in." Bella froze. Where have I heard
that voice, she wondered, a million times!
"Hello," she called.
She moved, counting the steps, and stopped.
And there was no one there.
Suddenly she was very cold. There was nowhere for the strangers to have gone
to.
The hill was steep and a long way down and a long way up, and they had been
burdened with an upright piano, hadn't they?
How come I know upright? she thought. I only heard. But-yes, upright! Not only
that, but inside a box!
She turned slowly and as she went back up the steps, one by one, slowly,
slowly, the voices began to sound again, below, as if, disturbed, they had
waited for her to go away.
"What are you doing?" demanded one voice.
"I was just-" said the other.
"Give me that!" cried the first voice.
That other voice, thought Bella, I know that, too. And I know what's going to
be said next!
"Now," said the echo far down the hill in the night, "just don't stand there,
help me!"
"Yes!" Bella closed her eyes and swallowed hard and half fell to sit on the
steps, getting her breath back as black-and-White pictures flashed in her
head.
Suddenly it was 1929 and she Was very small, in a theater with dark and light
pictures looming above the first row where she sat, transfixed, and then
laughing, and then transfixed and laughing again.

She opened her eyes. The two voices were still down there, a faint wrestle and
echo in the night, despairing and thumping each other with their hard derby
hats.

Zelda, thought Bella Winters. I'll call Zelda. She knows everything. She'll
tell me what this is. Zelda, yes!

Inside, she dialed Z and E and L and D and A before she saw what she had done
and started over. The phone rang a long while until Zelda's voice, angry with
sleep, spoke half way across L.A.

"Zelda, this is Bella!"

"Sam just died?"

"No, no, I'm sorry-

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" You're sorry?"

"Zelda, I know you're going to think I'm crazy, but . . ."
"Go ahead, be crazy."

"Zelda, in the old days when they made films around L.A., they used lots of
places, right? Like Venice, Ocean Park . . . "

"Chaplin did, Langdon did, Harold Lloyd, sure."

"Laurel and Hardy?"

"What?"

"Laurel and Hardy, did they use lots of locations?"

"Palms, they used Palms lots, Culver City Main Street,' Effie Street."

"Effie Street!"

"Don't yell, Bella."

"Did you say Effie Street?"

"Sure, and God, it's three in the morning!"

"Right at the top of Effie Street!?"

"Hey, yeah, the stairs. Everyone knows them. That's

where the music box chased Hardy downhill and ran over Him."

"Sure, Zelda, sure! Oh, God, Zelda, if you could see, hear,
what I hear! "

Zelda was suddenly wide awake on the line. "What's

going on? You serious?"

"oh, God, yes. On the steps just now, and last night and the night before
maybe, I heard, I hear--two men hauling a--a piano up the hill."

"Someone's pulling your leg!"

"No, no, they're there. I go out and there's nothing. But the steps are
haunted, Zelda! One voice says: 'Here's another fine mess you've got us in.'
You got to hear that man's voice!"

"You're drunk and doing this because you know I'm a nut for them."

"No, no. Come, Zelda. Listen. Tell!"

Maybe half an hour later, Bella heard the old tin lizzie rattle up the alley
behind the apartments. It was a car Zelda, in her joy at visiting silent-movie
theaters, had bought to lug herself around in while she wrote about the past,
always the past, and steaming into Cecil B. DeMille's old place or circling
Harold Lloyd's nation-state, or cranking and banging around the Universal
backlot, paying her respects to the Phantom's opera stage, or sitting on Ma
and

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Pa Kettle's porch chewing a sandwich lunch. That was Zelda, who once wrote in
a silent country in a silent time for Silver Screen.

Zelda lumbered across the front porch, a huge body with legs as big as the
Bernini columns in front of St. Peter's in Rome, and a face like a harvest
moon.

On that round face now was suspicion, cynicism, skepticisms, in equal
pie-parts.
But when she saw Bella's pale stare she cried:


"Belle! "

"You see I'm not lying!" said Bella.

"I see!"

"Keep your voice down, Zelda. Oh, it's scary and strange, terrible and nice.
So come on."

And the two women edged along the walk to the rim of the old hill near the old
steps in old Hollywood, and suddenly as they moved they felt time take a half
turn around them and it was another year, because nothing had changed all the
buildings were the way they were in 1928 and the hills beyond like they were
in
1926 and the steps, just the, way they were when the cement was poured in
1921.

"Listen, Zelda. There!"

And Zelda listened and at first there was only a creaking of wheels down in
the dark, like crickets, and then a moan of wood and a hum of piano strings,
and then one voice lamenting about this job, and the other voice claiming he
had nothing to do with it, and then the thumps as two derby hats fell, and an
exasperated voice announced:

"Here's another fine mess you've got us in."

Zelda, stunned, almost toppled off the hill. She held tight to Bella's arm as
tears brimmed in her eyes.

"It's a trick. Someone's got a tape recorder or-"

"No, I checked. Nothing but the steps, Zelda, the steps!"

Tears rolled down Zelda's plump cheeks.

"Oh, God, that is his voice! I'm the expert, I'm the mad, fanatic, Bella.
That's
Ollie. And that other voice, Stan! And you're not nuts after all!"

The voices below rose and fell and one cried: "Why don't you do something to
help me?"

Zelda moaned. "Oh, God, it's so beautiful."

"What does it mean?" asked Bella. "Why are they here? Are they really ghosts,
and why would ghosts climb this hill every night, pushing that music box,

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night after night, tell me, Zelda, why?"

Zelda peered down the hill and shut her eyes for a moment to think. "Why do
any ghosts go anywhere? Retribution? Revenge? No, not those two. Love maybe's
the reason, lost loves or something Yes?"

Bella let her heart pound once or twice and then said, "Maybe nobody told
them."

"Told them what?"

"Or maybe they were told a lot but still didn't believe, because maybe in
their old years things got bad, I mean they were sick, and sometimes when
you're sick you forget."

"Forget what!?"

"How much we loved them."

"They knew!"

"Did they? Sure, we told each other, but maybe not enough of us ever wrote or
waved when they passed and just yelled 'Love!' you think?"

"Hell, Bella, they're on TV every night!"

"Yeah, but that don't count. Has anyone, since they left us, come here to
these steps and said? Maybe those voices down there, ghosts or whatever, have
been here every night for years, pushing that music box, and nobody thought,
or tried, to just whisper or yell all the love we had all the years. Why not?"

'Why not?" Zelda stared down into the long darkness where perhaps shadows
moved and maybe a piano lurched clumsily among the shadows. "You're right."

If I'm right," said Bella, "and you say so, there's only one thing to do-"

"You mean you and me?"

"Who else? Quiet. Come on."

They moved down a step. In the same instant lights came

on around them, in a window here, another there. A screen door opened
somewhere and angry words shot out into the night:

"Hey, what's going on?"

"Pipe down!"

"You know what time it is?" "My God," Bella whispered, "everyone else hears
now!"

"No, no." Zelda looked around wildly. "They'll spoil everything!"

"I'm calling the cops!" A window slammed.

"God," said Bella, "if the cops come-"
"What?"

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"It'll be all wrong. If anyone's going to tell them to take it easy, pipe
down, it's gotta be us. We care, don't we?"

"God, yes, but-"

"No buts. Grab on. Here we go."

The two voices murmured below and the piano tuned itself with hiccups of sound
as they edged down another step and another, their mouths dry, hearts
hammering, and the night so dark they could see only the faint streetlight at
the stair bottom, the single street illumination so far away it was sad being
there all by itself, waiting for shadows to move.

More windows slammed up, more screen doors opened. At any moment there would
be an avalanche of protest, incredible outcries, perhaps shots fired, and all
this gone forever.

Thinking this, the women trembled and held tight, as if


to pummel each other to speak against the rage.

"Say something, Zelda, quick."

" What?"

"Anything! They'll get hurt if we don't-"
" They?"

"You know what I mean. Save them."

"Okay. Jesus!" Zelda froze, clamped her eyes shut to find the words, then
opened her eyes and said, "Hello."

"Louder. "

`'Hello," Zelda called softly, then loudly.

Shapes rustled in the dark below. One of the voices rose while the other fell
and the piano strummed its hidden harp strings.

"Don't be afraid," Zelda called

"That's good. Go on."

"Don't be afraid," Zelda called, braver now. "Don't listen to those others
yelling. We won't hurt you. It's just us. I'm Zelda, you wouldn't remember,
and this here is Bella, and we've known you forever, or since we were kids,
and we love you. It's late, but we thought you should know. We've loved you
ever since you were in the desert or on that boat with ghosts or trying to
sell Christmas trees door-to-door or in that traffic where you tore the
headlights off cars, and we still love you, right, Bella?"

The night below was darkness, waiting.

Zelda punched Bella's arm.

"Yes!" Bella cried, "what she said. We love you."

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"We can't think of anything else to say."

"But it's enough, yes?" Bella leaned forward anxiously. "It's enough?"

A night wind stirred the leaves and grass around the stairs and the shadows
below that had stopped moving with the music box suspended between them as
they looked up and up at the two women, who suddenly began to cry. First tears
fell from Bella's cheeks, and when Zelda sensed them, she let fall her own.

So now,'' said Zelda, amazed that she could form words but managed to speak
anyway, "we want you to know, you don t have to come back anymore. You don't
have to climb the hill every night, waiting. For what we said just now is it,
isn't it? I mean you wanted to hear it here on this hill, with those steps,
and that piano, yes, that's the whole thing, it had to be that, didn't it? So
now here we are and there you are and it's said. So rest, dear friends."

"Oh, there, Ollie,"," added Bella in a sad, sad whisper. "Oh, Stan, Stanley."

The piano, hidden in the dark, softly hummed its wires and creaked its ancient
wood.

And then the most incredible thing happened. There was: a series of shouts and
then a huge banging crash as the music box, in the dark, rocketed down the
hill, skittering on the steps, playing chords where it hit, swerving, rushing,
and ahead of it, running, the two shapes pursued by the musical beast,
yelling, tripping, shouting, warning the Fates, crying out to the gods, down
and down, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred steps.

And half down the steps, hearing, feeling, shouting, crying themselves, and
now laughing and holding to each other, the two women alone in the night
wildly clutching, grasping, trying to see, almost sure that they did see, the
three things ricocheting off and away, the two shadows rushing, one fat,, one
thin, and the piano blundering after, discordant and mindless, until they
reached the street, where, instantly, the one overhead streetlamp died as if
struck, and the shadows floundered on, pursued by the musical beast.

And the two women, abandoned, looked down, exhausted with laughing until they
wept and weeping until they laughed, until suddenly Zelda got a terrible look
on her face as if shot.

"My God!" she shouted in panic, reaching out. "Wait. We didn't mean, we don't
want-don't go forever! Sure, go. so the neighbors here sleep. But once a year,
you hear? Once a year, one night a year from tonight, and every year after
that, come back. It shouldn't bother anyone so much. But we got to tell you
all over again, huh?
Come back and bring the box with you, and we'll be here waiting, won't we,
Bella?"

"Waiting, yes."

There was a long silence from the steps leading down into an old black-and-
white, silent Los Angeles.

"You think they heard?"

They listened.

And from somewhere far off and down, there was the faintest explosion like the
engine of an old jalopy knocking itself to life, and then the merest whisper

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of a lunatic music from a dark theater when they were very young. It faded.

After a long while they climbed back up the steps, dabbing at their eyes with
wet Kleenex. Then they turned for a final time to stare down into the night.

"You know something?" said Zelda. "I think they heard."





THE ELECTROCUTION


She let him tie the black silk over her eyes and he knotted it and jerked it
so tight that she gasped and said, "Loosen it, damn you, Johnny, loosen it, or
I won't go on!'?


"Sure," he said easily, and she smelled his sharp breath;
while beyond; the crowd rustled against the rope barrier and the carnival tent
flapped in the night wind, and off, there was a drift of calliope music and
the rattle of a trap drum.

Dimly, through the black silk, she could see the men, the boys, the few women,
a good crowd, paying out dimes to see her strapped in this electric chair,
the electrodes on her wrists and neck, waiting.

"There." Johnny's voice whispered through the blindfold. "That better?"

She said nothing, but her hands gripped the ends of the wooden chair. She felt
her pulse beating in her arms and

neck.. Outside the pitchman yelled through his small cardboard megaphone and
slapped his cane across the banner where Electra's portrait shivered in the
wind: yellow hair,

hard blue eyes, sharp chin, seated in her death-chair like
Someone come for tea.

With the black silk blinding her, it was easier to let her mind run back to
wherever it wanted to go . . .

The carnival was either setting up in a new town or letting go; its brown
tents inhaling by day, exhaling its stale air by night as the canvases slid
rustling down along the dark poles. And then?

Last Monday night this young man with the long arms and the eager pink face
bought three tickets to the sideshow and stood watching Electra three times as
the electricity burned through her like blue fire while this young man
strained at the rope barrier, and memorized her every move as she sat high up
there on the platform, all fire and pale flesh.

He came four nights in a row.

"You got an audience, Ellie," said Johnny on the third night.

"So I see," she said.

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"Don't pay no attention," said Johnny.

"I won't," she said. "Why should I? Don't worry."

After all, she'd done the act for years. Johnny slammed on the power, and it
filled her from ankle to elbows to ears as he handed her the bright sword and
she thrust it out blindly over the audience, smiling under her half mask, to
let them tap shoulders and brows as the blue sparks crackled and spat. On the
fourth night she shoved the sword far out toward the young man with the
sweating pink face, first among the crowd. The young man raised his hand
swiftly, eagerly, as if to seize the blade. Blue sparks leaped the gap, but
his hand didn't flinch or stop as he grabbed on and took the fire in his
fingers and then his fist and then his wrist and his arm into his body.

His eyes, in the light, flared with blue alcohol flame, fed by the sword,
whose fire in passing lit her arm and face and body. He stretched his hand
still farther out, his waist jammed against the rope, silent and tense. Then
Johnny cried, "Everybody touch it! Every one!" And Electra lifted the blade
out on the air for others to feel and stroke, while Johnny cursed. Through the
blindfold she saw the terrible illumination which would not leave the young
man's face.

The fifth night, instead of touching the young man's fingers, she tapped the
blazing tip of the sword against the palm of his hand, brushing and burning
until he shut his eyes.

That night she walked out on the lake pier after the show and did not look
back as she moved, but listened and began to smile. The lake shook against the
rotting piles. The carnival lights made wandering, uneasy roads on the black
water. The Ferris wheel whirled high and around, with its faint screams, and
far away the calliope steamed and sobbed "Beautiful Ohio." She slowed her
walking.
She put out her right foot, slowly, then her left, then she stopped and turned
her head. And as she turned she saw the shadow, and his arms moved around her.
A
long time later she leaned back in his arms and stared up into his healthy,
excited pink face, and said, "My God, you're more dangerous than my chair!"

"Is your name really Electra?" he said.

The next night as the power leaped through her, she stiffened, shuddered, and
clamped her lips in her teeth, moaning. Her legs stirred; her hands groped and
scratched the chair arms.

"What's wrong!" Beyond the blindfold, Johnny cried out, "What?"

And cut the power.

"I'm all right," she gasped. The crowd murmured. "It's nothing Go on! Now!"

And he hit the switch.

The fire crawled through her and again she clenched her teeth and threw her
head back against the chair. A face rushed out of the dark, and a body with
it, to press against her. The power exploded. The electric chair stopped, then
melted.

Johnny, a million miles off in the dark, handed her the sword. Her limp,
twitching hand dropped it. He handed it back and instinctively she shoved it

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far out into the night.

Someone, out there in the roaring darkness, touched the blade. She could
imagine his eyes burning there, his lips parted as the power jolted him. He
was pressed against the rope, hard, hard against the rope, and could not
breathe or cry out or pull back!

The power died. The smell of lightning stayed.

"That's it!" someone cried.

Johnny left her to squirm out of the leather straps, jumped off the low
platform, and walked out toward the midway. Convulsively, she tore off the
bonds, trembling. She ran from the tent, not looking back to see if the young
man was still there against the rope.

She fell upon the cot of the trailer behind the tent, perspiring and shaking,
and was still crying when Johnny stepped in to look down at her.

"What's the matter?" he said.

"Nothing, nothing, Johnny."

"What was that you pulled out there just now?"

"Nothing, nothing."

"Nothing, nothing," he said. "Like hell it is." His face twisted. "Like hell!
You haven't done anything like that for years!"

"I was nervous!"

"Years it's been," he said. "When we were first married you did that. You
think
I forgot how when I switched the power on this same happened like tonight? You
been sitting in that chair for three years like someone listening to a radio.
And tonight, and tonight!" he cried, choking, standing over her, his fists
tightened. "Damn it, tonight."

"Please, please, Johnny. I was nervous."

"What were you thinking there in the chair?" he demanded, leaning down wildly.
"What did you think about?"

"Nothing, Johnny, nothing. " He grabbed her hair. "Please!"

He threw her head down, turned, walked out, and stopped outside. "I know what
you were thinking," he said. "I know." And she heard his footsteps fade away.

And the night passed and the day and another night with another crowd.

But nowhere in the crowd did she see his face. Now, in the blackness, with the
blindfold tight to her face, she sat in the electric chair and waited while
Johnny described the wonders of the Skeleton Man over on the next platform,
and still she waited and stared at everyone who entered the tent. Johnny
walked around the Skeleton Man, all stiffness, describing the living skull and
the terrible bones, and at last the crowd rustled, turned, led by Johnny, his
voice like a battered brass horn as he jumped up onto the platform with her so
violently that she jerked aside and licked her red lips.

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And now the knot of the blindfold was tied tighter and yet tighter as he bent
to whisper:

"Miss him?"

She said nothing, but held her head up. The crowd stirred below, like animals
in a straw stable.

"He's not here," he whispered and locked the electrodes on her arms. She was
silent. He whispered again, "He'll never come back." He fitted the black
skullcap over her hair. She trembled. "Afraid?" he wondered quietly. "What
of?"
He snapped the straps around her ankles. "Don't be afraid. Good clean
electricity." A gasp escaped her lips. He stood up. "I hit him," he said
softly, touching her blindfold. "Hit him so hard I broke his front teeth. Then
I knocked him against a wall and hit him again and again-" He Stopped and
shouted. "Ladies and gentlemen, witness the most astounding act in carnival
history! Here you see a penitentiary electric chair exactly like those used in
our biggest prisons.
Perfect for the destruction of criminals!" With this last word she fell
forward, fingers scratching the wood as he cried, "Before your very eyes, this
dear lady will be electrocuted!"

The crowd murmured, and she thought of the tesla transformer under the
platform and how Johnny might have fixed it so she got amperage, not voltage.
Accident, bad accident Shame. Amperage, not voltage.

She wrenched her right hand free of its leather strap and heard the power
switch slam shut as the blue fire seized and shook her, screaming!

The audience applauded and whistled and stomped. Oh she thought wildly, this
is good, my death? Great! More applause! More screams!

Out of the black spaces a body fell. "Hit him so hard broke his teeth!" The
body jerked. "Then I hit him and hit him again!" The body fell, was picked up,
fell again. She screamed high and long as a million unseen mouths stung and
bit her.

Blue flames seized her heart. The young man' body writhed and exploded in bone
shrapnel, flame, and ash

Calmly, Johnny handed her the sword.

"Now," he said.

Being safe was like a blow to the stomach.

She sobbed, fumbling at the sword, quivering and jerking unable to move. The
power hummed and the crowd stuck out their hands, some like spiders, some like
birds leaping away wherever the sword sizzled and spat.

The power still lived in her bones as all over the carnival grounds the lights
dimmed.

Click. The switch lay in its Off bed.

She sank in upon herself, the sweat running around her nose and her sagging
mouth. Gasping, she fought free to pull the blindfold away.

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The crowd had gone off to another platform, another miracle, where the Fat
Lady called and they obeyed.

Johnny's hand lay on the switch. He dropped his hand, stood there watching
her, his dark eyes cold, not flickering.

The tent lights looked dirty, old, yellow, and unclean. She stared blindly at
the retreating crowd, Johnny, the tent, the lights. She looked shrunken in the
chair. Half of her had poured out through the wires, flushed into the copper
cable that fled over the town, leaping from high pole to pole. She lifted her
head as if it weighed ninety pounds. The clean light had come, entered into
and slid through her, and blasted out again; but it was not the same light
anymore.
She had changed it; she saw how she had made it. And she shivered because the
light was discolored.

Johnny's mouth opened. She didn't hear him at first. He had to repeat what had
to be said.

"You're dead," he said firmly. And again: "You're dead."

And sitting there in the electric chair, trapped by the leather straps, with a
wind from the tent flaps playing over her face, evaporating the wetness,
staring at him and seeing the dark in his eyes, she gave the only answer it
was possible to give.

"Yes," she said, eyes shut. "Oh, yes. I am."









HOPSCOTCH

Vinia woke to the sound of a rabbit running down and across an endless moonlit
field; but it was only the soft, quick beating of her heart. She lay on the
bed for a moment, getting her breath. Now the sound of the running faded and
was gone at a great distance. At last she sat up and looked down from her
second-
story bedroom window and there below, on the long sidewalk, in the faint
moonlight before dawn, was the hopscotch.

Late yesterday, some child had chalked it out, immense and endlessly
augmented, square upon square, line after line, numeral following numeral. You
could not see the end of it. Down the street it built its crazy pattern, 3, 4,
5, on up to
10, then 30, 50, 90, on away to turn far corners. Never in all the children's
world a hopscotch like this! You could Jump forever toward the horizon.

Now in the very early, very quiet morning, her eyes traveled and jumped,
paused and hopped, along that presumptuous ladder of chalk-scratches and she
heard herself whisper:

"Sixteen. "

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But she did not run on from there.

The next square waited, she knew, with the scribbled blue chalk 17, but her
mind flung out its arms and balanced, teetering, poised with her numb foot
planted across the 1 and the 6, and could go no further.

Trembling, she lay back down.

The room was like the bottom of a cool well all night and she lay in it like a
white stone in a well, enjoying it, floating in the dark yet clear element of
half dreams and half wakening. She felt the breath move in small jets from her
nostrils and she felt the immense sweep of her eyelids shutting and opening
again and again. And at last she felt the fever brought into her room by the
presence of the sun beyond the hills.

Morning, she thought. It might be a special day. After all, it's my birthday.
Anything might happen. And I hope it does.

The air moved the white curtains like a summer breath.

"Vinia . . . ?"

A voice was calling. But it couldn't be a voice. Yet-Vinia raised
herself-there it was again.

"Vinia . . . ?"

She slipped from bed and ran to the window of her high second-story window.

There on the fresh lawn below, calling up to her in the early hour, stood
James
Conway, no older than she, seventeen, very seriously smiling, waving his hand
now as her head appeared.

"Jim, what're you doing here?" she said, and thought, Does he know what day
this is?

"I've been up an hour already," he replied. "I'm going for a walk, starting
early, all day. Want to come along?"

Oh but I couldn't . . . my folks won't be back till late tonight, I'm alone,
I'm supposed to stay . . ."

She saw the green hills beyond the town and the roads leading out into summer,
leading out into August and rivers and places beyond this town and this house
and this room and this particular moment.

"I can't go . . ." she said faintly.

"I can't hear you!" he protested mildly, smiling up at her under a shielding
hand.

"Why did you ask me to walk with you, and not someone else?"

He considered this for a moment. "I don't know," he admitted. He thought it
over again, and gave her his most pleasant and agreeable look. "Because,
that's all, just because."

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"I'll be down," she said.

"Hey!" he said.

But the window was empty.

They stood in the center of the perfect, jeweled lawn, over which one set of
prints, hers, had run, leaving marks, and another, his, had walked in great
slow strides to meet them. The town was silent as a stopped clock. All the
shades were still down.

"My gosh," said Vinia, "it's early. It's crazy-early. I've never been up this
early and out this early in years. Listen to everyone sleeping."

They listened to the trees and the whiteness of the houses in this early
whispering hour, the hour when mice went back to sleep and flowers began
untightening their bright fists.

"Which way do we go?"

"Pick a direction."

Vinia closed her eyes, whirled, and pointed blindly. "Which way am I
pointing?"

"North. "

She opened her eyes. "Lefts go north out of town, then. I don't suppose we
should."

"Why?"

And they walked out of town as the sun rose above the hills and the grass
burned greener on the lawns.

There was a smell of hot chalk highway, of dust and sky and waters flowing in
a creek the color of grapes. The sun was a new lemon. The forest lay ahead
with shadows stirring like a million birds under each tree, each bird a leaf-
darkness, trembling. At noon, Vinia and James Conway had crossed vast meadows
that sounded brisk and starched underfoot. The day had grown warm, as an iced
glass of tea grows warm, the frost burning off, left in the sun.

They picked a handful of grapes from a wild barbed-wire vine. Holding them up
to the sun, you could see the clear grape thoughts suspended in the dark amber
fluid, the little hot seeds of contemplation stored from many afternoons of
solitude and plant philosophy. The grapes tasted of fresh, clear water and
something that they had saved from the morning dews and the evening rains.
They were the warmed-over flesh of April ready now, in August, to pass on
their simple gain to any passing stranger. And the lesson was this; sit in the
sun, head down, within a prickly vine, in flickery light or open light, and
the world will come to you. The sky will come in its time, bringing rain, and
the earth will rise through you, from beneath, and make you rich and make you
full.

"Have a grape," said James Conway. "Have two."

They munched their wet, full mouths.

They sat on the edge of a brook and took off their shoes and let the water cut

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their feet off to the ankles with an exquisite cold razor.

My feet are gone! thought Vinia. But when she looked, there they were,
underwater, living comfortably apart from her, completely acclimated to an
amphibious existence.

They ate egg sandwiches Jim had brought with him in a paper sack.

"Vinia,'' said Jim, looking at his sandwich before he bit it. ''would you mind
if I kissed you?"

"I don't know," she said, after a moment. "I hadn't thought. "

"Will you think it over?" he asked.

"Did we come on this picnic just so you could kiss me?" she asked suddenly.

"Oh, don't get me wrong! It's been a swell day! I don't want to spoil it. But
if you should decide, later, that it's all right for me to kiss you, would you
tell me?"

"I'll tell you," she said, starting on her second sandwich, "if I ever
decide."




The rain came as a cool surprise.

It smelled of soda water and limes and oranges and the cleanest, freshest
river in the world, made of snow-water, falling from the high, parched sky.

First there had been a motion, as of veils, in the sky. The clouds had
enveloped each other softly. A faint breeze had lifted Vinia's hair, sighing
and evaporating the moisture from her upper lip, and then, as she and Jim
began to

run, the raindrops fell down all about without touching them and then at last
began to touch them, coolly, as they leaped green-moss logs and darted among
vast trees into the deepest, muskiest cavern of the forest. The forest sprang
up in wet murmurs overhead, every leaf ringing and painted fresh with water.

"This way!" cried Jim.

And they reached a hollow tree so vast that they could squeeze in and be
warmly cozy from the rain. They stood together, arms about each other, the
first coldness from the rain making them shiver, raindrops on their noses and
cheeks, laughing. "Hey!" He gave her brow a lick. "Drinking water!"

"Jim!"

They listened to the rain, the soft envelopment of the world in the velvet
clearness of falling water, the whispers in deep grass, evoking odors of old,
wet wood and leaves that had lain a hundred years, moldering and sweet.

Then they heard another sound. Above and inside the hollow warm darkness of
the tree was a constant humming, like someone in a kitchen, far away, baking
and crusting pies contentedly, dipping in sweet sugars and snowing in baking
powders, someone in a warm, dim, summer-rainy kitchen making a vast supply of

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food, happy at it, humming between lips over it.

"Bees, Jim, up there! Bees!"

"Shh!"

Up the channel of moist, warm hollow they saw little yellow flickers. Now the
last bees, wettened, were hurrying home from whatever pasture or meadow or
field they had covered, dipping by Vinia and Jim, vanishing up the warm flue
of summer into hollow dark.

"They won't bother us. Just stand still."

Jim tightened his arms; Vinia tightened hers. She could smell his breath with
the wild tart grapes still on it. And the harder the rain drummed on the tree,
the tighter they held, laughing, at last quietly letting their laughter drain
away into the sound of the bees home from the far fields. And for a moment,
Vinia thought that she and Jim might be caught by a sudden drop of great
masses of honey from above, sealing them into this tree forever, enchanted, in
amber, to be seen by anyone in the next thousand years who strolled by, while
the weather of all ages rained and thundered and turned green outside the
tree.

It was so warm, so safe, so protected here, the world did not exist, there was
raining silence, in the sunless, forested day.

"Vinia," whispered Jim, after a while. "May I now?"

His face was very large, near her, larger than any face she had ever seen.

"Yes," she said.

He kissed her.

The rain poured hard on the tree for a full minute while everything was cold
outside and everything was tree-warmth and hidden away inside.

It was a very sweet kiss. It was very friendly and comfortably warm and it
tasted like apricots and fresh apples and as water tastes when you rise at
night and walk into a dark, warm summer kitchen and drink from a cool tin cup.
She had never imagined that a kiss could be so sweet and immensely tender and
careful of her. He held her not as he had held her a moment before, hard, to
protect her from the green rain weather, but he held her now as if she were a
porcelain clock, very carefully and with consideration. His eyes were closed
and the lashes were glistening dark; she saw this in the instant she opened
her eyes and closed them again.

The rain stopped.

It was a moment before the new silence shocked them into an awareness of the
climate beyond their world. Now there was nothing but the suspension of water
in all the intricate branches of the forest. Clouds moved away to show the
blue sky in great quilted patches.

They looked out at the change with some dismay. They waited for the rain to
come back, to keep them, by necessity, in this hollow tree for another minute
or an hour. But the sun appeared, shining through upon everything, making the
scene quite commonplace again.

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They stepped from the hollow tree slowly and stood with their hands out,
balancing, finding their way, it seemed, in these woods where the water was
drying fast on every limb and leaf.

"I think we'd better start walking," said Vinia. "That way."

They walked off into the summer afternoon.



They crossed the town limits at sunset and walked hand in hand in the last
glowing of the summer day. They had talked very little the rest of the
afternoon, and now as they turned down one street after another, they looked
at the passing sidewalk under their feet.

"Vinia," he said at last. "Do you think this is the beginning of something?"

"Oh, gosh, Jim, I don't know."

"Do you think maybe we're in love?"

"Oh, I don't know that either!"

They passed down into the ravine and over the bridge and up the other side to
her street.

"Do you think we'll ever be married?"

"It's too early to tell, isn't it?" she said.

"I guess you're right." He bit his lip. "Will we go walking again soon?"

'I don't know. I don't know. Let's wait and see, Jim."

The house was dark, her parents not home yet. They stood on her porch and she
shook his hand gravely.

"Thanks, Jim, for a really fine day," she said.

"You're welcome," he said.

They stood there.

Then he turned and walked down the steps and across the dark lawn. At the far
edge of lawn he stopped in the shadows and said, "Good night."

He was almost out of sight, running, when she, in turn, said good night.




In the middle of the night, a sound wakened her.

She half sat up in bed, trying to hear it again. The folks were home,
everything was locked and secure, but it hadn't been them. No, this was a
special sound.
And lying there, looking out at the summer night that had, not long ago, been
a summer day, she heard the sound again, and it was a sound of hollowing
warmth and moist bark and empty, tunneled tree, the rain outside but

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comfortable dryness and secretness inside, and it was the sound of bees come
home from distant fields, moving upward in the flue of summer into wonderful
darkness.

And this sound, she realized, putting her hand up in the summer-night room to
touch it, was coming from her drowsy, half-smiling mouth.

Which made her sit bolt upright, and very quietly move downstairs, out through
the door, onto the porch, and across the wet-grass lawn to the sidewalk, where
the crazed hopscotch chalked itself way off into the future.

Her bare feet hit the first numbers, leaving moist prints up to 10 and 12,
thumping, until she stopped at 16, staring down at 17, hesitating, swaying.
Then she gritted her teeth, made fists, reared back, and . . .

Jumped right in the middle of the square 17.

She stood there for a long moment, eyes shut, seeing how it felt.

Then she ran upstairs and lay out on the bed and touched her mouth to see if a
summer afternoon was breathing out of it, and listening for that drowsy hum,
the golden sound, and it was there.

And it was this sound, eventually, which sang her to sleep.






THE FINNEGAN

To say that I have been haunted for the rest of my life by the affair Finnegan
is to grossly understate the events leading up to that final melancholy. Only
now, at threescore and ten, can I write these words for an astonished
constabulary who may well run with picks and shovels to unearth my truths or
bury my lies.
The facts are these:
Three children went astray and were missed. Their bodies were found in the
midst of Chatham Forest and each bore no marks of criminal assassination, but
all had suffered their lifeblood to be drained. Only their skin remained like
that of some discolored vineyard grapes withered by sunlight and no rain.
From the withered detritus of these innocents rose fresh rumors of vampires or
similar beasts with similar appetites. Such myths always pursue the facts to
stun them in their tracks. It could only have been a tombyard beast, it was
said, that fed on and destroyed three lives and ruined three dozen more.
The children were buried in the most holy ground. Soon after, Sir Robert
Merriweather, pretender to the throne of Sherlock Holmes but modestly refusing
the claim, moved through the ten dozen doors of his antique house to come
forth to search for this terrible thief of life. With myself, I might add, to
carry his brandy and bumbershoot and warn him of underbrush pitfalls in that
dark and mysterious forest.
Sir Robert Merriweather, you say?
Just that. Plus the ten times ten plus twelve amazing doors in his shut-up
house.
Were the doors used? Not one in nine. How had they appeared in Sir Robert's
old manse? He had shipped them in, as a collector of doors, from Rio, Paris,
Rome, Tokyo, and mid-America. Once collected, he had stashed them, hinged, to
be seen from both sides, on the walls of his upper and lower chambers. There

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he conducted tours of these odd portals for such antique fools as were
ravished by the sight of the curiously overdone, the undersimplified, the
rococo, or some
First Empire cast aside by Napoleon's nephews or seized from Hermann Goering,
who had in turn ransacked the Louvre. Others, pelted by Oklahoma dust storms,
were jostled home in flatbeds cushioned by bright posters from carnivals
buried in the windblown desolations of 1936 America. Name your least favorite
door, it was his. Name the best quality, he owned it also, hidden and safe,
true beauties behind oblivion's portals.
I had come to see his doors, not the deaths. At his behest, which was a
command, I had bought my curiosity a steamship ticket and arrived to find Sir
Robert involved not with ten dozen doors, but some great dark door. A
mysterious portal, still un-found. And beneath? A tomb.
Sir Robert hurried the grand tour, opening and shutting panels rescued from
Peking, long buried near Etna, or filched from Nantucket. But his heart, gone
sick, was not in this, what should have been delightful, tour.
He described the spring rains that drenched the country to make things green,
only to have people to walk out in that fine weather and one week find the
body of a boy emptied of life through two incisions in his neck, and in the
next weeks, the bodies of the two girls. People shouted for the police and sat
drinking in pubs, their faces long and pale, while mothers locked their
children home where fathers lectured on the dooms that lay in Chatham Forest.
"Will you come with me," said Sir Robert at last, "on a very strange, sad
picnic?"
"I will," I said.
So we snapped ourselves in weather-proofs, lugged a hamper of sandwiches and
red wine, and plunged into the forest on a drear Sunday.
There was time, as we moved down a hill into the dripping gloom of the trees,
to recall what the papers had said about the vanished children's bloodless
flesh,

the police thrashing the forest ten dozen times, clueless, while the
surrounding estates slammed their doors drum-tight at sunset.
"Rain. Damn. Rain!" Sir Robert's pale face stared up, his gray mustache
quivering over his thin mouth. He was sick and brittle and old. "Our picnic
will be ruined!"
"Picnic?" I said. "Will our killer join us for eats?"
"I pray to God he will," Sir Robert said. "Yes, pray to God he will."
We walked through a land that was now mists, now dim sunlight, now forest, now
open glade, until we came into a silent part of the woods, a silence made of
the way the trees grew wetly together and the way the green moss lay in swards
and hillocks. Spring had not yet filled the empty trees. The sun was like an
arctic disk, withdrawn, cold, and almost dead.
"This is the place," said Sir Robert at last.
"Where the children were found?" I inquired.
"Their bodies empty as empty can be."
I looked at the glade and thought of the children and the people who had stood
over them with startled faces and the police who had come to whisper and touch
and go away, lost.
"The murderer was never apprehended?"
"Not this clever fellow. How observant are you?" asked Sir Robert.
"What do you want observed?"
"There's the catch. The police slipped up. They were stupidly anthropomorphic
about the whole bloody mess, seeking a killer with two arms, two legs, a suit
of clothes, and a knife. So hypnotized with their human concept of the killer
that they overlooked one obvious unbelievable fact about this place. So!"
He gave his cane a quick light tap on the earth.
Something happened. I stared at the ground. "Do that again," I whispered.
"You saw it?"

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"I thought I saw a small trapdoor open and shut. May I have your cane?"
He gave me the cane. I tapped the ground. It happened again.
"A spider!" I cried. "Gone! God, how quick!"
"Finnegan," Sir Robert muttered.
"What?"
"You know the old saying: in again, out again, Finnegan. Here."
With his penknife, Sir Robert dug in the soil to lift an entire clod of earth,
breaking off bits to show me the tunnel. The spider, in panic, leaped out its
small wafer door and fell to the ground.
Sir Robert handed me the tunnel. "Like gray velvet. Feel. A model builder,
that small chap. A tiny shelter, camouflaged, and him alert. He could hear a
fly walk. Then pounce out, seize, pop back, slam the lid!"
"I didn't know you loved Nature."
"Loathe it. But this wee chap, there's much we share. Doors. Hinges. Wouldn't
consider other arachnids. But my love of portals drew me to study this
incredible carpenter." Sir Robert worked the trap on its cobweb hinges. "What
craftsmanship! And it all ties to the tragedies!"
"The murdered children?"
Sir Robert nodded. "Notice any special thing about this forest?"
"It's too quiet."
"Quiet!" Sir Robert smiled weakly. "Vast quantities of silence. No familiar
birds, beetles, crickets, toads. Not a rustle or stir. The police didn't
notice.
Why should they? But it was this absence of sound and motion in the glade that
prompted my wild theory about the murders."
He toyed with the amazing structure in his hands.
"What would you say if you could imagine a spider large enough, in a hideout
big enough, so that a running child might hear a vacuumed sound, be seized,
and vanish with a soft thud below. How say you?" Sir Robert stared at the
trees.

"Poppycock and bilge? Yet, why not? Evolution, selection, growth, mutations,
and-pfft!"
Again he tapped with his cane. A trapdoor flew open, shut.
"Finnegan," he said.
The sky darkened.
"Rain!" Casting a cold gray eye at the clouds, he stretched his frail hand to
touch the showers. "Damn! Arachnids hate rain. And so will our huge dark
Finnegan."
"Finnegan!" I cried irritably.
"I believe in him, yes."
"A spider larger than a child?!"
"Twice as large."
The cold wind blew a mizzle of rain over us. "Lord, I hate to leave. Quick,
before we go. Here."
Sir Robert raked away the old leaves with his cane, revealing two globular
gray-
brown objects.
"What are they?" I bent. "Old cannonballs?"
"No." He cracked the grayish globes. "Soil, through and through."
I touched the crumbled bits.
"Our Finnegan excavates," said Sir Robert. "To make his tunnel. With his large
rakelike chelicerae he dislodges soil, works it into a ball, carries it in his
jaws, and drops it beyond his hole."
Sir Robert displayed half a dozen pellets on his trembling palm. "Normal balls
evicted from a tiny trapdoor tunnel. Toy-size." He knocked his cane on the
huge globes at our feet. "Explain those!"
I laughed. "The children must've made them with mud!"
"Nonsense!" cried Sir Robert irritably, glaring about at trees and earth. "By

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God, somewhere, our dark beast lurks beneath his velvet lid. We might be
standing on it. Christ, don't stare! His door has beveled rims. Some
architect, this Finnegan. A genius at camouflage."
Sir Robert raved on and on, describing the dark earth, the arachnid, its
fiddling legs, its hungry mouth, as the wind roared and the trees shook.
Suddenly, Sir Robert flung up his cane.
"No!" he cried.
I had no time to turn. My flesh froze, my heart stopped.
Something snatched my spine.
I thought I heard a huge bottle uncorked, a lid sprung. Then this monstrous
thing crawled down my back.
"Here!" cried Sir Robert. "Now!"
He struck with his cane. I fell, dead weight. He thrust the thing from my
spine.
He lifted it.
The wind had cracked the dead tree branch and knocked it onto my back.
Weakly, I tried to rise, shivering. "Silly," I said a dozen times. "Silly.
Damn awful silly!"
"Silly, no. Brandy, yes!" said Sir Robert. "Brandy?"
The sky was very black now. The rain swarmed over us.

Door after door after door, and at last into Sir Robert's country house study.
A
warm, rich room, where a fire smoldered on a drafty hearth. We devoured our
sandwiches, waiting for the rain to cease. Sir Robert estimated that it would
stop by eight o'clock, when, by moonlight, we might return, ever so
reluctantly, to Chatham Forest. I remembered the fallen branch, its spidering
touch, and drank both wine and brandy.
"The silence in the forest," said Sir Robert, finishing his meal. "What
murderer could achieve such a silence?"

"An insanely clever man with a series of baited, poisoned traps, with liberal
quantities of insecticide, might kill off every bird, every rabbit, every
insect," I said.
"Why should he do that?"
"To convince us that there is a large spider nearby. To perfect his act."
"We are the only ones who have noticed this silence; the police did not. Why
should a murderer go to all that trouble for nothing?"
"Why is a murderer? you might well ask."
"I am not convinced." Sir Robert topped his food with wine. "This creature,
with a voracious mouth, has cleansed the forest. With nothing left, he seized
the children. The silence, the murders, the prevalence of trapdoor spiders,
the large earth balls, it all fits."
Sir Robert's fingers crawled about the desktop, quite like a washed, manicured
spider in itself. He made a cup of his frail hands, held them up.
"At the bottom of a spider's burrow is a dustbin into which drop insect
remnants on which the spider has dined. Imagine the dustbin of our Grand
Finnegan!"
I imagined. I visioned a Great Legged thing fastened to its dark lid under the
forest and a child running, singing in the half-light. A brisk insucked whisk
of air, the song cut short, then nothing but an empty glade and the echo of a
softly dropped lid, and beneath the dark earth the spider, fiddling, cabling,
spinning the stunned child in its silently orchestrating legs.
What would the dustbin of such an incredible spider resemble? What the
remnants of many banquets? I shuddered.
"Rain's letting up." Sir Robert nodded his approval. "Back to the forest. I've
mapped the damned place for weeks. All the bodies were found in one half-open
glade. That's where the assassin, if it was a man, arrives! Or where the
unnatural silk-spinning, earth-tunneling architect of special doors abides his

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tomb."
"Must I hear all this?" I protested.
"Listen more." Sir Robert downed the last of his burgundy. "The poor
children's prolapsed corpses were found at thirteen-day intervals. Which means
that every two weeks our loathsome eight-legged hide-and-seeker must feed.
Tonight is the fourteenth night after the last child was found, nothing but
skin. Tonight our hidden friend must hunger afresh. So! Within the hour, I
shall introduce you to
Finnegan the great and horrible!"
"All of which," I said, "makes me want to drink."
"Here I go." Sir Robert stepped through one of his Louis the Fourteenth
portals.
"To find the last and final and most awful door in all my life. You will
follow."
Damn, yes! I followed.

The sun had set, the rain was gone, and the clouds cleared off to show a cold
and troubled moon. We moved in our own silence and the silence of the
exhausted paths and glades while Sir Robert handed me a small silver pistol.
"Not that that would help. Killing an outsize arachnid is sticky. Hard to know
where to fire the first shot. If you miss, there'll be no time for a second.
Damned things, large or small, move in the instant!"
"Thanks." I took the weapon. "I need a drink."
"Done." Sir Robert handed me a silver brandy flask. "Drink as needed."
I drank. "What about you?"
"I have my own special flask." Sir Robert lifted it. "For the right time."
"Why wait?"
"I must surprise the beast and mustn't be drunk at the encounter. Four seconds
before the thing grabs me, I will imbibe of this dear Napoleon stuff, spiced
with a rude surprise.
"Surprise?"

"Ah, wait. You'll see. So will this dark thief of life. Now, dear sir, here we
part company. I this way, you yonder. Do you mind?"
"Mind when I'm scared gutless? What's that?"
"Here. If I should vanish." He handed me a sealed letter. "Read it aloud to
the constabulary. It will help them locate me and Finnegan, lost and found."
"Please, no details. I feel like a damned fool following you while Finnegan,
if he exists, is underfoot snug and warm, saying, 'Ah, those idiots above
running about, freezing. I think I'll let them freeze.' "
"One hopes not. Get away now. If we walk together, he won't jump up. Alone,
he'll peer out the merest crack, glom the scene with a huge bright eye, flip
down again, ssst, and one of us gone to darkness."
"Not me, please. Not me."
We walked on about sixty feet apart and beginning to lose one another in the
half moonlight.
"Are you there?" called Sir Robert from half the world away in leafy dark.
"I wish I weren't," I yelled back.
"Onward!" cried Sir Robert. "Don't lose sight of me. Move closer. We're near
on the site. I can intuit, I almost feel-"
As a final cloud shifted, moonlight glowed brilliantly to show Sir Robert
waving his arms about like antennae, eyes half shut, gasping with expectation.
"Closer, closer," I heard him exhale. "Near on. Be still. Perhaps . .
He froze in place. There' was something in his aspect that made me want to
leap, race, and yank him off the turf he had chosen.
"Sir Robert, oh, God!" I cried. "Run!"
He froze. One hand and arm orchestrated the air, feeling, probing, while his
other hand delved, brought forth his silver-coated flask of brandy. He held it
high in the moonlight, a toast to doom. Then, afflicted with need, he took

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one, two, three, my God, four incredible swigs!
Arms out, balancing the wind, tilting his head back, laughing like a boy, he
swigged the last of his mysterious drink.
"All right, Finnegan, below and beneath!" he cried. "Come get me!"
He stomped his foot.
Cried out victorious.
And vanished.
It was all over in a second.
A flicker, a blur, a dark bush had grown up from the earth with a whisper, a
suction, and the thud of a body dropped and a door shut.
The glade was empty.
"Sir Robert. Quick!"
But there was no one to quicken.
Not thinking that I might be snatched and vanished, I lurched to the spot
where
Sir Robert had drunk his wild toast.
I stood staring down at earth and leaves with not a sound save my heart
beating while the leaves blew away to reveal only pebbles, dry grass, and
earth.
I must have lifted my head and bayed to the moon like a dog, then fell to my
knees, fearless, to dig for lids, for tunneled tombs where a voiceless tangle
of legs wove themselves, binding and mummifying a thing that had been my
friend.
This is his final door, I thought insanely, crying the name of my friend.
I found only his pipe, cane, and empty brandy flask, flung down when he had
escaped night, life, everything.
Swaying up, I fired the pistol six times here into the unanswering earth, a
dumb thing gone stupid as I finished and staggered over his instant graveyard,
his locked-in tomb, listening for muffled screams, shrieks, cries, but heard
none. I
ran in circles, with no ammunition save my weeping shouts. I would have stayed
all night, but a downpour of leaves, a great spidering flourish of broken
branches, fell to panic and suffer my heart. I fled, still calling his name to
a silence lidded by clouds that hid the moon.

At his estate, I beat on the door, wailing, yanking, until I recalled: it
opened inward, it was unlocked.
Alone in the library, with only liquor to help me live, I read the letter that
Sir Robert had left behind:

My dear Douglas:
I am old and have seen much but am not mad. Finnegan exists. My chemist had
provided me with a sure poison that I will mix in my brandy for our walk. I
will drink all. Finnegan, not knowing me as a poisoned morsel will give me a
swift invite. Now you see me, now you don't. I will then be the weapon of his
death, minutes after my own. I do not think there is another outsize nightmare
like him on earth. Once gone, that's the end.
Being old, I am immensely curious. I fear not death, for my physicians tell me
that f no accidents kill me, cancer will.
I thought of giving a poisoned rabbit to our nightmare assassin. But then I'd
never know where he was or if he really existed. Finnegan would die unseen in
his monstrous closet, and I never the wiser. This way, for one victorious
moment, I will know. Fear for me. Envy me. Pray for me. Sorry to abandon you
without farewells. Dear friend, carry on.

I folded the letter and wept.
No more was ever heard of him.
Some say Sir Robert killed himself, an actor in his own melodrama, and that
one day we shall unearth his brooding, lost, and Gothic body and that it was

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he who killed the children and that his preoccupation with doors and hinges,
and more doors, led him, crazed, to study this one species of spider, and
wildly plan and build the most amazing door in history, an insane burrow into
which he popped to die, before my eyes, thus hoping to perpetuate the
incredible Finnegan.
But I have found no burrow. I do not believe a man could construct such a pit,
even given Sir Robert's overwhelming passion for doors.
I can only ask, would a man murder, draw his victims' blood, build an earthen
vault? For what motive? Create the finest secret exit in all time? Madness.
And what of those large grayish balls of earth supposedly tossed forth from
the spider's lair?
Somewhere, Finnegan and Sir Robert lie clasped in a velvet-lined unmarked
crypt, deep under. Whether one is the paranoiac alter ego of the other, I
cannot say.
But the murders have ceased, the rabbits once more rush in Chatham Forest, and
its bushes teem with butterflies and birds. It is another spring, and the
children run again through a loud glade, no longer silent.
Finnegan and Sir Robert, requiescat in peace.







THAT WOMAN ON THE LAWN





Very late at night he heard the weeping on the lawn in front of his house. It
was the sound of a woman crying. By its sound he knew it was not a girl or a
mature woman, but the crying of someone eighteen or nineteen years old. It
went

on, then faded and stopped, and again started up, now moving this way or that
on the late-summer wind.
He lay in bed listening to it until it made his eyes fill with tears. He
turned over, shut his eyes, let the tears fall, but could not stop the sound.
Why should a young woman be weeping long after midnight out there?
He sat up and the weeping stopped.
At the window, he looked down. The lawn was empty but covered with dew. There
was a trail of footsteps across the lawn to the middle where someone had stood
turning, and another trail going off toward the garden around the house.
The moon stood full in the sky and filled the lawn with its light, but there
was no more sadness and only the footprints there.
He stepped back from the window, suddenly chilled, and went down to heat and
drink a cup of chocolate.
He did not think of the weeping again until dusk the next day, and even then
thought that it must be some woman from a house nearby, unhappy with life,
perhaps locked out and in need of a place to let her sadness go.
Yet . . .?
As the twilight deepened, coming home he found himself hurrying from the bus,
at a steady pace which astonished him. Why, why all this?
Idiot, he thought. A woman unseen weeps under your window, and here at sunset
the next day, you almost run.
Yes, he thought, but her voice!
Was it beautiful, then?

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No. Only familiar.
Where had he heard such a voice before, wordless in crying?
Who could he ask, living in an empty house from which his parents had vanished
long ago?
He turned in at his front lawn and stood still, his eyes shadowed.
What had he expected? That whoever she was would be waiting here? Was he that
lonely that a single voice long after midnight roused all his senses?
No. Simply put: he must know who the crying woman was.
And he was certain she would return tonight as he slept.
He went to bed at eleven, and awoke at three, panicked that he had missed a
miracle. Lightning had destroyed a nearby town or an earthquake had shaken
half the world to dust, and he had slept through it!
Fool! he thought, and slung back the covers and moved to the window, to see
that indeed he had overslept.
For there on the lawn were the delicate footprints.
And he hadn't even heard the weeping!
He would have gone out to kneel in the grass, but at that moment a police car
motored slowly by, looking at nothing and the night.
How could he run to prowl, to probe, to touch the grass if that car came by
again? What doing? Picking clover blossoms? Weeding dandelions? What, what?
His bones cracked with indecision. He would go down, he would not.
Already the memory of that terrible weeping faded the more he tried to make it
clear. If he missed her one more night, the memory itself might be gone.
Behind him, in his room, the alarm clock rang. Damn! he thought. What time did
I
set it for? He shut off the alarm and sat on his bed, rocking gently, waiting,
eyes shut, listening.
The wind shifted. The tree just outside the window whispered and stirred.
He opened his eyes and leaned forward. From far off, coming near, and now down
below, the quiet sound of a woman weeping.
She had come back to his lawn and was not forever lost. Be very quiet, he
thought.
And the sounds she made came up on the wind through the blowing curtains into
his room.
Careful now. Careful but quick.

He moved to the window and looked down.
In the middle of the lawn she stood and wept, her hair long and dark on her
shoulders, her face bright with tears.
And there was something in the way her hands trembled at her sides, the way
her hair moved quietly in the wind, that shook him so that he almost fell.
He knew her and yet did not. He had seen her before, but had never seen.
Turn your head, he thought.
Almost as if hearing this, the young woman sank to her knees to half kneel on
the grass, letting the wind comb her hair, head down and weeping so steadily
and bitterly that he wanted to cry out: Oh, no! It kills my heart!
And as if she had heard, quite suddenly her head lifted, her weeping grew less
as she looked up at the moon, so that he saw her face.
And it was indeed a face seen somewhere once, but where?
A tear fell. She blinked.
It was like the blinking of a camera and a picture taken.
"God save me!" he whispered. "No!"
He whirled and stumbled toward the closet to seize down an avalanche of boxes
and albums. In the dark he scrabbled, then pulled on the closet light, tossed
aside six albums until finally, dragging another forth and riffling pages, he
gave a cry, stopped, and held a photo close, then turned and moved blindly to
the window.
There he stared down at the lawn and then at the photograph, very old, very
yellowed with age.

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Yes, yes, the same! The image struck his eyes and then his heart. His whole
body shook, made an immense pulsation, as he leaned at the album, leaned on
the window frame, and almost shouted:
You! How dare you come back! How dare you be young! How dare you be what? A
girl untouched, wandering late on my lawn!? You were never that young! Never!
Damn, oh, damn your warm blood, damn your wild soul!
But this he did not shout or say.
For something in his eyes, like a beacon, must have flashed.
The crying of the young woman on the lawn stopped.
She looked up.
At which instant the album fell from his fingers, through the burst-wide
screen, and down like a dark bird fluttering to strike the earth.
The young man gave a muted cry, whirled, and ran. "No, no!" he cried aloud. "I
didn't mean-come back!" He was down the stairs and out on the porch in a
matter of seconds. The door slammed behind him like a gunshot. The explosion
nailed him to the rail, half down to the lawn, where there was nothing to be
seen but footprints. Either way, up the street lay empty sidewalks and shadows
under trees. A radio played off in an upstairs window in a house behind trees.
A car passed, murmuring, at a far intersection.
"Wait," he whispered. "Come back. I shouldn't have said-"
He stopped. He had said nothing, but only thought it. But his outrage, his
jealousy?
She had felt that. She had somehow heard. And now. ..?
She'll never come back, he thought. Oh God!
He sat on the porch steps for a while, quietly biting his knuckle.
At three in the morning, in bed, he thought he heard a sigh and soft footsteps
in grass, and waited. The photo album lay closed on the floor. Even though it
lay shut, he could see and know her face. And it was utterly impossible,
utterly insane.
His last thought before sleep was: ghost.
The strangest ghost that ever walked.
The ghost of someone dead.
The ghost of someone who died very old.
But somehow come back not as her old self.

But a ghost that was somehow young.
Weren't ghosts always, when they returned, the same age as when they died?
No.
Not this one anyway.
"Why . ..?" he whispered.
And dream took over the whisper.

One night passed and then another and another, and there was nothing on the
lawn but the light of a moon that changed its face from outright stare to half
grimace.
He waited.
The first night a more than ordinarily casual cat crossed the yard at two a.m.
The second night a dog trotted by, wearing his tongue half out of his mouth
like a loosely tied red cravat, smiling at trees.
The third night a spider spent from twelve-twenty-five until four a.m.
building a baroque clockface on the air between lawn and trees, which a bird
broke in passing at dawn.
He slept most of Sunday and awoke with a fever that was not an illness at
dusk.
Late in the twilight of the fifth day, the color of the sky somehow promised
her return, as did the way the wind leaned against the trees and the look of
the moon when it finally rose to set the scene.
"All right," he said, half aloud. "Now." But at midnight, nothing.
"Come on," he whispered.

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One o'clock, nothing.
You must, he thought.
No, you will.
He slept for ten minutes and woke suddenly at two-ten, knowing that when he
went to the window-
She would be there.
She was.
At first, he didn't see her, and groaned, and then, in the shadow of the great
oak far out on the edge of the lawn, he saw something move, and one foot came
out, and she took a step and stood very still.
He held his breath, quieted his heart, told himself to turn, walk, and take
each step down with precision, numbering them, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen,
moving in darkness with no rush, six, five, four, and at last one. He opened
the front screen door with only a whisper, and was on the porch without
frightening what might be out beyond waiting for him.
Quietly, he moved down the porch steps to the edge of the lawn, like one who
stands on the rim of a pond. Out in the center of that pond, the young woman
stood, trapped like someone on thin ice that might at any moment break and
drop her through.
She did not see him. And then ...
She did a thing that was a signal. Tonight her hair was fixed in a knot at the
back of her head. She lifted her white arms in a gesture and with one touch of
her fingers, a touch of snow, loosened her hair.
It fell in a dark banner, to blow and repattern itself across her shoulders,
which trembled with their shadows.
The wind stirred her hair in the night and moved it about her face and on her
uplifted hands.
The shadows laid down by the moon under every tree leaned as if called by the
motion.
The entire world shifted in its sleep.
The wind blew as the young woman waited.
But no footsteps sounded along the white sidewalks. No front doors opened far
down the street. No windows were raised. No motion caused front porches to
creak and shift.

He took another step out onto the small meadow of night.
"Who are you-?" she gasped, and stepped back. "No, no," he said softly. "It's
all right." Another trembling had taken over her body. Where before it had
been some hope, some anticipation, now it was fear. One hand stopped her hair
from blowing; the other half shielded her face.
''I'll stand right here,'' he said. ''Believe me.'' She waited a long while,
staring at him until her shoulders relaxed and the lines around her mouth
vanished. Her whole body sensed the truth of his words.
"I don't understand," she said.
"I don't either." "What are you doing here?"
"I don't know." "What am I doing here?"
"You came to meet someone," he said.
"Did I?"
The town clock struck three in the morning far away. She listened to it, her
face shadowed by the sound.
"But it's so late. People don't walk around late on front lawns!"
"They do if they must," he said.
"But why?"
"Maybe we can find out, if we talk."
"About what, what?!"
"About why you're here. If we talk long enough, we may know. I know why I'm
here, of course. I heard you crying."
"Oh, I'm so ashamed."
"Don't be. Why are people ashamed of tears? I cry often. Then I start

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laughing.
But the crying must come first. Go ahead."
"What a strange man you are."
Her hand fell away from her hair. Her other hand moved away so her face was
illuminated by a small and growing curiosity.
"I thought I was the only one who knew about crying," she said.
"Everyone thinks that. It's one of those little secrets we keep from each
other.
Show me a serious man and I'll show you a man who has never wept. Show me a
madman and I'll show you a man who dried his tears a long time ago. Go ahead."
"I think I'm done," she said.
"Any time, start over."
She burst out a tiny laugh. "Oh, you are strange. Who are you?"
"We'll come to that."
She peered across the lawn at his hands, his face, his mouth, and then at his
eyes.
"Oh, I know you. But from where?!"
"That would spoil it. You wouldn't believe, anyway."
"I would!"
Now it was his turn to laugh quietly. "You're very young."
"No, nineteen! Ancient!"
"Girls, by the time they go from twelve to nineteen, are full of years, yes. I
don't know; but it must be so. Now, please, why are you out here in the middle
of the night?"
"I-" She shut her eyes to think in on it. "I'm waiting."
"Yes?"
"And I'm sad."
"It's the waiting that makes you sad, yes?"
"I think, no, yes, no."
"And you don't quite know what you're waiting for?"
"Oh, I wish I could be sure. All of me's waiting. I don't know, all of me. I
don't understand. I'm impossible!"
"No, you're everyone that ever grew up too fast and wanted too much. I think
girls, women, like you have slipped out at night since time began. If it
wasn't

here in Green Town, it was in Cairo or Alexandria or Rome or Paris in summer,
anywhere there was a private place and late hours and no one to see, so they
just rose up and out, as if someone had called their name-"
"I was called, yes! That's it! Someone did call my name! It's true. How did
you know? Was it you!"
"No. But someone we both know. You'll know his name when you go back to bed
tonight, wherever that is."
"Why, in that house, behind you," she said. "That's my house. I was born in
it."
"Well"-he laughed-"so was I."
"You? How can that be? Are you sure?"
"Yes. Anyway, you heard someone calling. You had to come out-"
"I did. Many nights now. But, always, no one's here. They must be there, or
why would I hear them?"
"One day there'll be someone to fit the voice."
"Oh, don't joke with me!"
"I'm not. Believe. There will be. That's what all those other women heard in
other years and places, middle of summer, dead of winter, go out and risk
cold, stand warm in snow banks, and listen and look for strange footprints on
the midnight snow, and only an old dog trotting by, all smiles. Damn, damn."
"Oh, yes, damn, damn." And her smile showed for a moment, even as the moon
came out of the clouds and went away. "Isn't it silly?"
"No. Men do the same. They take long walks when they're sixteen, seventeen.

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They don't stand on lawns, waiting, no. But, my God, how they walk! Miles and
miles from midnight until dawn and come home exhausted and explode and die in
bed."
"What a shame that those who stand and wait and those who walk all night
can't-"
"Meet?"
"Yes; don't you think it's a shame?"
"They do, finally."
"Oh, no, I shall never meet anyone. I'm old and ugly and terrible and I don't
know how many nights I've heard that voice making me come here and there's
nothing and I just want to die."
"Oh, lovely young girl," he said gently. "Don't die. The cavalry is on its
way.
You will be saved."
There was such certainty in his voice that it made her glance up again, for
she had been looking at her hands and her own soul in her hands.
"You know, don't you?" she asked.
"Yes."
"You truly know? You tell the truth?"
"Swear to God, swear by all that's living."
"Tell me more!"
"There's little more to tell."
"Tell me!"
"Everything will be all right with you. Some night soon, or some day, someone
will call and they'll really be there when you come to find. The game will be
over."
"Hide-and-seek, you mean? But it's gone on too long!"
"It's almost over, Marie."
"You know my name!"
He stopped, confused. He had not meant to speak it.
"How did you know, who are you?" she demanded.
"When you get back to sleep tonight, you'll know. If we say too much, you'll
disappear, or I'll disappear. I'm not quite sure which of us is real or which
is a ghost."
"Not me! Oh, surely not me. I can feel myself. I'm here. Why, look!" And she
showed him the remainder of her tears brushed from her eyelids and held on her
palms.

"Oh, that's real, all right. Well, then, dear young woman, I must be the
visitor. I come to tell you it will all go right. Do you believe in special
ghosts?"
"Are you special?"
"One of us is. Or maybe both. The ghost of young love or the ghost of the
unborn."
"Is that what I am, you are?"
"Paradoxes aren't easy to explain."
"Then, depending on how you look at it, you're impossible, and so am I."
"If it makes it easier, just think I'm not really here. Do you believe in
ghosts?"
"I think I do."
"It comes to me to imagine, then, that there are special ghosts in the world.
Not ghosts of dead people. But ghosts of want and need, or I guess you might
say desire."
"I don't understand."
"Well, have you ever lain in bed late afternoons, late nights and dreamed
something so much, awake, you felt your soul jump out of your body as if
something had yanked a long, pure white sheet straight out the window? You
want something so much, your soul leaps out and follows, my God, fast?"
"Why . . . yes. Yes!"

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"Boys do that, men do that. When I was twelve I read Burroughs' Mars novels.
John Carter used to stand under the stars, hold up his arms to Mars, and ask
to be taken.
And Mars grabbed his soul, yanked him like an aching tooth across space, and
landed him in dead Martian seas. That's boys, that's men."
"And girls, women?"
"They dream, yes. And their ghosts come out of their bodies. Living ghosts.
Living wants. Living needs."
"And go to stand on lawns in the middle of winter nights?"
"That's about it."
"Am I a ghost, then?"
"Yes, the ghost of wanting so much it kills but doesn't kill you, shakes and
almost breaks you."
"And you?"
"I must be the answer-ghost."
"The answer-ghost. What a funny name!"
"Yes. But you've asked and I know the answer."
"Tell me!"
"All right, the answer is this, young girl, young woman. The time of waiting
is almost over. Your time of despair will soon be through. Very soon, now, a
voice will call and when you come out, both of you, your ghost of want and
your body with it, there will be a man to go with the voice that calls."
"Oh, please don't tell me that if it isn't true!" Her voice trembled. Tears
flashed again in her eyes. She half raised her arms again in defense.
"I wouldn't dream to hurt you. I only came to tell." The town clock struck
again in the deep morning. "It's late," she said.
"Very late. Get along, now." "Is that all you're going to say?" "You don't
need to know any more." The last echoes of the great clock faded.
"How strange," she murmured. "The ghost of a question, the ghost of an
answer."
"What better ghosts can there be?"
"None that I ever heard of. We're twins."
"Far nearer than you think."
She took a step, looked down, and gasped with delight. "Look, oh, look. I can
move!"
"Yes."
"What was it you said, boys walk all night, miles and miles?"

"Yes."
"I could go back in, but I can't sleep now. I must walk, too."
"Do that," he said gently.
"But where shall I go?"
"Why," he said, and he suddenly knew. He knew where to send her and was
suddenly angry with himself for knowing, angry with her for asking. A burst of
jealousy welled in him. He wanted to race down the street to a certain house
where a certain young man lived in another year and break the window, burn the
roof. And yet, oh, yet, if he did that!?
"Yes?" she said, for he had kept her waiting.
Now, he thought, you must tell her. There's no escape.
For if you don't tell her, angry fool, you yourself will never be born.
A wild laugh burst from his mouth, a laugh that accepted the entire night and
time and all his crazed thinking.
"So you want to know where to go?" he said at last.

"Oh, yes!"
He nodded his head. "Up to that corner, four blocks to the right, one block to
the left."
She repeated it quickly. "And the final number?!"
"Eleven Green Park."

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"Oh, thank you, thank you!" She ran a few steps, then stopped, bewildered. Her
hands were helpless at her throat. Her mouth trembled. "Silly. I hate to
leave."
"Why?"
"Why, because . . . I'm afraid I'll never see you again!"
"You will. Three years from now."
"Are you sure?"
"I won't look quite the same. But it'll be me. And you'll know me forever."
"Oh, I'm glad for that. Your face is familiar. I somehow know you well."
She began to walk slowly, looking over at him as he stood near the porch of
the house.
"Thanks," she said. "You've saved my life."
"And my own along with it."
The shadows of a tree fell across her face, touched her cheeks, moved in her
eyes.
"Oh, Lord! Girls lie in bed nights listing the names for their future
children.
Silly. Joe. John. Christopher. Samuel. Stephen. And right now, Will." She
touched the gentle rise of her stomach, then lifted her hand out halfway to
point to him in the night. "Is your name Will?"
"Yes."
Tears absolutely burst from her eyes. He wept with her.
"Oh, that's fine, fine," she said at last. "I can go now. I won't be out here
on the lawn anymore. Thank God, thank you. Good night."
She went away into the shadows across the lawn and along the sidewalk down the
street. At the far corner he saw her turn and wave and walk away.
"Good night," he said quietly.
I am not born yet, he thought, or she has been dead many years, which is it?
which?
The moon sailed into clouds.
The motion touched him to step, walk, go up the porch stairs, wait, look out
at the lawn, go inside, shut the door.
A wind shook the trees.
The moon came out again and looked upon a lawn where two sets of footprints,
one going one way, one going another in the dew, slowly, slowly, as the night
continued, vanished.
By the time the moon had gone down the sky there was only an empty lawn and no
sign, and much dew.

The great town clock struck six in the morning. Fire showed in the east. A
cock crowed.







THE VERY GENTLE MURDERS





Joshua Enderby awoke in the middle of the night because e felt someone's
fingers at his throat.
In the rich darkness above him he sensed but could not see his wife's frail,
skelatinous weight seated on his chest while she dabbled and clenched
tremblingly again and again at his neck.

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He opened his eyes wide. He realized what she was trying to do. It was so
ridiculous he almost cried out with laughter!
His rickety, jaundiced, eighty-five-year-old wife was trying to strangle him!
She panted forth a rum-and-bitters smell as she perched there, toppling like a
drunken moth, tinkering away as if he were a toy. She sighed irritably and her
skinny fingers began to swear as she gasped, "Why don't you, oh, why don 't
you?"
Why don't I what? he wondered idly, lying there. He swallowed and this faint
action of his Adam's apple dislodged her feeble clutch. Why don't I die; is
that it? he cried silently. He lay another few moments, wondering if she'd
gain strength enough to do him in. She didn't.
Should he snap on the light to confront her? Wouldn't she look a silly ass, a
skinny chicken aloft sidesaddle on her hated husband's amazed body, and him
laughing?
Joshua Enderby groaned and yawned. "Missy?"
Her hands froze on his collarbone.
"Will you-" He turned, pretending half sleep. "Will you-please' '-he yawned-'
'move to your side - of the bed? Eh? Good girl."
Missy moved off in the dark. He heard ice tinkle. She was having another shot
of rum.

At noon the next day, enjoying the weather and waiting for luncheon guests to
arrive, old Joshua and Missy traded drinks in the garden pavilion. He handed
her
Dubonnet; she gave him sherry.
There was a moment of silence as both eyed the stuff and hesitated to sip. He
handled his glass in such a way that his large white diamond ring sparked and
glittered on his palsied hand. Its light made him flinch and at last he
gathered his phlegm.
"Missy," he said. "You haven't long to live, you know." Missy was hidden
behind jonquils in a crystal bowl and now peered out at her mummified husband.
Both perceived that the other's hands shook. She wore a cobalt dress, heavily
iced with luncheon jewels, little glittery planets under each ear, a scarlet
design for a mouth. The ancient whore of Babylon, he thought dryly.
"How odd, my dear, how very odd," Missy said with a polite scrape of her
voice.
"Why, only last night-"
"You were thinking of me?"
"We must talk."

"Yes, we must." He leaned like a wax mannequin in his chair. "No rush. But if
I
do you in, or if you do me in (it matters not which), let's protect each
other, yes? Oh, don't look at me in amaze, my dear. I was perfectly aware of
your little gallup last night on my ribs, fumbling with my esophagus, feeling
the tumblers click, or whatever."
"Dear me." Blood rose in Missy's powdery cheeks. "Were you awake all during?
I'm mortified. I think I shall have to go lie down."
"Nonsense." Joshua stopped her. "If I die, you should be shielded so no one'll
accuse you. Same with me, if you die. Why go to all the trouble of trying to-
eliminate-each other if it just means a gallows-drop or a french fry."
"Logical enough," she agreed.
"I suggest a-a series of mash notes to each other. Umm, lavish displays of
sentiment before friends, gifts, et cetera. I'll run up bills for flowers,
diamond bracelets. You purchase fine leather wallets and gold-ferruled canes
for me."
"You have a head for things, I must say," she admitted.
"It will help allay suspicion if we appear madly, anciently in love."
"You know," she said tiredly, "it doesn't matter, Joshua, which of us dies

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first, except that I'm very old and would like to do one thing right in my
life.
I've always been such a dilettante. I've never liked you. Loved you, yes, but
that's ten million years back. You never were a friend. If it weren't for the
children-"
"Motives are bilge," he said. "We are two querulous old pots with nothing to
do but kick off, and make a circus of that. But how much better the dying game
if we write a few rules, act it neatly, with no one the wiser. How long has
this assassination plot of yours been active?"
She beamed. "Remember the opera last week? You slipped from the curb? That car
almost nailed you?"
"Good Lord." He laughed. "I thought someone shoved both of us!" He leaned
forward, chuckling. "Okay. When you fell in the bath last month? I greased the
tub!"
Unthinkingly, she gasped, drank part of her Dubonnet, then froze.
Reading her mind, he stared at his own drink.
"This isn't poisoned, by any chance?" He sniffed his glass. "Don't be silly,"
she replied, touching her Dubonnet with a lizard's doubtful tongue. "They'd
find the residue in what's left of your stomach. Just be sure you double-check
your shower tonight. I have kited the temperature, which might bring on a
seizure."
"You didn't!" he scoffed.
"I've thought about it," she confessed.
The front-door chimes rang, but not with their usual joy, sounding more
funereal. Nonsense! Joshua thought. Bosh! thought Missy, then brightened:
"We have forgotten our luncheon guest! That's the Gowrys! He's a bore, but be
nice! Fix your collar."
"It's damned tight. Too much starch. One more plot to strangle me?"
"I wish I had thought of that. Double time, now!"
And they marched, arm in arm, with idiot laughter, off to meet the half-
forgotten Gowrys.
Cocktails were served. The old relics sat side by side, hands laced like
school chums, laughing with weak heartiness at Gowry's dire jokes. They leaned
forward to show him their porcelain smiles, saying, "Oh, that's a good one!"
loudly, and, softly, sotto voce; to each other: "Thought of anything new?"
"Electric razor in your bath?" "Not bad, not bad!"
"And then Pat said to Mike!" cried Mr. Gowry.
From the corner of his mouth Joshua whispered to Missy, "You know, I dislike
you with something approaching the colossal proportions of first love. You
have taught me mayhem. How?"
"When the teacher is ready, the pupil will arrive," whispered Missy.

Laughter rose in tumbling, whirling waves. The room was giddy, airy, light.
"So
Pat says to Mike, do it yourself!" boomed Gowry.
"Oh, ho!" everyone exploded.
"Now, dear." Missy waved at her ancient husband. "Tell one of your jokes. Oh,
but first," she remembered cleverly, "trot down-cellar, darling, and fetch the
brandy."
Gowry sprang forward with wild courtesy. "I know where it is!"
"Oh, Mr. Gowry, don't!"
Missy gestured frantically.
Mr. Gowry ran from the room.
"Oh, dear, dear me," cried Missy.
A moment later, Gowry uttered a loud shriek from the basement, followed by a
thunderous crash.
Missy hippety-hopped out, only to reappear moments later, her hand clutched to
her throat. "Heavens to Betsy," she wailed. "Come look. I do believe Mr. Gowry
has pitched himself straight down the cellar stairs!"

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The next morning Joshua Enderby shuffled into the house lugging a large green
velvet board some five feet by three, on which pistols were clasped in
display.
"Here I am!" he shouted.
Missy appeared with a rum Collins in one bracelet-jangly hand, her cane
thumping in the other. "What's that?" she demanded.
"First, how's old Gowry?"
"Broken leg. Wished it had been his vocal cords."
"Shame about that top cellar step gone loose, eh?" The old man hooked the
green velvet board to the wall. "Good thing Gowry lurched for the brandy, not
I."
"Shame." The wife drank thirstily. "Explain."
"I'm in the antique-gun-collecting business." He waved at the weapons in their
neat leather nests.
"I don't see-"
"With a collection of guns to clean-bang!" He beamed. "Man shoots wife while
oiling matchlock garter pistol. Didn't know it was loaded, says weeping
spouse."
"Touche'," she said.
An hour later, while oiling a revolver, he almost blew his brains out.
His wife came thumping in and froze. "Hell. You're still alive."
"Loaded, by God!" He lifted the weapon in a trembling hand. "None were loaded!
Unless-"
"Unless-?"
He seized three more weapons. "All loaded! You!"
"Me," she said. "While you ate lunch. I suppose I'll have to give you tea now.
Come along."
He stared at the bullet hole in the wall. "Tea, hell," he said. "Where's the
gin?!"

It was her turn for a shopping spree. "There are ants in the house." She
rattled her full shopping bag and set out ant-paste pots in all the rooms,
sprinkled ant powders on windowsills, in his golf bag, and over his gun
collection. From other sacks she drew rat poisons, mouse-killers, and
bug-exterminators. "A bad summer for roaches." She distributed these liberally
among the foods.
"That's a double-edged sword," he observed. "You'll fall on it!"
"Bilge. The victim mustn't choose his demise."
"Yes, but no violence. I wish a serene face for the coroner."
"Vanity. Dear Josh, your face will twist like a corkscrew with one heaping
teaspoon of Black Leaf Forty in your midnight cocoa!"
"I," he shot back, "know a recipe that will break you out in a thousand lumps
before expiring"
She quieted. "Why, Josh, I wouldn't dream of using Black Leaf Forty."

He bowed. "I wouldn't dream of using the thousand-lump recipe."
"Shake," she said.

Their assassins game continued. He bought huge rattraps to hide in the halls.
"You run barefoot so: small wounds, large infections!"
She in turn stuck the sofas full of antimacassar pins. Wherever he laid a hand
it drew blood. "Ow! Damn!" He sucked his fingers. "Are these Amazon Indian
blowgun darts?"
"No. Just plain old rusty lockjaw needles."
"Oh," he said.
Though he was aging fast, Joshua Enderby dearly loved to drive. You could see
him motoring with feeble wildness up and down the hills of Beverly, mouth
gaped, eyes blinking palely.

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One afternoon he phoned from Malibu. "Missy? My God, I almost dove from a
cliff.
My right front wheel flew off on a straightaway!"
"I planned it for a curve!"
"Sorry."
"Got the idea from Action News. Loosen car's wheel lugs:
tomato surprise."
"Never mind about careless old me," he said. "What's new with you?"
"Rug slipped on the hall stairs. Maid fell on her prat."
"Poor Lila."
"I send her everywhere ahead now. She bucketed down like a laundry bag. Lucky
she's all fat."
"We'll kill that one between us if we're not careful."
"Do you think? Oh, I do like Lila so."
"Lay Lila off for a spell. Hire someone new. If we catch them in our
crossfire, won't be so sad. Hate to think of Lila smashed under a chandelier
or-"
"Chandelier!" Missy shrieked. "You been fiddling with my grandma's
Fountainbleu
Palace crystal hangings? Listen here, mister. You're not to touch that
chandelier!"
"Promise," he muttered.
"Good grief! Those lovely crystals! If they fell and missed me, I'd hop on one
leg to cane you to death, then wake you up and cane you again!"
Slam went the phone.

Joshua Enderby stepped in from the balcony at supper that night. He'd been
smoking. He looked at the table. "Where's your strawberry crumpet?"
"I wasn't hungry. I gave it to the new maid."
"Idiot!"
She glared. "Don't tell me you poisoned that crumpet, you old S.O.B.?"
There was a crash from the kitchen.
Joshua went to look and returned. "She's not new any-more," he said.

They stashed the new maid in an attic trunk. No one telephoned to ask for her.
"Disappointing," observed Missy on the seventh day. "I felt certain there'd be
a tall, cold man with a notebook and another with a camera and flashbulbs
flashing. Poor girl was lonelier than we guessed."
Cocktail parties streamed wildly through the house. It was Missy's idea. "So
we can pick each other off in a forest of obstacles; moving targets!"
Mr. Gowry, gamely returning to the house, limping after his tumble of some
weeks before, joked, laughed, and didn't quite blow his ear off with one of
the dueling pistols. Everyone roared but the party broke up early. Gowry vowed
never to return.
Then there was a Miss Kummer, who, staying overnight, borrowed Joshua's
electric razor and was almost but not quite electrocuted. She left the house
rubbing her right underarm. Joshua promptly grew a beard.

Soon after, a Mr. Schlagel vanished. So did a Mr. Smith. The last seen of
these unfortunates was at a Saturday night soiree at the Enderbys' mansion.
"Hide-and-seek?" Friends slapped Joshua's back jovially.
"How do you do it? Kill 'em with toadstools, plant 'em like mushrooms?"
"Grand joke, yes!" chortled Joshua. "No, no, ha, not toadstools, but one got
locked in our stand-up fridge. Overnight Eskimo Pie. The other tripped on a
croquet hoop. Defenestrated through a greenhouse window."
"Eskimo Pie, defenestrated!" hooted the party people. "Dear Joshua, you are a
card!"
"I speak only the truth," Joshua protested.
"What won't you think of next?"

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"One wonders what did happen to old Schlagel and that rascal Smith."
* * *


"What did happen to Schlagel and Smith?" Missy inquired some days later.
"Let me explain. The Eskimo Pie was my dessert. But the croquet hoop? No! Did
you spot it in the wrong place, hoping I'd pop by and lunge through the
greenhouse panes?"
Missy turned to stone; he had touched a nerve.
"Well, now, it's time for a wee talk," he said. "Cancel the parties. One more
victim and sirens will announce the arrival of the law."
"Yes," Missy agreed. "Our target practice seems to wind up in ricochet. About
that croquet hoop. You always take midnight greenhouse walks. Why was that
damn fool Schlagel stumbling about out there at two a.m.? Dumb ox. Is he still
under the compost?"
"Until I stash him with he-who-is-frozen."
"Dear, dear. No more parties."
"Just you, me and-ah-the chandelier?"
"Ah, no. I've hid the stepladder so you can't climb!"
"Damn," said Joshua.

That night by the fireplace, he poured a few glasses of their best port. While
he was out of the room, answering the telephone, she dropped a little white
powder in her own glass.
"Hate this," she murmured. "Terribly unoriginal. But there won't be an
inquest.
He looked long dead before he died, they'll say as they shut the lid." And she
added a touch more lethal stuff to her port just as he wandered in to sit and
pluck up his glass. He .eyed it and fixed his wife a grin. "Ah, no, no, you
don't!"
"Don't what?" she said, all innocence.
The fire crackled warmly, gently on the hearth. The mantel clock ticked.
"You don't mind, do you, my dear, if we exchange drinks?"
"Surely you don't think I poisoned your drink while you were out?"
"Trite. Banal. But possible."
"Well, then, fussbudget, trade."
He looked surprised but traded glasses.
"Here's not looking at you!" both said, and laughed.
They drank with mysterious smiles.
And then they sat with immense satisfaction in their easy chairs, the
firelight glimmering on their ghost-pale faces, letting the port warm their
almost spidery veins. He stuck his legs out and held one hand to the fire.
"Ah." He sighed.
"Nothing, nothing quite like port!"
She leaned her small gray head back, dozing, gumming her red-sticky mouth, and
glancing at him with half-secretive, lazy eyes. "Poor Lila," she murmured.
"Yes," he murmured. "Lila. Poor."
The fire popped and she at last added, "Poor Mr. Schlagel."

"Yes." He drowsed. "Poor Schlagel. Don't forget Smith."
"And you, old man," she said finally, slowly, slyly. "How do you feel?'
"Sleepy."
"Very sleepy?"
"Un-huh." He studied her with bright eyes. "And, my dear, what about you?"
"Sleepy," she said behind closed eyes. Then they popped wide. "Why all these
questions?"
"Indeed," he said, stirring alert. "Why?"
"Oh, well, because . . ." She examined her little black shoe moving in a low
rhythm a long way off below her knee. "I think, or perhaps imagine, I have

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just destroyed your digestive and nervous systems."
For the moment he was drowsily content and examined the warm fire and listened
to the clock tick. "What you mean is that you have just poisoned me?" He
dreamed the words. "You what!?" He jumped as all the air gusted from his body.
The port glass shattered on the floor.
She leaned forward like a fortune-teller eagerly predicting futures.
"I cleverly poisoned my own drink and knew that you'd ask to trade off, so you
felt safe. And we did!" Her laugh tinkled.
He fell back in his chair, clutching at his face to stop the wild swiveling of
his eyes. Then suddenly he remembered something and let out an incredible
explosion of laughter.
"Why," cried Missy, "why are you laughing?"
"Because," he gasped, tears streaming down his cheeks, his mouth grinning
horribly, "I poisoned my drink! and hoped for an excuse to change with you!"
"Oh, dear," she cried, no longer smiling. "How stupid of us. Why didn't I
guess?"
"Because both of us are much too clever by far!" And he lay back, chortling.
"Oh, the mortification, the embarrassment, I feel stark naked and hate
myself!"
"No, no," he husked. "Think instead how much you still hate me."
"With all my withered heart and soul. You?"
"No deathbed forgiveness here, old lily-white iron-maiden wife 0 mine.
Cheerio,"
he added faintly, far away.
"If you think I'll say 'Cheerio' back, you're crazed," she whispered, her head
rolling to one side, her eyes clamped, her mouth gone loose around the words.
"But what the hell. Cheer-"
At which her breath ceased and the fire burned to ashes as the clock ticked
and ticked in the quiet room.
Friends found them strewn in their library chairs the next day, both looking
more than usually pleased with their situation.
"A suicide pact," said all. "So great their love they could not bear to let
the other vanish alone into eternity."
"I hope," said Mr. Gowry, on his crutches, "my wife will someday join me in
similar drinks."





QUICKER THAN THE EYE





It was at a magic show I saw the man who looked enough like me to be my twin.
My wife and I were seated at a Saturday night performance, it was summer and
warm, the audience melting in weather and conviviality. All around I saw
married

and engaged couples delighted and then alarmed by the comic opera of their
lives which was being shown in immense symbol onstage.
A woman was sawed in half. How the husbands in the audience smiled.
A woman in a cabinet vanished. A bearded magician wept for her in despair.
Then, at the tip-top of the balcony, she appeared, waving a white-powdered
hand, infinitely beautiful, unattainable, far away.
How the wives grinned their cat grins!
"Look at them!" I said to my wife.

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A woman floated in midair. .. a goddess born in all men's minds by their own
true love. Let not her dainty feet touch earth. Keep her on that invisible
pedestal. Watch it! God, don't tell me how it's done, anyone! Ah, look at her
float, and dream.
And what was that man who spun plates, globes, stars, torches, his elbows
twirling hoops, his nose balancing a blue feather, sweating everything at
once!
What, I asked myself, but the commuter husband, lover, worker, the quick
luncher, juggling hour, Benzedrine, Nembutal, bank balances, and budgets?
Obviously, none of us had come to escape the world outside, but rather to have
it tossed back at us in more easily digested forms, brighter, cleaner,
quicker, neater; a spectacle both heartening and melancholy.
Who in life has not seen a woman disappear?
There, on the black, plush stage, women, mysteries of talc and rose petal,
vanished. Cream alabaster statues, sculptures of summer lily and fresh rain
melted to dreams, and the dreams became empty mirrors even as the magician
reached hungrily to seize them.
From cabinets and nests of boxes, from flung sea-nets, shattering like
porcelain as the conjurer fired his gun, the women vanished.
Symbolic, I thought. Why do magicians point pistols at lovely assistants,
unless through some secret pact with the male subconscious?
"What?" asked my wife.
"Eh?"
"You were muttering," said my wife.
"Sorry." I searched the program. "Oh! Next comes Miss Quick! The only female
pickpocket in the world!"
"That can't be true," said my wife quietly.
I looked to see if she was joking. In the dark, her dim mouth seemed to be
smiling, but the quality of that smile was lost to me.
The orchestra hummed like a serene flight of bees.
The curtains parted.
There, with no great fanfare, no swirl of cape, no bow, only the most
condescending tilt of her head, and the faintest elevation of her left
eyebrow, stood Miss Quick.
I thought it was a dog act, when she snapped her fingers.
"Volunteers. All men!"
"Sit down." My wife pulled at me.
I had risen.
There was a stir. Like so many hounds, a silently baying pack rose and walked
(or did they run?) to the snapping of Miss Quick's colorless fingernails.
It was obvious instantly that Miss Quick was the same woman who had been
vanishing all evening.
Budget show, I thought; everyone doubles in brass. I don't like her.
"What?" asked my wife.
"Am I talking out loud again?"
But really, Miss Quick provoked me. For she looked as if she had gone
backstage, shrugged on a rumpled tweed walking suit, one size too large,
gravy-spotted and grass-stained, and then purposely rumpled her hair, painted
her lipstick askew, and was on the point of exiting the stage door when
someone cried, "You're on!"

So here she was now, in her practical shoes, her nose shiny, her hands in
motion but her face immobile, getting it over with .
Feet firmly and resolutely planted, she waited, her hands deep in her lumpy
tweed pockets, her mouth cool, as the dumb volunteers dogged it to the stage.
This mixed pack she set right with a few taps, lining them up in a military
row.
The audience waited.
"That's all! Act's over! Back to your seats!"

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Snap! went her plain fingers.
The men, dismayed, sheepishly peering at each other, ambled off. She let them
stumble half down the stairs into darkness, then yawned:
"Haven't you forgotten something?"
Eagerly, they turned.
"Here."
With a smile like the very driest wine, she lazily unwedged a wallet from one
of her pockets. She removed another wallet from within her coat. Followed by a
third, a fourth, a fifth! Ten wallets in all!
She held them forth, like biscuits, to good beasts. The men blinked. No, those
were not their wallets! They had been onstage for only an instant. She had
mingled with them only in passing. It was all a joke. Surely she was offering
them brand-new wallets, compliments of the show!
But now the men began feeling themselves, like sculptures finding unseen flaws
in old, hastily flung together armatures. Their mouths gaped, their hands grew
more frantic, slapping their chest-pockets, digging their pockets.
All the while Miss Quick ignored them to calmly sort their wallets like the
morning mail.
It was at this precise moment I noticed the man on the far right end of the
line, half on the stage. I lifted my opera glasses. I looked once. I looked
twice.
"Well," I said lightly. "There seems to be a man there who somewhat resembles
me."
"Oh?" said my wife.
I handed her the glasses, casually. "Far right."
"It's not like you," said my wife. "It's you!"
"Well, almost," I said modestly.
The fellow was nice-looking. It was hardly cricket to look thus upon yourself
and pronounce favorable verdicts. Simultaneously, I had grown quite cold. I
took back the opera glasses and nodded, fascinated. "Crew cut. Horn-rimmed
glasses.
Pink complexion. Blue eyes-"
"Your absolute twin!" cried my wife.
And this was true. And it was strange, sitting there, watching myself onstage.
"No, no, no," I kept whispering.
But yet, what my mind refused, my eye accepted. Aren't there two billion
people in this world? Yes! All different snowflakes, no two the same! But now
here, delivered into my gaze, endangering my ego and my complacency, here was
a casting from the same absolutes, the identical mold.
Should I believe, disbelieve, feel proud, or run scared? For here I stood
witness to the forgetfulness of God.
"I don't think," said God, "I've made one like this before."
But, I thought, entranced, delighted, alarmed: God errs.
Flashes from old psychology books lit my mind.
Heredity. Environment.
"Smith! Jones! Helstrom!"
Onstage, in bland drill-sergeant tones, Miss Quick called roll and handed back
the stolen goods.
You borrow your body from all your forebears, I thought. Heredity.
But isn't the body also an environment?
"Winters!"

Environment, they say, surrounds you. Well, doesn't the body surround, with
its lakes, its architectures of bone, its overabundances, or wastelands of
soul?
Does not what is seen in passing window-mirrors, a face either serene
snowfalls or a pitted abyss, the hands like swans or sparrows, the feet anvils
or hummingbirds, the body a lumpy wheat-sack or a summer fern, do these not,
seen, paint the mind, set the image, shape the brain and psyche like clay?

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They do!
"Bidwell! Rogers!"
Well, then, trapped in the same environmental flesh, how fared this stranger
onstage?
In the old fashion, I wanted to leap to my feet and call, "What o'clock is
it?"
And he, like the town crier passing late with my face, might half mournfully
reply, "Nine o'clock, and all's well
But was all well with him?
Question: did those horn-rims cover a myopia not only of light but of spirit?
Question: was the slight obesity pressed to his skeleton symbolic of a similar
gathering of tissue in his head?
In sum, did his soul go north while mine went south, the same flesh cloaking
us but our minds reacting, one winter, one summer?
"My God," I said, half aloud. "Suppose we're absolutely identical!"
"Shh!" said a woman behind me.
I swallowed hard.
Suppose, I thought, he is a chain-smoker, light sleeper, overeater, manic-
depressive, glib talker, deep/shallow thinker, flesh fancier...
No one with that body, that face, could be otherwise. Even our names must be
similar.
Our names!
"...1...bl . . . er..." .
Miss Quick spoke his!
Someone coughed. I missed it.
Perhaps she'd repeat it. But no, he, my twin, moved forward. Damn! He
stumbled!
The audience laughed.
I focused my binoculars swiftly.
My twin stood quietly, center stage now, his wallet returned to his fumbling
hands.
"Stand straight," I whispered. "Don't slouch."
"Shh!" said my wife.
I squared my own shoulders, secretly.
I never knew I looked that fine, I thought, cramming the glasses to my eyes.
Surely my nostrils aren't that thinly made, the true aristocrat. Is my skin
that fresh and handsome, my chin that firm?
I blushed, in silence.
After all, if my wife said that was me, accept it! The lamplight of pure
intelligence shone softly from every pore of his face.
"The glasses." My wife nudged me.
Reluctantly I gave them up.
She trained the glasses rigidly, not on the man, but now on Miss Quick, who
was busy cajoling, flirting, and repicking the pockets of the nearest men. On
occasion my wife broke into a series of little satisfied snorts and giggles.

Miss Quick was, indeed, the goddess Shiva.
If I saw two hands, I saw nine. Her hands, an aviary, flew, rustled, tapped,
soared, petted, whirled, tickled as Miss Quick, her face blank, swarmed coldly
over her victims; touched without touching.
"What's in this pocket? And this? And here?"
She shook their vests, pinched their lapels, jingled their trousers: money
rang.
She punched them lightly with a vindictive forefinger, ringing totals on cash
registers. She unplucked coat buttons with mannish yet fragile motions, gave

wallets back, sneaked them away. She thrust them, took them, stole them again,
while peeling money to count it behind the men's backs, then snatched their
watches while holding their hands.

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She trapped a live doctor now!
"Have you a thermometer!?" she asked.
"Yes." He searched. His face panicked. He searched again. The audience cued
him with a roar. He glanced over to find:
Miss Quick standing with the thermometer in her mouth, like an unlit smoke.
She whipped it out, eyed it.
"Temperature!" she cried. "One hundred ten!"
She closed her eyes and gave an insincere shake of her hips.
The audience roared. And now she assaulted her victims, bullied them, tugged
at their shirts, rumpled their hair, asked:
"Where's your tie?"
They clapped their hands to their empty collars.
She plucked their ties from nowhere, tossed them back.
She was a magnet that invisibly drew good-luck charms, saints' medals, Roman
coins, theater stubs, handkerchiefs, stickpins, while the audience ran riot,
convulsed as these rabbit men stood peeled of all prides and protections.
Hold your hip pocket, she vacuumed your vest. Clutch your vest, she jackpotted
your trousers. Blithely bored, firm but evanescent, she convinced you you
missed nothing, until she extracted it, with faint loathing, from her own
tweeds moments later.
"What's this?!" She held up a letter. "'Dear Helen: Last night with you-'"
A furious blush as the victim tussled with Miss Quick, snatched the letter,
stowed it away. But a moment later, the letter was restolen and reread aloud:
"'Dear Helen: Last night-'"
So the battle raged. One woman. Ten men.
She kissed one, stole his belt.
Stole another's suspenders.
The women in the audience-whinnied.
Their men, shocked, joined in.
What a magnificent bully, Miss Quick! How she spanked her dear,
idiot-grinning, carry-on-somehow men turned boys as she spun them like
cigar-store Indians, knocked them with her brontosaur hip, leaned on them like
barber-poles, calling each one cute or lovely or handsome.
This night, I thought, is lunatic! All about me, wives, hilarious with
contempt, hysterical at being so shabbily revealed in their national pastimes,
gagged for air. Their husbands sat stunned, as if a war were over that had not
been declared, fought and lost before they could move. Each, nearby, had the
terrible look of a man who fears his throat is cut, and that a sneeze would
fill the aisle with heads .
Quickly! I thought. Do something!
"You, you onstage, my twin, dodge! Escape!"
And she was coming at him!
"Be firm!" I told my twin. "Strategy! Duck, weave. Zigzag. Don't look where
she says. Look where she doesn't say! Go it! now!"
If I shouted this, or merely ground it to powder in my teeth, I don't recall,
for all the men froze as Miss Quick seized my twin by the hand.
"Careful!" I whispered.
Too late. His watch was gone. He didn't know it. Your watch is gone! I
thought.
He doesn't know what time it is! I thought.
Miss Quick stroked his lapel. Back off! I warned myself.
Too late. His forty-dollar pen was gone. He didn't know it. She tweaked his
nose. He smiled. Idiot! There went his wallet. Not your nose, fool, your coat!

"Padded?" She pinched his shoulder. He looked at his right arm. No! I cried
silently, for now she had the letters out of his left coat pocket. She planted
a red kiss on his brow and backed off with everything else he had on him,
coins, identification, a package of chocolates which she ate, greedily. Use
the sense

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God gave a cow! I shouted behind my face. Blind! See what she's doing!
She whirled him round, measured him, and said, "This yours?" and returned his
tie.
My wife was hysterical. She still held the glasses fixed on every nuance and
vibration of loss and deprivation on the poor idiot's face. Her mouth was
spoiled with triumph.
My God! I cried in the uproar. Get off the stage! I yelled within, wishing I
could really yell it. At least get out while you have some pride!
The laughter had erupted a volcano in the theater, high and rumbling and dark.
The dim grotto seemed lit with unhealthy fever, an incandescence. My twin
wanted to break off, like one of Pavlov's dogs, too many bells on too many
days: no reward, no food. His eyes were glazed with his insane predicament.
Fall! Jump in the pit! Crawl away! I thought.
The orchestra sawed at destiny with violins and Valkyrian trumpets in full
flood.
With one last snatch, one last contemptuous wag of her body, Miss Quick
grasped my twin's clean white shirt, and yanked it off.
She threw the shirt in the air. As it fell, so did his pants As his pants
fell, unbelted, so did the theater. An avalanche of shock soared to bang the
rafters and roll over us in echoes a thundering hilarity.
The curtain fell.
We sat, covered with unseen rubble. Drained of blood, buried in one upheaval
after another, degraded and autopsied and, minus eulogy, tossed into a mass
grave, we men took a minute to stare at that dropped curtain, behind which hid
the pickpocket and her victims, behind which a man quickly hoisted his
trousers up his spindly legs.
A burst of applause, a prolonged tide on a dark shore. Miss Quick did not
appear to bow. She did not need to. She was standing behind the curtain. I
could feel her there, no smile, no expression. Standing, coldly estimating the
caliber of the applause, comparing it to the metered remembrances of other
nights.
I jumped up in an absolute rage. I had, after all, failed myself. When I
should have ducked, I bobbed; when I should have backed off, I ran in. What an
ass!
"What a fine show!" said my wife as we milled through the departing audience.
"Fine!" I cried.
"Didn't you like it?"
"All except the pickpocket. Obvious act, overdone, no subtlety," I said,
lighting a cigarette.
"She was a whiz!"
"This way." I steered my wife toward the stage door.
"Of course," said my wife blandly, "that man, the one who looks like you, he
was a plant. They call them shills, don't they? Paid by the management to
pretend to be part of the audience?"
"No man would take money for a spectacle like that," I said. "No, he was just
some boob who didn't know how to be careful."
"What are we doing back here?"
Blinking around, we found we were backstage.
Perhaps I wished to stride up to my twin, shouting, "Half-baked ox! Insulter
of all men! Play a flute: you dance. Tickle your chin: you jump like a puppet!
Jerk!"
The truth was, of course, I must see my twin close-up, confront the traitor
and see where his true flesh differed from mine. After all, wouldn't I have
done better in his place?!

The backstage was lit in blooms and isolated flushes, now bright, now dark,
where the other magicians stood chatting. And there, there was Miss Quick!
And there, smiling, was my twin!
"You did fine, Charlie," said Miss Quick.

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My twin's name was Charlie. Stupid name.
Charlie patted Miss Quick's cheek. "You did fine, ma'am!"
God, it was true! A shill, a confederate. Paid what? Five, ten dollars for
letting his shirt be torn oft, letting his pants drop with his pride? What a
turncoat, traitor!
I stood, glaring.
He glanced up.
Perhaps he saw me.
Perhaps some bit of my rage and impacted sorrow reached him.
He held my gaze for only a moment, his mouth wide, as if he had just seen an
old school chum. But, not remembering my name, could not call out, so let the
moment pass.
He saw my rage. His face paled. His smile died. He glanced quickly away. He
did not look up again, but stood pretending to listen to Miss Quick, who was
laughing and talking with the other magicians.
I stared at him and stared again. Sweat oiled his face. My hate melted. My
temper cooled. I saw his profile clearly, his chin, eyes, nose, hairline; I
memorized it all. Then I heard someone say:
"It was a fine show!"
My wife, moving forward, shook the hand of the pickpocketing beast.
On the street, I said, "Well, I'm satisfied."
"About what?" asked my wife.
"He doesn't look like me at all. Chin's too sharp. Nose is smaller. Lower lip
isn't full enough. Too much eyebrow. Onstage, far oft, had me going. But close
up, no, no. It was the crew cut and horn-rims fooled us. Anyone could have
horn-
rims and a crew cut."
"Yes," my wife agreed, "anyone."
As she climbed into our car, I could not help but admire her long, lovely
legs.
Driving off, I thought I glimpsed that familiar face in the passing crowd. The
face, however, was watching me. I wasn't sure. Resemblances, I now knew, are
superficial.
The face vanished in the crowd.
"I'll never forget," said my wife, "when his pants-fell!" I drove very fast,
then drove very slow, all the way home.





DORIAN IN EXCELSUS







Good evening. Welcome. I see you have my invitation in your hands. Decided to
be brave, did you? Fine. Here we are Grab onto this."
The tall, handsome stranger with the heavenly eyes and the impossibly blond
hair handed me a wineglass.
"Clean your palate," he said.

I took the glass and read the label on the bottle he held in his left hand.
Bordeaux, it read. St. Emilion.
"Go on," said my host. "It's not poison. May I sit? And might you drink?"
"I might," I sipped, shut my eyes, and smiled. "You're a connoisseur. This is

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the best I've had in years. But why this wine and why the invitation? What am
I
doing here at Gray's Anatomy Bar and Grill?"
My host sat and filled his own glass. "I am doing a favor to myself. This is a
great night, perhaps for both of us. Greater than Christmas or Halloween." His
lizard tongue darted into his wine to vanish back into his contentment. "We
celebrate my being honored, at last becoming-"
He exhaled it all out:
"Becoming," he said, "a friend to Dorian! Dorian's friend. Me!"
"Ah." I laughed. "That explains the name of this place, then? Does Dorian own
Gray's Anatomy?"
"More! Inspires and rules over it. And deservedly so."
"You make it sound as if being a friend to Dorian is the most important thing
in the world."
"No! In life! In all of life." He rocked back and forth, drunk not from the
wine but from some inner joy. "Guess."
"At what?"
"How old I am!"
"You look to be twenty-nine at the most."
"Twenty-nine. What a lovely sound. Not thirty, forty, or fifty, but-"
I said, "I hope you're not going to ask what sign I was born under. I usually
leave when people ask that. I was born on the cusp, August, 1920." I pretended
to half rise. He pressed a gentle hand to my lapel.
"No, no, dear boy-you don't understand. Look here. And here." He touched under
his eyes and then around his neck. "Look for wrinkles."
"But you have none," I said.
"How observant. None. And that is why I have become this very night a fresh,
new, stunningly handsome friend to Dorian."
"I still don't see the connection."
"Look at the backs of my hands." He showed his wrists. "No liver spots. I am
not turning to rust. I repeat the question, how old am I?"
I swirled the wine in my glass and studied his reflection in the swirl.
"Sixty?" I guessed. "Seventy?"
"Good God!" He fell back in his chair, astonished. "How did you know?"
"Word association. You've been rattling on about Dorian. I know my Oscar
Wilde, I know my Dorian Gray, which means you, sir, have a portrait of
yourself stashed in an attic aging while you yourself, drinking old wine, stay
young."
"No, no." The handsome stranger leaned forward. "Not stayed young. Became
young.
I was old, very old, and it took a year, but the clock went back and after a
year of playing at it, I achieved what I set out for."
"Twenty-nine was your target?"
"How clever you are!"
"And once you became twenty-nine you were fully elected as-"
"A Friend to Dorian! Bulls-eye! But there is no portrait, no attic, no staying
young. It's becoming young again's the ticket."
"I'm still puzzled!"
"Child of my heart, you might possibly be another Friend. Come along. Before
the greatest revelation, let me show you the far end of the room and some
doors."
He seized my hand. "Bring your wine. You'll need it!" He hustled me along
through the tables in a swiftly filling room of mostly middle-aged and some
fairly young men, and a few smoke-exhaling ladies. I jogged along, staring
back at the EXIT as if my future life were there.
Before us stood a golden door.
"And behind the door?" I asked.

"What always lies behind any golden door?" my host responded. "Touch."

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I reached out to print the door with my thumb.
"What do you feel?" my host inquired.
"Youngness, youth, beauty." I touched again. "All the springtimes that ever
were or ever will be."
"Jeez, the man's a poet. Push."
We pushed and the golden door swung soundlessly wide.
"Is this where Dorian is?"
"No, no, only his students, his disciples, his almost Friends. Feast your
eyes."
I did as I was told and saw, at the longest bar in the world, a line of men, a
lineage of young men, reflecting and re-reflecting each other as in a fabled
mirror maze, that illusion seen where mirrors face each other and you find
yourself repeated to infinity, large, small, very small, smallest, GONE! The
young men were all staring down the long bar at us and then, as if unable to
pull their gaze away, at themselves. You could almost hear their cries of
appreciation. And with each cry, they grew younger and younger and more
splendid and more beautiful...
I gazed upon a tapestry of beauty, a golden phalanx freshly out of the Elysian
fields and hills. The gates of mythology swung wide and Apollo and his demi-
Apollos glided forth, each more beautiful than the last.
I must have gasped. I heard my host inhale as if he drank my wine.
"Yes, aren't they," he said.
"Come," whispered my new friend. "Run the gauntlet. Don't linger; you may find
tiger-tears on your sleeve and blood rising. Now."
And he glided, he undulated, me along on his soundless tuxedo slippers, his
fingers a pale touch on my elbow, his breath a flower scent too near. I heard
myself say:
"It's been written that H. G. Wells attracted women with his breath, which
smelled of honey. Then I learned that such breath comes with illness."
"How clever. Do I smell of hospitals and medicines?"
"I didn't mean-"
"Quickly. You're rare meat in the zoo. Hup, two, three!"
"Hold on," I said, breathless not from walking fast but from perceiving
quickly.
"This man, and the next, and the one after that-"
''Yes?!"
"My God," I said, "they're almost all the same, look-alikes!"
"Bull's-eye, half true! And the next and the next after that, as far behind as
we have gone, as far ahead as we might go. All twenty-nine years old, all
golden tan, all six feet tall, white of teeth, bright of eye. Each different
but beautiful, like me!"
I glanced at him and saw what I saw around me. Similar but different beauties.
So much youngness I was stunned.
"Isn't it time you told me your name?"
"Dorian."
"But you said you were his Friend."
"I am. They are. But we all share his name. This chap here. And the next. Oh,
once we had commoner names. Smith and Jones. Harry and Phil. Jimmy and Jake.
But then we signed up to become Friends."
"Is that why I was invited? To sign up?"
"I saw you in a bar across town a year ago, made queries. A year later, you
look the proper age-"
"Proper-?"
"Well, aren't you? Just leaving sixty-nine, arriving at seventy?"
''Well.''
"My God! Are you happy being seventy?"
"It'll do.''
"Do? Wouldn't you like to be really happy, steal some wild oats? Sow them?!"

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"That time's over."
"It's not. I asked and you came, curious.
"Curious about what?"
"This." He bared me his neck again and flexed his pale white wrists. "And all
those!" He waved at the fine faces as we passed. "Dorian's sons. Don't you
want to be gloriously wild and young like them?"
"How can I decide?"
"Lord, you've thought of it all night for years. Soon you could be part of
this!"
We had reached the far end of the line of men with bronzed faces, white teeth,
and breath like H. G. Wells' scent of honey ...
"Aren't you tempted?" he pursued. "Will you refuse-"
"Immortality?"
"No! To live the next twenty years, die at ninety, and look twenty-nine in the
damn tomb! In the mirror over there-what do you see?"
"An old goat among ten dozen fauns."
"Yes!"
"Where do I sign up?" I laughed.
"Do you accept?"
"No, I need more facts."
"Damn! Here's the second door. Get in!"
He swung wide a door, more golden than the first, shoved me, followed, and
slammed the door. I stared at darkness.
"What's this?" I whispered.
"Dorian's Gym, of course. If you work out here all year, hour by hour, day by
day, you get younger."
"That's some gym," I observed, trying to adjust my eyes to the dim areas
beyond where shadows tumbled, and voices rustled and whispered. "I've heard of
gyms that help keep, not make, you young . . . Now tell me...
"I read your mind. For every old man that became young in there at the bar, is
there an attic portrait?"
"Well, is there?"
"No! There's only Dorian."
"A single person? Who grows old for all of you?"
"Touche'! Behold his gym!"
I gazed off into a vast high arena where a hundred shadows stirred and moaned
like a tide on a terrible shore.
"I think it's time to leave," I said.
"Nonsense. Come. No one will see you. They're all... busy. I am Moses," said
the sweet breath at my elbow. "And I hereby tell the Red Sea to part!"
And we moved along a path between two tides, each shadowed, each more
terrifying with its gasps, its cries, its slip-pages of flesh, its slapping
like waves, its repeated whispers for more, more, ah, God, more!
I ran, but my host grabbed on. "Look right, left, now right again!"
There must have been a hundred, two hundred animals, beasts, no, men
wrestling, leaping, falling, rolling in darkness. It was a sea of flesh,
undulant, a writhing of limbs on acres of tumbling mats, a glistening of skin,
flashes of teeth where men climbed ropes, spun on leather horses, or flung
themselves up crossbars to be seized down in the tidal flux of lamentations
and muffled cries.
I stared across an ocean of rising and falling shapes. My ears were scorched
by their bestial moans.
"What, my God," I exclaimed, "does it all mean?"
"There. See."
And above the wild turbulence of flesh in a far wall was a great window, forty
feet wide and ten feet tall, and behind that cold glass Something watching,
savoring, alert, one vast stare.

And over all there was the suction of a great breath, a vast inhalation which

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pulled at the gymnasium air with a constant hungry and invisible need. As the
shadows tumbled and writhed, this inhalation tugged at them and the raw air in
my nostrils. Somewhere a huge vacuum machine sucked in darkness but did not
exhale. There were long pauses as the shadows flailed and fell, and then
another savoring inhalation. It swallowed breath. In, in, always in, devouring
the sweaty air, hungering the passions.
And the shadows were pulled, I was pulled, toward that vast glass eye, that
immense window behind which a shapeless Something stared to dine on gymnasium
airs.
"Dorian?" I guessed.
"Come meet him."
"Yes, but . . ." I watched the wild, convulsive shadows. "What are they
doing?"
"Go find out. Afraid? Cowards never live. So!"
He swung wide a third door and whether it was golden hot and alive, I could
not feel, for suddenly I lurched into a hothouse as the door slammed and was
locked by my blond young friend. "Ready?"
"Lord, I must go home!"
"Not until you meet," said my host, "him."
He pointed. At first I could see nothing. The lights were dim and the place,
like the gymnasium, was mostly shadow. I smelled jungle greens. The air
stirred on my face with sensuous strokes. I smelled papaya and mango and the
wilted odor of orchids mixed with the salt smells of an unseen tide. But the
tide was there with that immense inhaled breathing that rose and was quiet and
began again.
"I see no one," I said.
"Let your eyes adjust. Wait."
I waited. I watched.
There were no chairs in the room, for there was no need of chairs.
He did not sit, he did not recline, he "prolonged" himself on the largest bed
in history. The dimensions might easily have been fifteen feet by twenty. It
reminded me of the apartment of a writer I once knew who had completely
covered his room with mattresses so that women stumbled on the sill and fell
flat out on the springs.
So it was with this nest, with Dorian, immense, a gelatinous skin, a vitreous
shape, undulant within that nest.
And if Dorian was male or female, I could not guess. This was a great pudding,
an emperor jellyfish, a monstrous heap of sexual gelatin from the exterior of
which, on occasion, noxious gases escaped with rubbery sounds; great lips
sibilating. That and the sough of that labored pump, that constant inhalation,
were the only sounds within the chamber as I stood, anxious, alarmed, but at
last impressed by this beached creature, cast up from a dark landfall. The
thing was a gelatinous cripple, an octopus without limbs, an amphibian
stranded, unable to undulate and seep back to an ocean sewer from which it had
inched itself in monstrous waves and gusts of lungs and eruptions of corrupt
gas until now it lay, featureless, with a mere x-ray ghost of legs, arms,
wrists, and hands with skeletal fingers. At last I could discern, at the far
end of this flesh peninsula, what seemed a half-flat face with a frail phantom
of skull beneath, an open fissure for an eye, a ravenous nostril, and a red
wound which ripped wide to surprise me as a mouth.
And at last this thing, this Dorian, spoke.
Or whispered, or lisped.
And with each lisp, each sibilance, an odor of decay was expelled as if from a
vast night-swamp balloon, sunk on its side, lost in fetid water as its
unsavory breath rinsed my cheeks. It expelled but one lingering syllable:
Yessss.
Yes what?
And then it added:

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Soooo...
"How long . . . how long," I murmured, "has it . . . has he been here?"
"No one knows. When Victoria was Queen? When Booth emptied his makeup kit to
load his pistol? When Napoleon yellow-stained the Moscow snows? Forever's not
bad .
What else?"
I swallowed hard. "Is . . . is he?"
"Dorian? Dorian of the attic? He of the Portrait? And somewhere along the line
found portraits not enough? Oil, canvas, no depth. The world needed something
that could soak in, sponge the midnight rains, breakfast and lunch on loss,
depravity's guilt. Something to truly take in, drink, digest; a pustule,
imperial intestine. A rheum oesophagus for sin. A laboratory plate to take
bacterial snows. Dorian."
The long archipelago of membranous skin flushed some buried tubes and valves,
and a semblance of laughter was throttled and drowned in the aqueous gels.
A slit widened to emit gas and again the single word:
Yessss .
"He's welcoming you!" My host smiled.
"I know, I know," I said impatiently. "But why? I don't even want to be here.
I'm ill. Why can't we go?"
"Because"-my host laughed-"you were selected.
"Selected?"
"We've had our eye on you."
"You mean you've watched, followed, spied on me? Christ, who gave you
permission?"
"Temper, temper. Not everyone is picked."
"Who said I wanted to be picked!?"
"If you could see yourself as we see you, you'd know why."
I turned to stare at the vast mound of priapic gelatin in which faint creeks
gleamed as the creature wept its lids wide in holes to let it stare. Then all
its apertures sealed: the saber-cut mouth, the slitted nostrils, the cold eyes
gummed shut so that its skin was faceless. The sibilance pumped with gaseous
suctions.
Yessss, it whispered.
Lisssst, it murmured.
"And list it is!" My host pulled forth a small computer pad which he tapped to
screen my name, address, and phone.
He glanced from the pad to reel off such items as wilted me.
"Single," he said.
"Married and divorced."
"Now single! No women in your life?"
"I'm walking wounded."
He tapped his pad. "Visiting strange bars."
"I hadn't noticed."
"Creative blindness. Getting to bed late. Sleeping all day. Drinking heavily
three nights a week."
"Twice!"
"Going to the gym, look, every day. Workouts excessive. Prolonged steam baths,
overlong massages. Sudden interest in sports. Endless basketball, soccer,
tennis matches every night, and half the noons. That's hyperventilation!"
''My business!"
"And ours! You're balanced giddily on the rim. Shove all these facts in that
one-armed bandit in your head, yank, and watch the lemons and ripe cherries
spin. Yank!"
Jesus God. Yes! Bars. Drinks. Late nights. Gyms. Saunas. Masseurs. Basketball.
Tennis. Soccer. Yank. Pull. Spin!
"Well?" My host searched my face, amused. "Three jackpot cherries in a row?"

I shuddered.

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"Circumstance. No court would convict me."
"This court elects you. We tell palms to read ravenous groins. Yes?"
Gas steamed up from one shriveled aperture in the restless mound. Yessss.
They say that men in the grip of passion, blind to their own darkness, make
love and run mad. Stunned by guilt, they find themselves beasts, having done
the very thing they were warned not to do by church, town, parents, life. In
explosive outrage they turn to the sinful lure. Seeing her as unholy
provocateur, they kill. Women, in similar rages and guilts, overdose. Eve lies
self-slain in the
Garden. Adam hangs himself with the Snake as noose.
But here was no passionate crime, no woman, no provocateur, only the great
mound of siphoning breath and my blond host. And only words which riddled me
with fusillades of arrows. Like an Oriental hedgehog, bristled with shafts, my
body exploded with No, No, No. Echoed and then real:
"No!"
Yessss, whispered the vapor from the mounded tissue, the skeleton buried in
ancient soups.

Yessss.
I gasped to see my games, steams, midnight bars, late-dawn beds: a maniac sum.
I rounded dark corridors to confront a stranger so pockmarked, creased, and
oiled by passion, so cobwebbed and smashed by drink, that I tried to avert my
gaze. The terror gaped his mouth and reached for my hand. Stupidly, I reached
to shake his and-rapped glass! A mirror. I stared deep into my own life. I had
seen myself in shop windows, dim undersea men running in creeks. Mornings,
shaving, I
saw my mirrored health. But this! This troglodyte trapped in amber. Myself,
snapshotted like ten dozen sexual acrobats! And who jammed this mirror at me?
My beautiful host, and that corrupt flatulence beyond.
"You are selected," they whispered.
"I refuse!" I shrieked.
And whether I shrieked aloud or merely thought, a great furnace gaped. The
oceanic mound erupted thunders of gaseous streams. My beautiful host fell
back, stunned that their search beneath my skin, behind my mask, had brought
revulsion. Always when Dorian cried, "Friend," raw gymnast teams had mobbed to
catapult that armless, legless, featureless Sargasso Sea. Before they had
smothered to drown in his miasma, to arise, embrace, and wrestle in the dark
gymnasium, then run forth young to assault a world.
And I? What had I dared to do, that quaked that membranous sac into
regurgitated whistling and broken winds?
"Idiot!" cried my host, all teeth and fists. "Out! Out!"
"Out," I cried, spun to obey, and tripped.
I do not clearly know what happened as I fell. And if it was a swift reaction
to the holocaust erupted like vile spit and vomit from that putrescent mound,
I
cannot say. I knew no lightning shock of murder, yet knew perhaps some summer
heat flash of revenge. For what? I thought. What are you to Dorian or he to
you that frees the hydra behind your face, or causes the slightest twitch of
leg, arm, hand, or fingernail, as the last fetid air from Dorian burned my
hair and stuffed my nostrils.
It was over in a second.
Something shoved me. Did my secret self, insulted, give that push? I was flung
as if on wires, knocked to sprawl at Dorian.
He gave two terrible cries, one of warning, one of despair.
I was recovered so in landing, I did not sink my hands deep in that poisonous
yeast, into that multiflorid Man of War jelly. I swear that I touched, raked,
scarified him with only one thing: the smallest fingernail of my right hand.
My fingernail!
And so this Dorian was shot and foundered. And so the mammoth with screams
collapsed. And so the nauseous balloon sank, fold on midnight fold, upon its

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own

boneless sell, fissuring volcanic sulfurs, immense rectal airs, outgassed
whistles, and whimpers of self-pitying despair.
"Christ! What have you done!? Murderer! Damn you!" cried my host, riven to
stare at Dorian's exhaustions unto death.
He whirled to strike, but ran to reach the door and cry, "Lock this! Lock!
Whatever happens, for God's sake, don't open! Now!" The door slammed. I ran to
lock it and turn.
Quietly, Dorian was falling away.
He sank down and down, out of sight. Like a great membranous tent with its
poles removed, he vanished into the floor, down flues and vents on all sides
of his great platform nest. Vents obviously created for such a massive
disease-sac melting into viral fluid and sewer gas. Even as I watched, the
last of the noxious clot was sucked into the vents, and I stood abandoned in a
room where but a few minutes before an unspeakable strata of discards and
half-born fetuses had lain sucking at sins, spoiled bones, and souls to send
forth beasts in semblance of beauty. That perverse royalty, that lunatic
monarch, gone, all gone. A last choke and throttle from the sewer vent
underlined its death.
My God, I thought, even now, that, all that, that terrible miasma, that stuff
is on its way to the sea to wash in with bland tides to lie on clean shores
where bathers come at dawn ...
Even now ...
I stood, eyes shut, waiting.
For what? There had to be a next thing, yes? It came.
There was a trembling, shivering, and then a quaking of the wall, but
especially the golden door behind me.
I spun to see as well as hear.
I saw the door shaken, and then bombarded from the other side. Fists pummeled,
struck, hammered. Voices cried out and screamed and then shrieked.
I felt a great mass ram the door to shiver, to slam it on its hinges.
I stared, fearful that the door might explode and let in the flood tide of
nightmare-ravening, terrified beasts, the kennel of dying things. For now
their shrieks as they mauled and rattled to escape, to beg for mercy, were so
terrible that I clamped my fists to my ears.
Dorian was gone, but they remained. Shrieks. Screams. Screams. Shrieks. An
avalanche of limbs beyond the door struck and fell, yammering.
What must they look like now? I thought. All those bouquets. All those
beauties.
The police will come, I thought, soon. But .
No matter what ...
I would not unlock that door.







NO NEWS, OR WHAT KILLED THE DOG?







It was a day of holocausts, cataclysms, tornadoes, earth-quakes, blackouts,

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mass murders, eruptions, and miscellaneous dooms, at the peak of which the sun
swallowed the earth and the stars vanished.

But to put it simply, the most respected member of the Bentley family up and
died.
Dog was his name, and dog he was.
The Bentleys, arising late Saturday morning, found Dog stretched on the
kitchen floor, his head toward Mecca, his paws neatly folded, his tail not
a-thump but silent for the first time in twenty years.
Twenty years! My God, everyone thought, could it really have been that long?
And now, without permission, Dog was cold and gone.
Susan, the younger daughter, woke everyone yelling:
"Something's wrong with Dog. Quick!"
Without bothering to don his bathrobe, Roger Bentley, in his underwear,
hurried out to look at that quiet beast on the kitchen tiles. His wife, Ruth,
followed, and then their son Skip, twelve. The rest of the family, married and
flown, Rodney and Sal, would arrive later. Each in turn would say the same
thing:
"No! Dog was forever."
Dog said nothing, but lay there like World War II, freshly finished, and a
devastation.
Tears poured down Susan's cheeks, then down Ruth Bentley's, followed in good
order by tears from Father and, at last, when it had sunk in, Skip.
Instinctively, they made a ring around Dog, kneeling to the floor to touch
him, as if this might suddenly make him sit up, smile as he always did at his
food, bark, and beat them to the door. But their touching did nothing but
increase their tears.
But at last they rose, hugged each other, and went blindly in search of
breakfast, in the midst of which Ruth Bentley said, stunned, "We can't just
leave him there."
Roger Bentley picked Dog up, gently, and moved him out on the patio, in the
shade, by the pool.
"What do we do next?"
"I don't know," said Roger Bentley. "This is the first death in the family in
years and-" He stopped, snorted, and shook his head. "I mean-"
"You meant exactly what you said," said Ruth Bentley. "If Dog wasn't family,
he was nothing. God, I loved him."
A fresh burst of tears ensued, during which Roger Bentley brought a blanket to
put over Dog, but Susan stopped him.
"No, no.1 want to see him. I won't be able to see him ever again. He's so
beautiful. He's so - old."
They all carried their breakfasts out on the patio to sit around Dog, somehow
feeling they couldn't ignore him by eating inside.
Roger Bentley telephoned his other children, whose response, after the first
tears, was the same: they'd be right over. Wait.
When the other children arrived, first Rodney, twenty-one, and then the older
daughter, Sal, twenty-four, a fresh storm of grief shook everyone and then
they sat silently for a moment, watching Dog for a miracle.
"What are your plans?" asked Rodney at last.
"I know this is silly," said Roger Bentley after an embarrassed pause. "After
all, he's only a dog-"
"Only!?" cried everyone instantly.
Roger had to back off. "Look, he deserves the Taj Mahal. What he'll get is the
Orion Pet Cemetery over in Burbank."
"Pet Cemetery!?" cried everyone, but each in a different way.
"My God," said Rodney, "that's silly!"
"What's so silly about it?" Skip's face reddened and his lip trembled. "Dog,
why, Dog was a pearl of. . . rare price.
"Yeah!" added Susan.

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"Well, pardon me." Roger Bentley turned away to look at the pool, the bushes,
the sky. "I suppose I could call those trash people who pick up dead bodies-"
"Trash people?" exclaimed Ruth Bentley.
"Dead bodies?" said Susan. "Dog isn't a dead body!"
"What is he, then?" asked Skip bleakly.
They all stared at Dog lying quietly there by the pool. "He's," blurted Susan
at last, "he's . . . he's my love!" Before the crying could start again, Roger
Bentley picked up the patio telephone, dialed the Pet Cemetery, talked, and
put the phone down.
"Two hundred dollars," he informed everyone. "Not bad."
"For Dog?" said Skip. "Not enough!"
"Are you really serious about this?" asked Ruth Bentley.
"Yeah," said Roger. "I've made fun of those places all my life. But, now,
seeing as how we'll never be able to visit Dog again-" He let a moment pass.
"They'll come take Dog at noon. Services tomorrow."
"Services!" Snorting, Rodney stalked to the rim of the pool and waved his
arms.
"You won't get me to that!"
Everyone stared. Rodney turned at last and let his shoulders slump. "Hell,
I'll be there."
"Dog would never forgive you if you didn't." Susan snuffed and wiped her nose.
But Roger Bentley had heard none of this. Staring at Dog, then his family, and
up to the sky, he shut his eyes and exhaled a great whisper:
"Oh, my God!" he said, eyes shut. "Do you realize that this is the first
terrible thing that's happened to our family? Have we ever been sick, gone to
the hospital? Been in an accident?"
He waited.
"No," said everyone.
"Gosh," said Skip.
"Gosh, indeed! You sure as hell notice accidents, sickness, hospitals."
"Maybe," said Susan, and had to stop and wait because her voice broke. "Maybe
Dog died just to make us notice how lucky we are."
"Lucky?!" Roger Bentley opened his eyes and turned. "Yes! You know what we
are-"
"The science fiction generation," offered Rodney, lighting a cigarette
casually.
"What?"
"You rave on about that, your school lectures, or during dinner. Can openers?
Science fiction. Automobiles. Radio, TV, films. Everything! So science
fiction!"
"Well, dammit, they are!" cried Roger Bentley and went to stare at Dog, as if
the answers were there amongst the last departing fleas. "Hell, not so long
ago there were no cars, can openers, TV. Someone had to dream them. Start of
lecture. Someone had to build them. Mid-lecture. So science fiction dreams
became finished science fact. Lecture finis!"
"I bet!" Rodney applauded politely.
Roger Bentley could only sink under the weight of his son's irony to stroke
the dear dead beast.
"Sorry. Dog bit me. Can't help myself. Thousands of years, all we did is die.
Now, that time's over. In sum: science fiction."
"Bull." Rodney laughed. "Stop reading that junk, Dad."
"Junk?" Roger touched Dog's muzzle. "Sure. But how about Lister, Pasteur,
Salk?
Hated death. Jumped to stop it. That's all science fiction was ever about.
Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different. Junk?!"
"Ancient history, Pop."
"Ancient?" Roger Bentley fixed his son with a terrible eye. "Christ. When I
was born in 1920, if you wanted to visit your family on Sundays you-"

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"Went to the graveyard?" said Rodney.
"Yes. My brother and sister died when I was seven. Half of my family gone!
Tell me, dear children, how many of your friends died while you were growing
up. In grammar school? High school?"

He included the family in his gaze, and waited.
"None," said Rodney at last.
"None! You hear that? None! Christ. Six of my best friends died by the time I
was ten! Wait! I just remembered!"
Roger Bentley hurried to rummage in a hall closet and brought out an old
78-rpm record into the sunlight, blowing off the dust. He squinted at the
label:
"No News, Or What Killed The Dog?"
Everyone came to look at the ancient disc.
"Hey, how old is that?"
"Heard it a hundred times when I was a kid in the twenties," said Roger.
"No News, Or What Killed The Dog?" Sal glanced at her father's face.
"This gets played at Dog's funeral," he said.
"You're not serious?" said Ruth Bentley.
Just then the doorbell rang.
"That can't be the Pet Cemetery people come to take Dog-?"
"No!" cried Susan. "Not so soon!"
Instinctively, the family formed a wall between Dog and the doorbell sound,
holding off eternity.
Then they cried, one more time.

The strange and wonderful thing about the funeral was how many people came.
"I didn't know Dog had so many friends," Susan blubbered.
"He freeloaded all around town," said Rodney.
"Speak kindly of the dead."
"Well, he did, dammit., Otherwise why is Bill Johnson here, or Gert Skall, or
Jim across the street?"
"Dog," said Roger Bentley, "I sure wish you could see this."
"He does." Susan's eyes welled over. "Wherever he is."
"Good old Sue," whispered Rodney, "who cries at telephone books-"
"Shut up!" cried Susan.
"Hush, both of you."
And Roger Bentley moved, eyes down, toward the front of the small funeral
parlor where Dog was laid out, head on paws, in a box that was neither too
rich nor too simple but just right.
Roger Bentley placed a steel needle down on the black record which turned on
top of a flake-painted portable phonograph. The needle scratched and hissed.
All the neighbors leaned forward.
"No funeral oration," said Roger quickly. "Just this . . And a voice spoke on
a day long ago and told a story about a man who returned from vacation to ask
friends what had happened while he was gone.
It seemed that nothing whatsoever had happened. Oh, just one thing. Everyone
wondered what had killed the dog.
The dog? asked the vacationer. My dog died? Yes, and maybe it was the burned
horseflesh did it. Burned horseflesh!? cried the vacationer. Well, said his
informant, when the barn burned, the horseflesh caught fire, so the dog ate
the burned horseflesh, died.
The barn!? cried the vacationer. How did it catch fire? Well, sparks from the
house blew over, torched the barn, burned the horseflesh, dog ate them, died.
Sparks from the house!? shouted the vacationer. How-?
It was the curtains in the house, caught fire.
Curtains? Burned!?
From the candles around the coffin.
Coffin!?

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Your aunt's funeral coffin, candles there caught the curtains, house burned,
sparks from the house flew over, burned down the barn, dog ate the burned
horseflesh-In sum: no news, or what killed the dog!
The record hissed and stopped.

In the silence, there was a little quiet laughter, even though the record had
been about dogs and people dying.
"Now, do we get the lecture?" said Rodney.
"No, a sermon."
Roger Bentley put his hands on the pulpit to stare for long moments at notes
he hadn't made.
"I don't know if we're here for Dog or ourselves. Both, I suppose. We're the
nothing-ever-happened-to-us people. Today is a first. Not that I want a rush
of doom or disease. God forbid. Death, come slowly, please."
He turned the phonograph record round and round in his hands, trying to read
the words under the grooves.
"No news. Except the aunt's funeral candles catch the curtains, sparks fly,
and the dog goes west. In our lives, just the opposite. No news for years.
Good livers, healthy hearts, good times. So-what's it all about?"
Roger Bentley glanced at Rodney, who was checking his wristwatch.
"Someday we must die, also." Roger Bentley hurried on. "Hard to believe. We're
spoiled. But Susan was right. Dog died to tell us this, gently, and we must
believe. And at the same time celebrate. What? The fact that we're the start
of an amazing, dumbfounding history of survival that will only get better as
the centuries pass. You may argue that the next war will take us all. Maybe.
"I can only say I think you will grow to be old, very old people. Ninety years
from now, most people will have cured hearts, stopped cancers, and jumped life
cycles. A lot of sadness will have gone out of the world, thank God. Will this
be easy to do? No. Will we do it? Yes. Not in all countries, right off. But,
finally, in most.
"As I said yesterday, fifty years ago, if you wanted to visit your aunts,
uncles, grandparents, brothers, sisters, the graveyard was it.
Death was all the talk. You had to talk it. Time's up, Rodney?"
Rodney signaled his father he had one last minute.
Roger Bentley wound it down:
"Sure, kids still die. But not millions. Old folks? Wind up in Sun City
instead of marble Orchard."
The father surveyed his family, bright-eyed, in the pews.
"God, look at you! Then look back. A thousand centuries of absolute terror,
absolute grief. How parents stayed sane to raise their kids when half of them
died, damned if I know. Yet with broken hearts, they did. While millions died
of flu or the Plague.
"So here we are in a new time that we can't see because we stand in the eye of
the hurricane, where everything's calm.
"I'll shut up now, with a last word for Dog. Because we loved him, we've done
this almost silly thing, this service, but now suddenly we're not ashamed or
sorry we bought him a plot or had me speak. We may never come visit him, who
can say? But he has a place. Dog, old boy, bless you. Now, everyone, blow your
nose."
Everyone blew his nose.
"Dad," said Rodney suddenly, "could-we hear the record again?"
Everyone looked at Rodney, surprised.
"Just," said Roger Bentley, "what I was going to suggest."
He put the needle on the record. It hissed.
About a minute in, when the sparks from the house flew over to burn the barn
and torch the horseflesh and kill the dog, there was a sound at the back
doorway to the small parlor.
Everyone turned.
A strange man stood in the door holding a small wicker basket from which came

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familiar, small yapping sounds.
And even as the flames from the candles around the coffin caught the curtains
and the last sparks blew on the wind

The whole family, drawn out into the sunlight, gathered around the stranger
with the wicker basket, waiting for Father to arrive to throw back the
coverlet on the small carrier so they could all dip their hands in.
That moment, as Susan said later, was like reading the telephone book one more
time.







THE WITCH DOCTOR





It was a pounding on a door, a furious, frantic, insistent pounding, born of
hysteria and fear and a great desire to be heard, to be freed, to be let
loose, to escape. It was a wrenching at hidden paneling, it was a hollow
knocking, a rapping, a testing, a clawing! It was a scratching at hollow
boards, a ripping at bedded nails; it was a muffled closet shouting and
demanding, far away, and a call to be noticed, followed by a silence.
The silence was the most empty and terrible of all. Robert and Martha Webb sat
up in bed.
"Did you hear it?"
"Yes, again."
"Downstairs."
Now whoever it was who had pounded and rapped and made his fingers raw, drawn
blood with his fever and quest to be free, had drawn into silence, listening
himself to see if his terror and drumming had summoned any help.
The winter night lay through the house with a falling-snow silence, silence
snowing into every room, drifting over tables and floors, and banking up the
stairwell.
Then the pounding started again. And then:
A sound of soft crying.
"Downstairs."
"Someone in the house."
"Lotte, do you think? The front door's unlocked."
"She'd have knocked. Can't be Lotte."
"She's the only one it could be. She phoned."
They both glanced at the phone. If you lifted the receiver, you heard a winter
stillness. The phones were dead. They had died days ago with the riots in the
nearest towns and cities. Now, in the receiver, you heard only your own heart-
beat. "Can you put me up?" Lone had cried from six hundred miles away. "Just
overnight?"
But before they could answer her, the phone had filled itself with long miles
of silence.
"Lotte is coming. She sounded hysterical. That might be her," said Martha
Webb.
"No,'' said Robert. "I heard that crying other nights, too. Dear God."
They lay in the cold room in this farmhouse back in the Massachusetts
wilderness, back from the main roads, away from the towns, near a bleak river
and a black forest. It was the frozen middle of December. The white smell of

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snow cut the air.
They arose. With an oil lamp lit, they sat on the edge of the bed as if
dangling their legs over a precipice.

"There's no one downstairs, there can't be."
"Whoever it is sounds frightened."
"We're all frightened, damn it. That's why we came out here, to be away from
cities, riots, all that damned foolishness. No more wiretaps, arrests, taxes,
neurotics. Now when we find it at last, people call and upset us. And tonight
this, Christ!" He glanced at his wife. "You afraid?"
"I don't know. I don't believe in ghosts. This is 1999; I'm sane. Or like to
think I am. Where's your gun?"
"We won't need it. Don't ask me why, but we won't." They picked up their oil
lamps. In another month the small power plant would be finished in the white
barns behind the house and there'd be power to spare, but now they haunted the
farm, coming and going with dim lamps or candles.
They stood at the stairwell, both thirty-three, both immensely practical.
The crying, the sadness, and the plea came from below in the winter rooms.
"She sounds so damned sad," said Robert. "God, I'm sorry for her, but don't
even know who it is. Come on."
They went downstairs.
As if hearing their footsteps, the crying grew louder. There was a dull
thudding against a hidden panel somewhere.
"The Witch Door!" said Martha Webb at last.
"Can't be."
"Is."
They stood in the long hall looking at that place under the stairs, where the
panels trembled faintly. But now the cries faded, as if the crier was
exhausted, or something had diverted her, or perhaps their voices had startled
her and she was listening for them to speak again. Now the winter-night house
was silent and the man and wife waited with the oil lamps quietly fuming in
their hands.
Robert Webb stepped to the Witch Door and touched it, probing for the hidden
button, the secret spring. "There can't be anyone in there," he said. "My God,
we've been here six months, and that's just a cubby. Isn't that what the
Realtor said when he sold the place? No one could hide in there and us not
know it. We-"
"Listen!"
They listened.
Nothing.
"She's gone, it's gone, whatever it was, hell, that door hasn't been opened in
our lifetime. Everyone's forgotten where the spring is that unlocks it. I
don't think there is a door, only a loose panel, and rats' nests, that's all.
The walls, scratching. Why not?" He turned to look at his wife, who was
staring at the hidden place.
"Silly," she said. "Good Lord, rats don't cry. That was a voice, asking to be
saved. Lotte, I thought. But now I know it wasn't she, but someone else in as
much trouble."
Martha Webb reached out and trembled her fingertips along the beveled edge of
ancient maple. "Can't we open it?"
"With a crowbar and hammer, tomorrow."
"Oh, Robert!"
"Don't 'Oh, Robert' me. I'm tired."
"You can't leave her in there to-"
"She's quiet now. Christ, I'm exhausted. I'll come down at the crack of dawn
and knock the damned thing apart, okay?"
"All right," she said, and tears came to her eyes.
"Women," said Robert Webb. "Oh, my God, you and Lotte, Lotte and you. If she
is coming here, if she makes it, I'll have a houseful of lunatics!"

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"Lotte's fine!"
"Sure, but she should keep her mouth shut. It doesn't pay now to say you're
Socialist, Democrat, Libertarian, Pro-Life Abortionist, Sinn Fein Fascist,
Commie, any damn thing. The towns are bombed out. People are looking for

scapegoats and Lotte has to shoot from the hip, get herself smeared and now,
hell, on the run."
"They'll jail her if they catch her. Or kill her, yes, kill her. We're lucky
to be here with our own food. Thank God we planned ahead, we saw it coming,
the starvation, the massacres. We helped ourselves. Now we help Lone if she
makes it through."
Without answering, he turned to the stairs. "I'm dead on my feet. I'm tired of
saving anyone. Even Lotte. But hell, if she comes through the front door,
she's saved."
They went up the stairs taking the lamps, advancing in an ever-moving aura of
trembling white glow. The house was as silent as snow falling. "God," he
whispered. "Damn, I don't like women crying like that."
It sounded like the whole world crying, he thought. The whole world dying and
needing help and lonely, but what can you do? Live in a farm like this? Far
off the main highway where people don't pass, away from all the stupidity and
death?
What can you do?
They left one of the lamps lit and drew the covers over their bodies and lay,
listening to the wind hit the house and creak the beams and parquetry.
A moment later there was a cry from downstairs, a splintering crash, the sound
of a door flung wide, a bursting out of air, footsteps rapping all the rooms,
a sobbing, almost an exultation, then the front door banged open, the winter
wind blowing wildly in, footsteps across the front porch and gone.
"There!" cried Martha. "Yes!"
With the lamp they were down the stairs swiftly. Wind smothered their faces as
they turned now toward the Witch Door, opened wide, still on its hinges, then
toward the front door where they cast their light out upon a snowing winter
darkness and saw nothing but white and hills, no moon, and in the lamplight
the soft drift and moth-flicker of snowflakes falling from the sky to the
mattressed yard.
"Gone," she whispered.
"Who?"
"We'll never know, unless she comes back."
"She won't. Look."
They moved the lamplight toward the white earth and the tiny footprints going
off, across the softness, toward the dark forest.
"It was a woman, then. But . . . why?"
"God knows. Why anything, now in this crazy world?" They stood looking at the
footprints a long while until, shivering, they moved back through the hall to
the open Witch Door. They poked the lamp into this hollow under the stairs.
"Lord, it's just a cell, hardly a closet, and look..."
Inside stood a small rocking chair, a braided rug, a used candle in a copper
holder, and an old, worn Bible. The place smelled of must and moss and dead
flowers.
"Is this where they used to hide people?"
"Yes. A long time back they hid people called witches. Trials, witch trials.
They hung or burned some."
"Yes, yes," they both murmured, staring into the incredibly small cell.
"And the witches hid here while the hunters searched the house and gave up and
left?"
"Yes, oh, my God, yes," he whispered.
"Rob
''Yes?"
She bent forward. Her face was pale and she could not look away from the

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small, worn rocking chair and the faded Bible.
"Rob. How old? This house, how old?"
"Maybe three hundred years.
"That old?"

"Why?"
"Crazy. Stupid . .
"Crazy?"
"Houses, old like this. All the years. And more years and more after that.
God, feel! If you put your hand in, yes? Would you feel it change, silly, and
what if
I sat in that rocking chair and shut the door, what? That woman . .. how long
was she in there? How'd she get there? From way, way back. Wouldn't it be
strange?"
''Bull!''
"But if you wanted to run away badly enough, wished for it, prayed for it, and
people ran after you, and someone hid you in a place like this, a witch behind
a door, and heard the searchers run through the house, closer and closer,
wouldn't you want to get away? Anywhere? To another place? Why not another
time? And then, in a house like this, a house so old nobody knows, if you
wanted and asked for it enough, couldn't you run to another year! Maybe"-she
paused-"here . . .
?"
"No, no," he muttered. "Really stupid!"
But still, some quiet motion within the closeted space caused both, at almost
the same instant, to hold their hands out on the air, curious, like people
testing invisible waters. The air seemed to move one way and then another, now
warm, now cold, with a pulsation of light and a sudden turning toward dark.
All this they thought but could not say. There was weather here, now a quick
touch of summer and then a winter cold, which could not be, of course, but
there it was. Passing along their fingertips, but unseen by their eyes, a
stream of shadows and sun ran as invisible as time itself, clear as crystal,
but clouded by a shifting dark. Both felt if they thrust their hands deep,
they might be drawn in to drown in a mighty storm of seasons within an
incredibly small space.
All this, too, they thought or almost felt but could not say.
They seized their frozen but sunburned hands back, to stare down and hold them
against the panic in their breasts.
"Damn," whispered Robert Webb. "Oh, damn!" He backed off and went to open the
front door again and look at the snowing night where the footprints had almost
vanished.
"No" he said. "No, no."
Just then the yellow flash of headlights on the road braked in front of the
house.
"Lotte!" cried Martha Webb. "It must be! Lotte!" The car lights went out. They
ran to meet the running woman half up the front yard.
"Lotte!"
The woman, wild-eyed, hair windblown, threw herself at them.
"Martha, Bob! God, I thought I'd never find you! Lost! I'm being followed,
let's get inside. Oh, I didn't mean to get you up in the middle of the night,
it's good to see you! Jesus! Hide the car! Here are the keys!"
Robert Webb ran to drive the car behind the house. When he came back around he
saw that the heavy snowfall was already covering the tracks.
Then the three of them were inside the house, talking, holding onto each
other.
Robert Webb kept glancing at the front door.
"I can't thank you," cried Lotte, huddled in a chair. "You're at risk! I won't
stay long, a few hours until it's safe. Then ..
"Stay as long as you want."

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"No. They'll follow! In the cities, the fires, the murders, everyone starving,
I
stole gas. Do you have more? Enough to get me to Phil Merdith's in
Greenborough?
I-"
"Lotte," said Robert Webb.
"Yes?" Lotte stopped, breathless.
"Did you see anyone on your way up here? A woman? Running on the road?"
"What? I drove so fast! A woman? Yes! I almost hit her. Then she was gone!
Why?"

''Well . .
"She's not dangerous?"
"No, no."
"It is all right, my being here?"
"Yes, fine, fine. Sit back. We'll fix some coffee-"
"Wait! I'll check!" And before they could stop her, Lotte ran to the front
door, opened it a crack, and peered out. They stood with her and saw distant
headlights flourished over a low hill and gone into a valley. "They're
coming,"
whispered Lotte. "They might search here. God, where can I hide?"
Martha and Robert glanced at each other.
No, no, thought Robert Webb. God, no! Preposterous, unimaginable, fantastic,
so damned coincidental the mind raves at it, crows, hoots, guffaws! No, none
of this! Get oft' circumstance! Get away with your goings and comings on not
neat, or too neat, schedules. Come back, Lotte, in ten years, five years,
maybe a year, a month, a week, and ask to hide. Even tomorrow show up! But
don't come with coincidence in each hand like idiot children and ask, only
half an hour after one terror, one miracle, to test our disbelief! I'm not,
after all, Charles Dickens, to blink and let this pass.
"What's wrong?" said Lotte.
"I-" said Robert.
"No place to hide me?"
"Yes," he said. "We've a place."
"Well?"
"Here." He turned slowly away, stunned.
They walked down the hall to the half-open paneling.
"This?" Lotte said. "Secret? Did you-7"
"No' it's been here since the house was built long ago." Lotte touched and
moved the door on its hinges. "Does it work? Will they know where to look and
find it?"
"No. It's beautifully made. Shut, you can't tell it's there." Outside in the
winter night, cars rushed, their beams flashing up the road, across the house
windows.
Lotte peered into the Witch Door as one peers down a deep, lonely well.
A filtering of dust moved about her. The small rocking chair trembled.
Moving in silently, Lotte touched the half-burned candle.
"Why, it's still warm!"
Martha and Robert said nothing. They held to the Witch Door, smelling the odor
of warm tallow.
Lotte stood rigidly in the little space, bowing her head beneath the beamed
ceiling.
A horn blew in the snowing night. Lotte took a deep breath and said, "Shut the
door."
They shut the Witch Door. There was no way to tell that a door was there.
They blew out the lamp and stood in the cold, dark house, waiting.
The cars rushed down the road, their noise loud, and their yellow headlights
bright in the falling snow. The wind stirred the footprints in the yard, one
pair going out, another coming in, and the tracks of Lotte's car fast

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vanishing, and at last gone.
"Thank God," whispered Martha.
The cars, honking, whipped around the last bend and down the hill and stopped,
waiting, looking in at the dark house. Then, at last, they started up away
into the snow and the hills.
Soon their lights were gone and their sound gone with them.
"We were lucky," said Robert Webb.
"But she's not."
"She?''

"That woman, whoever she was, ran out of here. They'll find here. Somebody'll
find her."
"Christ, that's right."
"And she has no I.D., no proof of herself. And she doesn't know what's
happened to her. And when she tells them who she is and where she came from!"
"Yes, yes."
"God help her."
They looked into the snowing night but saw nothing. Everything was still. "You
can't escape," she said. "No matter what you do, no one can escape."
They moved away from the window and down the hall to the Witch Door and
touched it.
"Lotte," they called.
The Witch Door did not tremble or move. "Lotte, you can come out now." There
was no answer; not a breath or a whisper. Robert tapped the door. "Hey in
there."
"Lotte!"
He knocked at the paneling, his mouth agitated. "Lotte!"
"Open it!"
"I'm trying, damn it!"
"Lotte, we'll get you out, wait! Everything's all right!"
He beat with both fists, cursing. Then he said, "Watch out!" took a step back,
raised his leg, kicked once, twice, three times; vicious kicks at the paneling
that crunched holes and crumbled wood into kindling. He reached in and yanked
the entire paneling free. "Lotte!"
They leaned together into the small place under the stairs. The candle
flickered on the small table. The Bible was gone. The small rocking chair
moved quietly back and forth, in little arcs, and then stood still.
"Lotte!"
They stared at the empty room. The candle flickered.
"Lotte," they said.
"You don't believe .
"I don't know. Old houses are old. . . old . .
"You think Lotte . . . she ... ?"
"I don't know, I don't know."
"Then she's safe at least, safe! Thank God!"
"Safe? Where's she gone? You really think that? A woman in new clothes, red
lipstick, high heels, short skirt, perfume, plucked brows, diamond rings, silk
stockings, safe? Safe!" he said, staring deep into the open frame of the Witch
Door.
"Yes, safe. Why not?"
He drew a deep breath.
"A woman of that description, lost in a town called Salem in the year 1680?"
He reached over and shut the Witch Door.
They sat waiting by it for the rest of the long, cold night.

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THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

The talk in the village in the year 1853 was, of course, about the madman
above, in his sod-and-brick hut, with an untended garden and a wife who had
fled, silent about his madness, never to return.
The people of the village had never drunk enough courage to go see what the
special madness was or why the wife had vanished, tear-stained, leaving a
vacuum into which atmospheres had rushed to thunder-clap.
And yet ...
On a sweltering hot day with no cloud to offer shadow comfort and no threat of
rain to cool man or beast, the Searcher arrived. Which is to say, Dr. Mortimer
Goff, a man of many parts, most of them curious and self-serving, but also
traveling the world for some baroque event, or miraculous revelation.
The good doctor came tramping up the hill, stumbling over cobbles that were
more stone than paving, having abandoned his coach-and-horses, fearful of
crippling them with such a climb.
Dr. Goff it turned out, had come from London, inhaling fogs, bombarded by
storms, and now, stunned by too much light and heat, this good if curious
physician stopped, exhausted, to lean against a fence, sight further up the
hill, and ask:
"Is this the way to the lunatic?"
A farmer who was more scarecrow than human raised his eyebrows and snorted,
"That would be Elijah Wetherby."
''If lunatics have names, yes."
"We call him crazed or mad, but lunatic will do. It sounds like book learning.
Are you one of those?"
"I own books, yes, and chemical retorts and a skeleton that was once a man,
and a permanent pass to the London Historical and Scientific Museum-"
"All well and good," the farmer interrupted, "but of no use for failed crops
and a dead wife. Follow your nose. And when you find the fool or whatever you
name him, take him with you. We're tired of his shouts and commotions late
nights in his iron foundry and anvil menagerie. Rumor says he will soon finish
some monster that will run to kill us all."
"Is that true?" asked Dr. Goff.
"No, it lies easy on my tongue. Good day, Doctor, and God deliver you from the
lightning bolts that wait for you above."
With this the farmer spaded the earth to bury the conversation.
So the curious doctor, threatened, climbed on, under a dark cloud which did
not stop the sun.
And at last arrived at a hut that seemed more tomb than home, surrounded by
land more graveyard than garden.
Outside the ramshackle sod-and-brick dwelling a shadow stepped forth, as if
waiting, and became an old, very old, man.
"Well, there you are at last!" it cried.
Dr. Goff reared back at this. "You sound, sir, as if you expected me!"
"I did," said the old man, "some years ago! What took you so long?"
"You are not exactly cheek by jowl with London, sir."
"I am not," the old man agreed and added, "The name is Wetherby. The Inventor"
"Mr. Wetherby, the Inventor. I am Dr. Goff, the so-called Searcher, for I move
in behalf of our good Queen, turning rocks, digging truffles, curious for
stuffs that might delight her Majesty or fill her museums, shops, and streets
in the greatest city in the world. Have I reached the right place?"
"And just in time, for I am now in my eightieth year and of inconsequential
vigor. If you had arrived next year, you might have found me in the
churchyard.
Do come in!"
At this moment, Dr. Goff heard a gathering of people behind him, all with a
most unpleasant muttering, so at Mr. Wetherby's beckoning, he was glad to
enter, sit, and watch an almost rare whiskey being poured without invitation.

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When he had quaffed the glass, Dr. Goff swiveled his gaze about the room.

"Well, where is it?"
"Where is what, sir?"
"The lunatic device, the insane machine that goes nowhere but in going might
run down a child, a lamb, a priest, a nun, or an old blind dog, where?"
"So I am that famous, am I?" The old man let a few crumbs of laughter fall
from his toothless mouth. "Well, sir. I keep it locked in the goats' shed
behind: the outhouse of machines. Finish that to strengthen your sanity when
you at last behold the delight and grievance of my long inventive life. So!"
The doctor drank, was replenished and soon out the door, across a small,
smooth circle of turf, and to a shed whose door was triple-kept with numerous
padlocks and keys. Old Wetherby entered, lit many candles, and beckoned the
good doctor in.
He pointed as to a manger. The medical Searcher looked, expecting a mother,
crib, and holy babe by the way Wetherby gestured and cried:
"There she be!"
"Is it female, then?"
"Come to think, she is!"
And there in the candlelight was Wetherby's mechanical pride.
Dr. Goff coughed, to hide his chagrin.
"That, sir, is but a metal frame!"
"But what a frame to hold velocities! Ha!"
And the old man, young with fevers, rushed to seize a largish wheel which he
transported to fit to the front part of the frame. Then he fetched yet another
circular object to fit into the frame's rear.
"Well?" he cried.
"I see two wheels, half a cart, and no horse!"
"We will shoot all horses!" exclaimed Wetherby. "My invention, by the tens of
thousands, will shy off all horses and banish manures. Do you know, each day
in
London a thousand tons of horse clods must be cleared, fertilizer wasted, not
spread on neighbor fields but dumped as sludge down-Thames. God, how I talk!"
"But, sir, continue. Those look to be spinning wheels, borrowed from nearby
farms?"
"They are, but spliced and strengthened with metal to sustain" - Wetherby
touched himself - "one hundred twenty pounds. And here's the saddle for that
weight." Whereupon he fitted a saddle mid-frame. "And here the stirrups and
ribbon to run the back wheel." So saying, he affixed a longish leather ribbon
to one stirrup's rotary and tightened it on a spool at the rear.
"Do you begin to perceive, Doctor?"
"I am stranded in ignorance, sir.
"Well, then, be alert, for I now enthrone myself."
And the old man, light as a chimpanzee, slung himself in place on a leather
seat mid-frame between the silent spinning wheels.
"I still see no horse, sir."
"I am the horse, Doctor. I am the horse a-gallop!"
And the old man thrust his feet in the stirrups to chum them up, around, and
down; up, around, and down; as the rear wheels, provoked, did likewise, up,
down, around, with a lovely hum, fastened in place on the platform planks.
"Aha." The doctor's face brightened. "This is a device to manufacture
electrical power? Something from Benjamin Franklin's storm-lightning
notebooks?!"
"Gods, no. It could make lightnings, yes! But this, sir, not seeming one, is a
horse, and I its night rider! So!"
And Wetherby pumped and wheezed, wheezed and pumped, and the rear wheels,
locked in place, spun faster, faster, with a siren whine.
"All very well," snorted the good doctor, "but the horse, if it is, and the
rider, if you are, seem to be going nowhere! What will you call your machine?"

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"I have had many nights and years to think." Wetherby pumped and wheezed. "The
Velocitor, perhaps." Pumpwheeze. "Or the Precipitor, but no, that sounds as if
I

might be thrown from my 'horse.' The Galvanizer, yes? Or why not-"
Wheeze-pump.
"The Landstride or Diminisher, for-" Wheeze-pump. "It does diminish time and
distance. Doctor, you know Latin, eh? So, feet to wheel, wheel run by feet
name it!''
"The Elijah, your given name, sir, the Elijah."
"But he saw a wheel way in the middle of the air and it was a wheel in a
wheel, is that not so?"
"When last I was in church, yes. And you are grounded, that is plain to see.
Why not Velocipede, then? Having to do with speed and the applied toe and
ankle?"
"Close-on, Dr. Goff, close-on. Why do you stare so fixedly?"
"It comes to mind that great times call forth great inventions. The inventor
is child to his year and day. This is not a great time for such as you and
yours.
Did this century call you forth as its mightiest of all men of genius?"
Old Wetherby let his machine coast for a moment and smiled.
"No, I and my Tilda here, I call her Tilda, will instead be the gravity that
calls forth the century. We will influence the year, the decade, and the
millennium!"
"It is hard for me to believe," said the medical gentleman, "that you will
build a road from your sill to the city on which to glide your
not-inconsiderable dream."
"Nay, Doctor, the reverse is true. The city, and the world when they know me1
and this will run a concourse here to deliver me to fame."
"Your head knocks heaven, Mr. Wetherby," said the doctor dryly. "But your
roots ache for sustenance, water, minerals, air. You stroke and pump wildly,
but go nowhere. Once off that rack, will you not fall on your side,
destroyed?"
"Nay, nay." Wetherby, in gusts, pumped again. "For I have discovered some
physics, as yet nameless. The faster you propel this bodily device, the less
tendency to fall left or right but continue straight, if no obstacles
prevent!"
"With only two wheels beneath? Prove it. Release your invention, set it free
in flight, let us see you sustain your forward motion without breaking your
bum!"
"Oh, God, shut up!" cried Wetherby as his kindling legs thrashed the pedals,
racketing round as he leaned into a phantom wind, eyes clenched against an
invisible storm, and churned the wheels to a frenzy. "Don't you hear? Listen.
That whine, that cry, that whisper. The ghost in the machine, which promises
things most new, unseen, unrealized, only a dream now but tomorrow - Great
God, don't you see?! If I were on a real path this would be swifter than
gazelles, a panic of deer! All pedestrians vanquished. All coach-and-horses in
dust! Not twenty miles a day, but thirty, forty miles in a single glorious
hour! Stand off, Time. Beware, meadow-beasts! Here glides, in full plummet,
Wetherby with nothing to stop him!"
"Aye," said the Searcher dryly, "you pump up a storm on that stand. But, set
free, how would you balance on only two wheels!?"
"Like this!" cried Wetherby, and with a thrust of his hands and an uplift of
frame, seized the Traveler, the Motion Machine, the Pathfinder, up free of its
stand and in an instant plunged through the room and out the door, with Dr.
Goff, in full pursuit, yelling:
"Stop! You'll kill yourself!"
"No, exhilarate my heart, oxygenate my blood!" cried Wetherby, and there he
was in a chicken-yard he had trampled flat, paths some sixty feet around on

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which he now flailed his metal machine with scythings of ankle, toe, heel, and
leg, sucking air, gusting out great laughs. "See? I do not fall! Two legs, two
wheels, and: presto!"
"My God!" cried Dr. Goff, eyes thrust forth like hardboiled eggs. "God's
truth!
How so?!"
"I fly forward faster than I fall downward, an unguessed law of physics. But
lo!
I almost fly. Fly! Good-bye horses, doomed and dead!"

And with "dead" he was overcome with such a delirium of pant and pump,
perspiration raining off him in showers, that with a great cry, he wobbled and
was flung, a meteor of flesh, over and down on a coop where the chickens, in
dumb feather-duster alarms, exploded in shrieks as Wetherby slid in one
direction while his vehicle, self-motivated, wheels a-spin, mounted Dr. Goff,
who jumped aside, fearful of being spliced.
Wetherby, helped to his feet, protested his trajectory:
"Ignore that! Do you at last understand?"
"Fractures, wounds, broken skulls, yes!"
"No, a future brave with motion, 'tween my legs. You have come a long way,
Doctor. Will you adopt and further my machine?"
"Well," said the doctor, already out of the yard, into the house, and to the
front door, his face confused, his wits a patch of nettles. "Ah," he said.
"Say you will, Doctor. Or my device dies, and I with it!"
"But.. ." said the doctor and opened the outer door, only to draw back,
alarmed.
"What have I done!" he cried.
Peering over his shoulder, Wetherby expressed further alarm. "Your presence is
known, Doctor; the word has spread. A lunatic has come to visit a lunatic."
And it was true. On the road and in the front garden yard were some twelve or
twenty farmers and villagers, some with rocks, some with clubs, and with looks
of malice or outright hostility caught in their eyes and mouths.
"There they are!" someone cried.
"Have you come to take him away?" someone else shouted.
"Yah" echoed the struggling crowd, moving forward.
Thinking quickly, Dr. Goff replied, "Yes. I will take him away!" And turned
back to the old man.
"Take me where, Doctor?" whispered Wetherby, clutching his elbow.
"One moment!" cried the doctor to the crowd, which then subsided in murmurs.
"Let me think."
Standing back, cudgeling his bald spot, and then massaging his brow for
rampant inspiration, Dr. Goff at last exhaled in triumph.
"I have it, by George. A genius of an idea, which will please both villagers,
to be rid of you, and you, to be rid of them."
"What, what, Doctor?"
"Why, sir, you are to come down to London under cover of night and I will let
you through the side door of my museum with your blasphemous toy of Satan .
"To what purpose?"
"Purpose? Why, sir, I have found the path, the smooth surface, the road you
spoke of at some future time!"
"The road, the path, the surface?"
"The museum floors, marble, smooth, lovely, wondrous, ohmigod, for all your
needs!"
"Needs?"
"Don't be thick. Each night, as many nights as you wish, to your heart's
content, you can ride that wheeled demon round and round, past the Rembrandts
and Turners and Fra Angelicos, through the Grecian statues and Roman busts,
careful of porcelains, minding the crystals, but pumping away like Lucifer all
night till dawn!"

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"Oh, dear God," murmured Wetherby, "why didn't I think?"
"If you had you would've been too shy to ask!"
"The only place in the world with roads like future roads, paths like
tomorrow's paths, boulevards without cobbles, pure as Aphrodite's cheeks!
Smooth as
Apollo's rump!"
And here Wetherby unlocked his eyes to let fall tears, pent up for months and
long hilltop years.
"Don't cry," said Dr. Goff.
"I must, with joy, or burst. Do you mean it?"

"My good man, here's my hand!"
They shook and the shaking let free at least one drop of rain from the good
doctor's cheek, also.
"The excitement will kill me," said Wetherby, wiping the backs of his fists
across his eyes.
"No better way to die! Tomorrow night?"
"But what will people say as I lead my machine through the streets to your
museum?"
"If anyone sees, say you're a gypsy who's stolen treasure from a distant year.
Well, well, Elijah Wetherby, I'm off."
"Be careful downhill."
"Careful."
Half out the door, Dr. Goff tripped on a cobble and almost fell as a farmer
said:
"Did you see the lunatic?"
"I did."
"Will you take him to a madhouse?"
"Yes. Asylum." Dr. Goff adjusted his cuffs. "Crazed. Worthless. You will see
him no more!"
"Good!" said all as he passed.
"Grand," said Goff and picked his way down the stone path, listening.
And uphill was there not a final, joyful, wheel-circling cry from that distant
yard?
Dr. Goff snorted.
"Think on it," he said, half aloud, "no more horses, no more manure! Think!"
And, thinking, fell on the cobbles, lurching toward London and the future.






AT THE END OF THE NINTH YEAR







"Well," said Sheila, chewing on her breakfast toast and examining her
complexion, distorted in the side of the coffee urn, "here it is the last day
of the last month of the ninth year."
Her husband, Thomas, glanced over the rampart of The Wall Street Journa4 saw
nothing to fasten his regard, and sank back in place. "What?"
"I said," said Sheila, "the ninth year's finished and you have a completely
new wife. Or, to put it properly, the old wife's gone. So I don't think we're
married anymore."

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Thomas floored the Journal on his as-yet-untouched scrambled eggs, tilted his
head this way and that, and said:
"Not married?"
"No, that was another time, another body, another me." She buttered more toast
and munched on it philosophically.
"Hold on!" He took a stiff jolt of coffee. "Explain."
"Well, dear Thomas, don't you remember reading as children and later, that
every nine years, I think it was nine, the body, churning like a
gene-chromosome

factory, did your entire person over, fingernails, spleen, ankles to elbows,
belly, bum, and earlobes, molecule by molecule-"
"Oh, get to it," he grumbled. "The point, wife, the point!"
"The point, dear Tom," she replied, finishing her toast, "is that with this
breakfast I have replenished my soul and psyche, completed the reworking of my
entire flesh, blood, and bones. This person seated across from you is not the
woman you married-"
"I have often said that!"
"Be serious."
"Are you?" he said.
"Let me finish. If the medical research is true, then at the end of nine years
there is not an eyebrow, eyelash, pore, dimple, or skin follicle in this
creature here at this celebratory breakfast that in any way is related to that
old Sheila Tompkins married at eleven a.m. of a Saturday nine years ago this
very hour. Two different women. One in bondage to a nice male creature whose
jaw jumps out like a cash register when he scans the Journal. The other, now
that it is one minute after the deadline hour, Born Free. So!"
She rose swiftly and prepared to flee.
"Wait!" He gave himself another jolt of coffee. "Where are you going?"
Hallway to the door, she said, "Out. Perhaps away. And who knows: forever!"
"Born free? Hogwash. Come here! Sit down!"
She hesitated as he assumed his lion-tamer's voice. "Dammit. You owe me an
explanation. Sit!"
She turned slowly. "For only as long as it takes to draw a picture."
"Draw it, then. Sit!"
She came to stare at her plate. "I seem to have eaten everything in sight."
He jumped up, ran over to the side table, rummaged more omelet, and banged it
in front of her.
"There.! Speak with your mouth full."
She forked in the eggs. "You do see what I'm driving at, don't you, Tomasino?"
"Damnation! I thought you were happy!"
"Yes, but not incredibly happy."
"That's for maniacs on their honeymoons!"
"Yes, wasn't it?" she remembered.
"That was then, this is now. Well?"
"I could feel it happening all year. Lying in bed, I felt my skin prickle, my
pores open like ten thousand tiny mouths, my perspiration run like faucets, my
heart race, my pulse sound in the oddest places, under my chin, my wrists, the
backs of my knees, my ankles. I felt like a huge wax statue, melting. After
midnight I was afraid to turn on the bathroom light and find a stranger gone
mad in the mirror."
"All right, all right!" He stirred four sugars in his coffee and drank the
slops from the saucer. "Sum it up!"
"Every hour of every night and then all day, I could feel it as if I were out
in a storm being struck by hot August rain that washed away the old to find a
brand-new me. Every drop of serum, every red and white corpuscle, every hot
flash of nerve ending, rewired and restrung, new marrow, new hair for combing,
new fingerprints even. Don't look at me that way. Perhaps no new fingerprints.
But all the rest. See? Am I not a fresh-sculpted, fresh-painted work of God's

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creation?"
He searched her up and down with a razor glare.
"I hear Mad Carlotta maundering," he said. "I see a woman hyperventilated by a
midlife frenzy. Why don't you just say it? Do you want a divorce?"
"Not necessarily."
"Not necessarily?" he shouted.
"I'll just simply . . . go away."
"Where will you go?"

"There must be some place," she said vaguely, stirring her omelet to make
paths.
"Is there another man?" he said at last, holding his utensils with fists.
"Not quite yet.
"Thank God for small favors." He let a great breath gust out. "Now go to your
room."
"Beg pardon?" She blinked.
"You'll not be allowed out for the rest of this week. Go to your room. No
phone calls. No TV. No-"
She was on her feet. "You sound like my father in high school!"
"I'll be damned." He laughed quietly. "Yes! Upstairs now! No lunch for you, my
girl. I'll put a plate by your door at suppertime. When you behave I'll give
you your car keys. Meanwhile, march! Pull out your telephone plugs and hand
over your CD player!"
"This is outrageous," she cried. "I'm a grown woman."
"Ingrown. No progress. Re-gress. If that damn theory's true, you didn't add
on, just sank back nine years! Out you go! Up!"
She ran, pale-faced, to the entry stairs, wiping tears from her eyes.
As she was hallway up, he, putting his foot on the first step, pulled the
napkin from his shirt and called quietly, "Wait ..."
She froze in place but did not look back down at him, waiting.
"Sheila," he said at last, tears running down his cheeks now.
"Yes," she whispered.
"I love you," he said.
"I know," she said. "But it doesn't help."
"Yes, it does. Listen."
She waited, hallway up to her room.
He rubbed his hand over his face as if trying to massage some truth out of it.
His hand was almost frantic, searching for something hidden around his mouth
or near his eyes.
Then it almost burst from him. "Sheila!"
"I'm supposed to go to my room," she said.
"Don't!"
"What, then?"
His face began to relax, his eyes to fix on a solution, as his hand rested on
the banister leading up to where she stood with her back turned.
"If what you say is true-"
"It is," she murmured. "Every cell, every pore, every eyelash. Nine years-"
"Yes, yes, I know, yes. But listen."
He swallowed hard and that helped him digest the solution which he now spoke
very weakly, then quietly, and then with a kind of growing certainty.
"If what you say happened-"
"It did," she murmured, head down.
"Well, then," he said slowly, and then, "It happened to me, too."
"What?" Her head lifted a trifle.
"It doesn't just happen to one person, right? It happens to all people,
everyone in the world. And if that's true, well, my body has been changing
along with yours during all the last nine years. Every follicle, every
fingernail, all the dermis and epidermis or whatever. I never noticed. But it
must have."

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Her head was up now and her back was not slumped. He hurried on.
"And if that's true, good Lord, then I'm new, too. The old Tom, Thomas, Tommy,
Tomasino is left behind back there with the shed snakeskin."
Her eyes opened and she listened and he finished. "So we're both brand-new.
You're the new, beautiful woman I've been thinking about finding and loving in
the last year. And I'm that man you were heading out to search for. Isn't that
right? Isn't that true?"

There was the merest hesitation and then she gave the smallest, almost
imperceptible nod.
"Mercy," he called gently.
"That's not my name," she said.
"It is now. New woman, new body, new name. So I picked one for you. Mercy?"
After a moment she said, "What does that make you?"
"Let me think." He chewed his lip and smiled. "How about Frank? Frankly, my
dear, I do give a damn."
"Frank," she murmured. "Frank and Mercy. Mercy and Frank."
"It doesn't exactly ring, but it'll do. Mercy?"
"Yes?"
"Will you marry me?"

"What?''
"I said, will you marry me. Today. An hour from now. Noon?"
She turned at last to look down at him with a face all freshly tanned and
washed.
"Oh, yes," she said.
"And we'll run away and be maniacs again, for a little while

"No," she said, "here is fine. Here is wonderful."
"Come down, then," he said, holding his hand up to her. "We have another nine
years before another change. Come down and finish your wedding breakfast.
Mercy?"
She came down the steps and took his hand and smiled.
"Where's the champagne?" she said.





BUG





Looking back now, I can't remember a time when Bug wasn't dancing. Bug is
short for jitterbug and, of course, those were the days in the late thirties,
our final days in high school and our first days out in the vast world looking
for work that didn't exist when jitterbugging was all the rage. And I can
remember
Bug (his real name was Bert Bagley, which shortens to Bug nicely), during a
jazz-band blast at our final aud-call for our high school senior class,
suddenly leaping up to dance with an invisible partner in the middle of the
front aisle of the auditorium. That brought the house down. You never heard
such a roar or such applause. The bandleader, stricken with Bug's oblivious
joy, gave an encore and Bug did the same and we all exploded. After that the
band played "Thanks for the Memory" and we all sang it, with tears pouring
down our cheeks. Nobody in all the years after could forget: Bug dancing in
the aisle, eyes shut, hands out to grasp his invisible girlfriend, his legs

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not connected to his body, just his heart, all over the place. When it was
over, nobody, not even the band, wanted to leave. We just stood there in the
world Bug had made, hating to go out into that other world that was waiting
for us.
It was about a year later when Bug saw me on the street and stopped his
roadster and said come on along to my place for a hot dog and a Coke, and I
jumped in and we drove over with the top down and the wind really hitting us
and Bug talking and talking at the top of his lungs, about life and the times
and what he wanted

to show me in his front parlor-front parlor, hell, dining room, kitchen, and
bedroom.
What was it he wanted me to see?
Trophies. Big ones, little ones, solid gold and silver and brass trophies with
his name on them. Dance trophies. I mean they were everywhere, on the floor by
his bed, on the kitchen sink, in the bathroom, but in the parlor, especially,
they had settled like a locust plague. There were so many of them on the
mantel, and in bookcases instead of books, and on the floor, you had to wade
through, kicking some over as you went. They totaled, he said, tilting his
head back and counting inside his eyelids, to about three hundred and twenty
prizes, which means grabbing onto a trophy almost every night in the past
year.
"All this," I gasped, "just since we left high school?"
"Ain't I the cat's pajamas?" Bug cried.
"You're the whole darned department store! Who was your partner, all those
nights?"
"Not partner, partners," Bug corrected. "Three hundred, give or take a dozen,
different women on three hundred different nights."
"Where do you find three hundred women, all talented, all good enough, to win
prizes?"
"They weren't talented or all good," said Bug, glancing around at his
collection. "They were just ordinary, good, every-night dancers. I won the
prizes. I made them good. And when we got Out there dancing, we cleared the
floor.
Everyone else stopped, to watch us there out in the middle of nowhere, and we
never stopped."
He paused, blushed, and shook his head. "Sorry about that. Didn't mean to
brag."
But he wasn't bragging. I could see. He was just telling the truth.
"You want to know how this all started?" said Bug, handing over a hot dog and
a
Coke.
"Don't tell me," I said. "I know."
"How could you?" said Bug, looking me over.
"The last aud-call at L.A. High, I think they played 'Thanks for the Memory,'
but just before that-"
" 'Roll Out the Barrel'-"
"-'the Barrel,' yes, and there you were in front of God and everyone,
jumping."
"I never stopped," said Bug, eyes shut, back in those years. "Never," he said,
"stopped."
"You got your life all made," I said.
"Unless," said Bug, "something happens."
What happened was, of course, the war.
Looking back, I remember that in that last year in school, sap that I was, I
made up a list of my one hundred and sixty-five best friends. Can you imagine
that? One hundred and sixty-five, count 'em, best friends! It's a good thing I
never showed that list to anyone. I would have been hooted out of school.

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Anyway, the war came and went and took with it a couple dozen of those listed
friends and the rest just disappeared into holes in the ground or went east or
wound up in Malibu or Fort Lauderdale. Bug was on that list, but I
didn't figure out I didn't really know him until half a lifetime later. By
that time I was down to half a dozen pals or women I might turn to if I
needed, and it was then, walking down Hollywood Boulevard one Saturday
afternoon, I heard someone call:
"How about a hot dog and a Coke?"
Bug, I thought without turning. And that's who it was, standing on the Walk of
Stars with his feet planted on Mary Pickford and Ricardo Cortez just behind
and
Jimmy Stewart just ahead. Bug had taken off some hair and put on some weight,
but it was Bug and I was overjoyed, perhaps too much, and showed it, for he
seemed embarrassed at my enthusiasm. I saw then that his suit was not half new

enough and his shirt frayed, but his tie was neatly tied and he shook my hand
off and we popped into a place where we stood and had that hot dog and that
Coke.
"Still going to be the world's greatest writer?" said Bug.
"Working at it," I said.
"You'll get there," said Bug and smiled, meaning it. "You were always good."
"So were you," I said.
That seemed to pain him slightly, for he stopped chewing for a moment and took
a swig of Coke. "Yes, sir," he said. "I surely was."
"God," I said, "I can still remember the day I saw all those trophies for the
first time. What a family! Whatever-?"
Before I could finish asking, he gave the answer.
"Put 'em in storage, some. Some wound up with my first wife. Goodwill got the
rest."
"I'm sorry," I said, and truly was.
Bug looked at me steadily. "How come you're sorry?"
"Hell, I dunno," I said. "It's just, they seemed such a part of you. I haven't
thought of you often the last few years or so, to be honest, but when I do,
there you are knee-deep in all those cups and mugs in your front room, out in
the kitchen, hell, in your garage!"
"I'll be damned," said Bug. "What a memory you got."
We finished our Cokes and it was almost time to go. I couldn't help myself,
even seeing that Bug had fleshed himself out over the years.
"When-" I started to say, and stopped.
"When what?" said Bug.
"When," I said with difficulty, "when was the last time you danced?"
"Years," said Bug.
"But how long ago?"
"Ten years. Fifteen. Maybe twenty. Yeah, twenty. I don't dance anymore."
"I don't believe that. Bug not dance? Nuts."
"Truth. Gave my fancy night-out shoes to the Goodwill, too. Can't dance in
your socks."
"Can, and barefoot, too!"
Bug had to laugh at that. "You're really something. Well, it's been nice." He
started edging toward the door. "Take care, genius-"
"Not so fast." I walked him out into the light and he was looking both ways as
if there were heavy traffic. "You know one thing I never saw and wanted to
see?
You bragged about it, said you took three hundred ordinary girls out on the
dance floor and turned them into Ginger Rogers inside three minutes. But I
only saw you once at that aud-call in '38, so I don't believe you."
"What?" said Bug. "You saw the trophies!"
"You could have had those made up," I pursued, looking at his wrinkled suit
and frayed shirt cuffs. "Anyone can go in a trophy shop and buy a cup and have

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his name put on it!"
"You think I did that?" cried Bug.
"I think that, yes!"
Bug glanced out in the street and back at me and back in the street and back
to me, trying to decide which way to run or push or shout.
"What's got into you?" said Bug. "Why're you talking like that?"
"God, I don't know," I admitted. "It's just, we might not meet again and I'll
never have the chance, or you to prove it. I'd like, after all this time, to
see what you talked about. I'd love to see you dance again, Bug."
"Naw," said Bug. "I've forgotten how."
"Don't hand me that. You may have forgotten, but the rest of you knows how.
Bet you could go down to the Ambassador Hotel this afternoon, they still have
tea dances there, and clear the floor, just like you said. After you're out
there

nobody else dances, they all stop and look at you and her just like thirty
years ago."
"No," said Bug, backing away but coming back. "No, no."
"Pick a stranger, any girl, any woman, out of the crowd, lead her out, hold
her in your arms and just skim her around as if you were on ice and dream her
to
Paradise."
"If you write like that, you'll never sell," said Bug.
"Bet you, Bug."
"I don't bet."
"All right, then. Bet you you can't. Bet you, By God, that you've lost your
stuff!"
"Now, hold on," said Bug.
"I mean it. Lost your stuff forever, for good. Bet you. Wanna bet?"
Bug's eyes took on a peculiar shine and his face was flushed. "How much?"
"Fifty bucks!"
"I don't have-"
"Thirty bucks, then. Twenty! You can afford to lose that, can't you?"
"Who says I'd lose, dammit?"
"I say. Twenty. Is it a deal?"
"You're throwing your money away."
"No, I'm a sure winner, because you can't dance worth shoats and shinola!"
"Where's your money?" cried Bug, incensed now.
"Here!"
"Where's your car!?"
"I don't own a car. Never learned to drive. Where's yours?"
"Sold it! Jesus, no cars. How do we get to the tea dance!?" We got. We grabbed
a cab and I paid and, before Bug could relent, dragged him through the hotel
lobby and into the ballroom. It was a nice summer afternoon, so nice that the
room was filled with mostly middle-aged men and their wives, a few younger
ones with their girlfriends, and some kids out of college who looked out of
place, embarrassed by the mostly old-folks music out of another time. We got
the last table and when Bug opened his mouth for one last protest, I put a
straw in it and helped him nurse a marguerita.
"Why are you doing this?" he protested again.
"Because you were just one of one hundred sixty-five close friends!" I said.
"We were never friends," said Bug.
"Well, today, anyway. There's 'Moonlight Serenade.' Always liked that, never
danced myself, clumsy fool. On your feet, Bug!"
He was on his feet, swaying.
"Who do you pick?" I said. "You cut in on a couple? Or there's a few
wallflowers over there, a tableful of women. I dare you to pick the least
likely and give her lessons, yes?"
That did it. Casting me a glance of the purest scorn, he charged off half into

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the pretty teatime dresses and immaculate men, searching around until his eyes
lit on a table where a woman of indeterminate age sat, hands folded, face thin
and sickly pale, half hidden under a wide-brimmed hat, looking as if she were
waiting for someone who never came.
That one, I thought.
Bug glanced from her to me. I nodded. And in a moment he was bowing at her
table and a conversation ensued. It seemed she didn't dance, didn't know how
to dance, didn't want to dance. Ah, yes, he seemed to be saying. Ah, no, she
seemed to reply. Bug turned, holding her hand, and gave me a long stare and a
wink. Then, without looking at her, he raised her by her hand and arm and out,
with a seamless glide, onto the floor.
What can I say, how can I tell? Bug, long ago, had never bragged, but only
told the truth. Once he got hold of a girl, she was weightless. By the time he
had whisked and whirled and glided her once around the floor, she almost took
off,

it seemed he had to hold her down, she was pure gossamer, the closest thing to
a hummingbird held in the hand so you cannot feel its weight but only sense
its heartbeat sounding to your touch, and there she went out and around and
back, with Bug guiding and moving, enticing and retreating, and not fifty
anymore, no, but eighteen, his body remembering what his mind thought it had
long forgotten, for his body was free of the earth now, too. He carried
himself, as he carried her, with that careless insouciance of a lover who
knows what will happen in the next hour and the night soon following.
And it happened, just like he said. Within a minute, a minute and a half at
most, the dance floor cleared. As Bug and his stranger lady whirled by with a
glance, every couple on the floor stood still. The bandleader almost forgot to
keep time with his baton, and the members of the orchestra, in a similar
trance, leaned forward over their instruments to see Bug and his new love
whirl and turn without touching the floor.
When the "Serenade" ended, there was a moment of stillness and then an
explosion of applause. Bug pretended it was all for the lady, and helped her
curtsy and took her to her table, where she sat, eyes shut, not believing what
had happened. By that time Bug was on the floor again, with one of the wives
he borrowed from the nearest table. This time, no one even went out on the
floor.
Bug and the borrowed wife filled it around and around, and this time even
Bug's eyes were shut.
I got up and put twenty dollars on the table where he might find it. After
all, he had won the bet, hadn't he?
Why had I done it? Well, I couldn't very well have left him out in the middle
of the high school auditorium aisle dancing alone, could I?
On my way out I looked back. Bug saw me and waved, his eyes as brimmed full as
mine. Someone passing whispered, "Hey, come on, lookit this guy!"
God, I thought, he'll be dancing all night.
Me, I could only walk.
And I went out and walked until I was fifty again and the sun was going down
and the low June fog was coming in early over old Los Angeles.
That night, just before going to sleep, I wished that in the morning when Bug
woke up he would find the floor around his bed covered with trophies.
Or at the very least he would turn and find a quiet and understanding trophy
with her head on his pillow, near enough to touch.





ONCE MORE, LEGATO

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Fentriss sat up in his chair in the garden in the middle of a fine autumn and
listened. The drink in his hand remained unsipped, his friend Black unspoken
to, the fine house unnoticed, the very weather itself neglected, for there
was a veritable fountain of sound in the air above them.
"My God," he mid. "Do you 'hear?"
"What, the birds?" asked his friend Black, doing just the opposite, sipping
his drink, noticing the weather, admiring the rich house, and neglecting the
birds entirely until this moment.
"Great God in heaven, listen to them!" cried Fentriss.
Black listened. "Rather nice."

"clean out your ears!"
Black made a halfhearted gesture, symbolizing the cleaning out of ears.
"Well?"
"Damn it, don't be funny. I mean really listen! They're singing a tune!"
"Birds usually do."
"No, they don't; birds paste together bits and pieces maybe, five or six
notes, eight at the most. Mockingbirds have repertoires that change, but not
entire melodies. These birds are different. Now shut up and give over!"
Both men sat, enchanted. Black's expression melted.
"I'll be damned," he said at last. "They do go on." He leaned forward and
listened intently.
"Yes . . ." murmured Fentriss, eyes shut, nodding to the rhythms that sprang
like fresh rain from the tree just above their heads. ". . . ohmigod . . .
indeed."
Black rose as if to move under the tree and peer up. Fentriss protested with a
fierce whisper:
"Don't spoil it. Sit. Be very still. Where's my pencil? Ah..."
Half peering around, he found a pencil and notepad, shut his eyes, and began
to scribble blindly.
The birds sang.
"You're not actually writing down their song?" said Black.
"What does it look like? Quiet."
And with eyes now open, now shut, Fentriss drew scales and jammed in the
notes.
"I didn't know you read music," said Black, astonished.
"I played the violin until my father broke it. Please! There. There. Yes!
"Slower," he whispered. "Wait for me."
As if hearing, the birds adjusted their lilt, moving toward piano instead of
bravado.
A breeze stirred the leaves, like an invisible conductor, and the singing
died.
Fentriss, perspiration beading his forehead, stopped scribbling and fell back.
"I'll be damned." Black gulped his drink. "What was that all about?"
"Writing a song." Fentriss stared at the scales he had dashed on paper. "Or a
tone poem."
"Let me see that!"
"Wait." The tree shook itself gently, but produced no further notes. "I want
to be sure they're done."
Silence.
Black seized the pages and let his eyes drift over the scales. "Jesus, Joseph,
and Mary," he said, aghast. "It works." He glanced up at the thick green of
the tree, where no throat warbled, no wing stirred. "What kind of birds are
those?"

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"The birds of forever, the small beasts of an Immaculate Musical Conception.
Something," said Fentriss, "has made them with child and its name is song-"
"Hogwash!"
"Is it?! Something in the air, in the seeds they ate at dawn, some whim of
climate and weather, God! But now they're mine, it's mine. A fine tune."
"It is'" said Black. "But can't be!"
"Never question the miraculous when it happens. Good grief, maybe those damned
wonderful creatures have been throwing up incredible songs for months, years,
but no one listened. Today, for the first time, someone did. Me! Now, what to
do with the gift?"
"You don't seriously mean-?"
"I've been out of work for a year. I quit my computers, retired early, I'm
only forty-nine, and have been threatening to knit macrame' to give friends to
spoil their walls, day after day. Which shall it be, friend, macrame' or
Mozart?"
"Are you Mozart?"
"Just his bastard son."
"Nonsense," cried Black, pointing his face like a blunderbuss at the trees as
if he might blast the choir. "That tree, those birds, are a Rorschach test.
Your

subconscious is picking and choosing notes from pure chaos. There's no
discernible tune, no special rhythm. You had me fooled, but I see and hear it
now: you've had a repressed desire since childhood to compose. And you've let
a clutch of idiot birds grab you by the ears. Put down that pen!"
"Nonsense right back at you." Fentriss laughed. "You're jealous that after
twelve layabout years, thunderstruck with boredom, one of us has found an
occupation. I shall follow it. Listen and write, write and listen. Sit down,
you're obstructing the acoustics!"
"I'll sit," Black exclaimed, "but-" He clapped his hands over his ears.
"Fair enough," said Fentriss. "Escape fantastic reality while I change a few
notes and finish out this unexpected birth."
Glancing up at the tree, he whispered:
"Wait for me."
The tree rustled its leaves and fell quiet.
"Crazy," muttered Black.

One, two, three hours later, entering the library quietly and then loudly,
Black cried out:
"What are you doing?"
Bent over his desk, his hand moving furiously, Fentriss said:
"Finishing a symphony!"
"The same one you began in the garden?"
"No, the birds began, the birds!"
"The birds, then." Black edged closer to study the mad inscriptions. "How do
you know what to do with that stuff?"
"They did most. I've added variations!"
"An arrogance the ornithologists will resent and attack. Have you composed
before?"
"Not"-Fentriss let his fingers roam, loop, and scratch-"until today!"
"You realize, of course, you're plagiarizing those songbirds?"
"Borrowing, Black, borrowing. If a milkmaid, singing at dawn, can have her hum
borrowed by Berlioz, well! Or if Dvorak, hearing a Dixie banjo plucker pluck
'Goin' Home,' steals the banjo to eke out his New World, why can't I weave a
net to catch a tune? There! Finito. Done! Give us a title, Black!"
"I? Who sings off-key?"
"What about 'The Emperor's Nightingale'?"
"Stravinsky."
"'The Birds'?"

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"Hitchcock."
"Damn. How's this: 'It's Only John Cage in a Gilded Bird'?"
"Brilliant. But no one knows who John Cage was."
''Well, then, I've got it!" And he wrote:
"'Forty-seven Magpies Baked in a Pie.'
"Blackbirds, you mean; go back to John Cage."
"Bosh!" Fentriss stabbed the phone. "Hello, Willie? Could you come over? Yes,
a small job. Symphonic arrangement for a friend, or friends. What's your usual
Philharmonic fee? Eh? Good enough. Tonight!"
Fentriss disconnected and turned to gaze at the tree with wonder in it.
"What next?" he murmured.

"Forty-seven Magpies," with title shortened, premiered at the Glendale Chamber
Symphony a month later with standing ovations, incredible reviews.
Fentriss, outside his skin with joy, prepared to launch himself atop large,
small, symphonic, operatic, whatever fell on his ears. He had listened to the
strange choirs each day for weeks, but bad noted nothing, waiting to see if
the
"Magpie" experiment was to be repeated. When the applause rose in storms and
the

critics hopped when they weren't skipping, he knew he must strike again before
the epilepsy ceased.
There followed: "Wings," "Flight," "Night Chorus," "The Fledgling Madrigals,"
and "Dawn Patrol," each greeted by new thunderstorms of acclamation and
critics angry at excellence but forced to praise.
"By now," said Fentriss, "I should be unbearable to live with, but the birds
caution modesty."
"Also,'' said Black, seated under the tree, waiting for a sprig of benison and
the merest touch of symphonic manna, "shut up! If all those sly dimwit
composers, who will soon be lurking in the bushes, cop your secret, you're a
gone poacher."
"Poacher! By God, yes!" Fentriss laughed. "Poacher."
And damn if the first poacher didn't arrive!
Glancing out at tree in the morning, Fentriss witnessed a runty shadow
stretching up, handheld tape recorder poised, warbling and whistling softly at
the tree. when this failed, the half-seen poacher tried dove-coos and then
orioles and roosters, half dancing in a circle.
"Damn it to hell!" Fentriss leaped out with a shotgun cry: "Is that Wolfgang
Prouty poaching my garden? Out, Wolfgang! Go!"
Dropping his recorder, Prouty vaulted a bush, impaled himself on thorns, and
vanished.
Fentriss, cursing, picked up an abandoned notepad.
"Nightsong," it read. On the tape recorder he found a lovely Satie-like bird-
choir.
After that, more poachers arrived mid-night to depart at dawn. Their spawn,
Fentriss realized, would soon throttle his creativity and still his voice. He
loitered full-time in the garden now, not knowing what seed to give his
beauties, and heavily watered the lawn to fetch up worms. Wearily he stood
guard through sleepless nights, nodding off only to find Wolfgang Prouty's
evil minions astride the wall, prompting arias, and one night, by God, perched
in the tree itself, humming in hopes of sing-alongs.
A shotgun was the final answer. After its first fiery roar, the garden was
empty for a week. That is, until-
Someone came very late indeed and committed mayhem.
As quietly as possible, he cut the branches and sawed the limbs.
"Oh, envious composers, dreadful murderers!" cried Fentriss.
And the birds were gone.
And the career of Amadeus Two with it.

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"Black!" cried Fentriss.
"Yes, dear friend?" said Black, looking at the bleak sky where once green was.
"Is your car outside?"
"When last I looked."
"Drive!"
But driving in search didn't do it. It wasn't like calling in lost dogs or
telephone-poled cats. They must find and cage an entire Mormon tabernacle team
of soprano springtime-in-the-Rockies birdseed lovers to prove one in the hand
is worth two in the bush.
But still they hastened from block to block, garden to garden, lurking and
listening. Now their spirits soared with an echo of "Hallelujah Chorus" oriole
warbling, only to sink in a drab sparrow twilight of despair.
Only when they had crossed and recrossed interminable mazes of asphalt and
greens did one of them finally (Black) light his pipe and emit a theory.
"Did you ever think to wonder," he mused behind a smoke-cloud, "what season of
the year this is?"
"Season of the year?" said Fentriss, exasperated.
"Well, coincidentally, wasn't the night the tree fell and the wee songsters
blew town, was not that the first fall night of autumn?"

Fentriss clenched a fist and struck his brow.
"You mean?"
"Your friends have flown the coop. Their migration must be above San Miguel
Allende just now."
"If they are migratory birds!"
"Do you doubt it?"
Another pained silence, another blow to the head.
''Shit!''
"Precisely," said Black.
"Friend," said Fentriss.
"Sir?"
"Drive home."

It was a long year, it was a short year, it was a year of anticipation, it was
the burgeoning of despair, it was the revival of inspiration, but at its
heart, Fentriss knew, just another Tale of Two Cities, but he did not know
what the other city was!
How stupid of me, he thought, not to have guessed or imagined that my
songsters we're wanderers who each autumn fled south and each springtime
swarmed north in
A Cappella choirs of sound.
"The waiting," he told Black, "is madness. The phone never stops-"
The phone rang. He picked it up and addressed it like a child. "Yes. Yes. Of
course. Soon. When? Very soon." And put the phone down. "You see? That was
Philadelphia. They want another Cantata as good as the first. At dawn today it
was Boston. Yesterday the Vienna Philharmonic. Soon, I say. When? God knows.
Lunacy! Where are those angels that once sang me to my rest?"
He threw down maps and weather charts of Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and the
Argentines.
"How far south? Do I scour Buenos Aires or Rio, Mazatlan or Cuernavaca? And
then? Wander about with a tin ear, standing under trees waiting for bird-drops
like a spotted owl? Will the Argentine critics trot by scoffing to see me
leaning on trees, eyes shut, waiting for the quasi-melody, the lost chord? I'd
let no one know the cause of my journey, my search, otherwise pandemoniums of
laughter. But in what city, under what kind of tree would I wander to stand? A
tree like mine? Do they seek the same roosts? or will anything do in Ecuador
or
Peru? God, I could waste months guessing and come back with birdseed in my
hair and bird bombs on my lapels. What to do, Black? Speak!"

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"Well, for one thing"-Black stuffed and lit his pipe and exhaled his aromatic
concepts-' 'you might clear off this stump and plant a new tree."
They had been circling the stump and kicking it for inspiration. Fentriss
froze with one foot raised. "Say that again?!"
"I said-"
"Good grief, you genius! Let me kiss you!"
"Rather not. Hugs, maybe."
Fentriss hugged him, wildly. "Friend!"
"Always was."
"Let's get a shovel and spade."
"You get. I'll watch."
Fentriss ran back a minute later with a spade and pickax.
"Sure you won't join me?"
Black sucked his pipe, blew smoke. "Later."
"How much would a full-grown tree cost?"
"Too much."
"Yes, but if it were here and the birds did return?" Black let out more smoke.
"Might be worth it. Opus Number Two: 'In the Beginning' by Charles Fentriss,
stuff like that."
'In the Beginning,' or maybe 'The Return.''"

"One of those."
"Or-" Fentriss struck the stump with the pickax. " 'Rebirth.' " He struck
again.
"'Ode to Joy.' " Another strike.
'Spring Harvest.' " Another. "'Let the Heavens Resound.' How's that, Black?"
"I prefer the other," said Black.

The stump was pulled and the new tree bought.
"Don't show me the bill," Fentriss told his accountant. "Pay it."
And the tallest tree they could find, of the same family as the one dead and
gone, was planted.
"What if it dies before my choir returns?" said Fentriss. "What if it lives,"
said Black, "and your choir goes elsewhere?"
The tree, planted, seemed in no immediate need to die. Neither did it look
particularly vital and ready to welcome small singers from some far southern
places.
Meanwhile, the sky, like the tree, was empty. "Don't they know I'm waiting?"
said Fentriss. "Not unless," offered Black, "you majored in cross-continental
telepathy."
"I've checked with Audubon. They say that while the swallows do come back to
Capistrano on a special day, give or take a white lie, other migrating species
are often one or two weeks late."
"If I were you," said Black, "I would plunge into an intense love affair to
distract you while you wait."
"I am fresh out of love affairs."
"Well, then," said Black, "suffer."
The hours passed slower than the minutes, the days passed slower than the
hours, the weeks passed slower than the days. Black called. "No birds?"
"No birds."
"Pity. I can't stand watching you lose weight." And Black disconnected.
On a final night, when Fentriss had almost yanked the phone out of the wall,
fearful of another call from the Boston Symphony, he leaned an ax against the
trunk of the new tree and addressed it and the empty sky.
"Last chance," he said. "If the dawn patrol doesn't show by seven a.m., it's
quits."
And he touched ax-blade against the tree-bole, took two shots of vodka so
swiftly that the spirits squirted out both eyes, and went to bed.
He awoke twice during the night to hear nothing but a soft breeze outside his

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window, stirring the leaves, with not a ghost of song.
And awoke at dawn with tear-filled eyes, having dreamed that the birds had
returned, but knew, in waking, it was only a dream.
And yet...?
Hark, someone might have said in an old novel. List! as in an old play.
Eyes shut, he fine-tuned his ears .
The tree outside, as he arose, looked fatter, as if it had taken on invisible
ballasts in the night. There were stirrings there, not of simple breeze or
probing winds, but of something in the very leaves that knitted and purled
them in rhythms. He dared not look but lay back down to ache his senses and
try to know.
A single chirp hovered in the window.
He waited.
Silence.
Go on, he thought.
Another chirp.
Don't breathe, he thought; don't let them know you're listening.
Hush.
A fourth sound, then a fifth note, then a sixth and seventh. My God, he
thought, is this a substitute orchestra, a replacement choir come to scare off
my loves?

Another five notes.
Perhaps, he prayed, they're only tuning up!
Another twelve notes, of no special timbre or pace, and as he was about to
explode like a lunatic conductor and fire the bunch-It happened. Note after
note, line after line, fluid melody following spring freshet melody, the whole
choir exhaled to blossom the tree with joyous proclamations of return and
welcome in chorus.
And as they sang, Fentriss sneaked his hand to find a pad and pen to hide
under the covers so that its scratching might not disturb the choir that
soared and dipped to soar again, firing the bright air that flowed from the
tree to tune his soul with delight and move his hand to remember.
The phone rang. He picked it up swiftly to hear Black ask if the waiting was
over. Without speaking, he held the receiver in the window.
"I'll be damned," said Black's voice.
"No, anointed," whispered the composer, scribbling Cantata No.2. Laughing, he
called softly to the sky.
"Please. More slowly. Legato, not agitato."
And the tree and the creatures within the tree obeyed.
Agitato ceased.
Legato prevailed.




EXCHANGE




There were too many cards in the file, too many books on the shelves, too many
children laughing in the children's room, too many newspapers to fold and
stash on the racks ...
All in all, too much. Miss Adams pushed her gray hair back over her lined
brow, adjusted her gold-rimmed pince-nez, and rang the small silver bell on
the library desk, at the same time switching off and on all the lights. The
exodus of adults and children was exhausting. Miss Ingraham, the assistant
librarian, had gone home early because her father was sick, so it left the

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burden of stamping, filing, and checking books squarely on Miss Adams'
shoulders.
Finally the last book was stamped, the last child fed through the great brass
doors, the doors locked, and with immense weariness, Miss Adams moved back up
through a silence of forty years of books and being keeper of the books, stood
for a long moment by the main desk.
She laid her glasses down on the green blotter, and pressed the bridge of her
small-boned nose between thumb and forefinger and held it, eyes shut. What a
racket! Children who finger-painted or cartooned frontispieces or rattled
their roller skates. High school students arriving with laughters, departing
with mindless songs!
Taking up her rubber stamp, she probed the files, weeding out errors, her
fingers whispering between Dante and Darwin.
A moment later she heard the rapping on the front-door glass and saw a man's
shadow outside, wanting in. She shook her head. The figure pleaded silently,
making gestures.
Sighing, Miss Adams opened the door, saw a young man in uniform, and said,
"It's late. We're closed." She glanced at his insignia and added, "Captain."
"Hold on!" said the captain. "Remember me?"
And repeated it, as she hesitated.
"Remember?"

She studied his face, trying to bring light out of shadow. "Yes, I think I
do,"
she said at last. "You once borrowed books here."
"Right."
"Many years ago," she added. "Now I almost have you placed."
As he stood waiting she tried to see him in those other years, but his younger
face did not come clear, or a name with it, and his hand reached out now to
take hers.
"May I come in?"
"Well." She hesitated. "Yes."
She led the way up the steps into the immense twilight of books. The young
officer looked around and let his breath out slowly, then reached to take a
book and hold it to his nose, inhaling, then almost laughing.
"Don't mind me, Miss Adams. You ever smell new books? Binding, pages, print.
Like fresh bread when you're hungry." He glanced around. "I'm hungry now, but
don't even know what for."
There was a moment of silence, so she asked him how long he might stay.
"Just a few hours. I'm on the train from New York to L.A., so I came up from
Chicago to see old places, old friends." His eyes were troubled and he fretted
his cap, turning it in his long, slender fingers.
She said gently, "Is anything wrong? Anything I can help you with?"
He glanced out the window at the dark town, with just a few lights in the
windows of the small houses across the way.
"I was surprised," he said.
"By what?"
"I don't know what I expected. Pretty damn dumb," he said, looking from her to
the windows, "to expect that when I went away, everyone froze in place waiting
for me to come home. That when I stepped off the train, all my old pals would
unfreeze, run down, meet me at the station. Silly."
"No," she said, more easily now. "I think we all imagine that. I visited Paris
as a young girl, went back to France when I was forty, and was outraged that
no one had waited, buildings had vanished, and all the hotel staff where I had
once lived had died, retired, or traveled."
He nodded at this, but could not seem to go on.
"Did anyone know you were coming?" she asked.
"I wrote a few, but no answers. I figured, hell, they're busy, but they'll be
there. They weren't."

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She felt the next words come off her lips and was faintly surprised. "I'm
still here," she said.
"You are," he said with a quick smile. "And I can't tell you how glad I am."
He was gazing at her now with such intensity that she had to look away. "You
know," she said, "I must confess you look familiar, but I don't quite fit your
face with the boy who came here-"
"Twenty years ago! And as for what he looked like, that other one, me, well-"
He brought out a smallish wallet which held a dozen pictures and handed over a
photograph of a boy perhaps twelve years old, with an impish smile and wild
blond hair, looking as if he might catapult out of the frame.
"Ah, yes." Miss Adams adjusted her pince-nez and closed her eyes to remember.
"That one. Spaulding. William Henry Spaulding?"
He nodded and peered at the picture in her hands anxiously.
"Was I a lot of trouble?"
"Yes." She nodded and held the picture closer and glanced up at him. "A
fiend."
She handed the picture back. "But I loved you."
"Did you?" he said and smiled more broadly.
"In spite of you, yes."
He waited a moment and then said, "Do you still love me?"
She looked to left and right as if the dark stacks held the answer.
"It's a little early to know, isn't it?"

"Forgive."
"No, no, a good question. Time will tell. Let's not stand like your frozen
friends who didn't move. Come along. I've just had some late-night coffee.
There may be some left. Give me your cap. Take off that coat. The file index
is there.
Go look up your old library cards for the hell-heck-of it."
"Are they still there?" In amaze.
"Librarians save everything. You never know who's coming in on the next train.
Go."
When she came back with the coffee, he stood staring down into the index file
like a bird fixing its gaze on a half-empty nest. He handed her one of the old
purple-stamped cards.
"Migawd," he said, "I took out a lot of books."
"Ten at a time. I said no, but you took them. And," she added, "read them!
Here." She put his cup on top of the file and waited while he drew out
canceled card after card and laughed quietly.
"I can't believe. I must not have lived anywhere else but here. May I take
this with me, to sit?" He showed the cards. She nodded. "Can you show me
around? I
mean, maybe I've forgotten something."
She shook her head and took his elbow. "I doubt that. Come on. Over here, of
course, is the adult section."
"I begged you to let me cross over when I was thirteen. 'You're not ready,'
you said. But-"
"I let you cross over anyway?"
"You did. And much thanks."
Another thought came to him as he looked down at her.
"You used to be taller than me," he said.
She looked up at him, amused.
"I've noticed that happens quite often in my life, but I can still do this."
Before he could move, she grabbed his chin in her thumb and forefinger and
held tight. His eyes rolled.
He said:
"I remember. When I was really bad you'd hold on and put your face down close
and scowl. The scowl did it. After ten seconds of your holding my chin very
tight, I behaved for days."

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She nodded, released his chin. He rubbed it and as they moved on he ducked his
head, not looking at her.
"Forgive, I hope you won't be upset, but when I was a boy I used to look up
and see you behind your desk, so near but far away, and, how can I say this, I
used to think that you were Mrs. God, and that the library was a whole world,
and that no matter what part of the world or what people or thing I wanted to
see and read, you'd find and give it to me." He stopped, his face coloring.
"You did, too. You had the world ready for me every time I asked. There was
always a place I hadn't seen, a country I hadn't visited where you took me.
I've never forgotten."
She looked around, slowly, at the thousands of books. She felt her heart move
quietly. "Did you really call me what you just said?"
"Mrs. God? Oh, yes. Often. Always."
"Come along," she said at last.
They walked around the rooms together and then downstairs to the newspaper
files, and coming back up, he suddenly leaned against the banister, holding
tight.
"Miss Adams," he said.
"What is it, Captain?"
He exhaled. "I'm scared. I don't want to leave. I'm afraid."
Her hand, all by itself, took his arm and she finally said, there in the
shadows, "Sometimes-I'm afraid, too. What frightens you?"

"I don't want to go away without saying good-bye. If I never return, I want to
see all my friends, shake hands, slap them on the back, I don't know, make
jokes." He stopped and waited, then went on. "But I walk around town and
nobody knows me. Everyone's gone."
The pendulum on the wall clock slid back and forth, shining, with the merest
of sounds.
Hardly knowing where she was going, Miss Adams took his arm and guided him up
the last steps, away from the marble vaults below, to a final, brightly
decorated room, where he glanced around and shook his head.
"There's no one here, either."
"Do you believe that?"
"Well, where are they? Do any of my old pals ever come visit, borrow books,
bring them back late?"
"Not often," she said. "But listen. Do you realize Thomas Wolfe was wrong?"
"Wolfe? The great literary beast? Wrong?"
"The title of one of his books."
"You Can't Go Home Again?" he guessed.
"That's it. He was wrong. This is home. Your friends are still here. This was
your summer place."
"Yes. Myths. Legends. Mummies. Aztec kings. Wicked sisters who spat toads.
Where
I really lived. But I don't see my people."
"Well."
And before he could speak, she switched on a green-shaded lamp that shed a
private light on a small table.
"Isn't this nice?" she said. "Most libraries today, too much light. There
should be shadows, don't you think? Some mystery, yes? So that late nights the
beasts can prowl out of the stacks and crouch by this jungle light to turn the
pages with their breath. Am I crazy?"
"Not that I noticed."
"Good. Sit. Now that I know who you are, it all comes back."
"It couldn't possibly."
"No? You'll see."
She vanished into the stacks and came out with ten books that she placed
upright, their pages a trifle spread so they could stand and he could read the
titles.

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"The summer of 1930, when you were, what? ten, you read all of these in one
week."
"Oz? Dorothy? The Wizard? Oh, yes."
She placed still others nearby. "Alice in Wonderland. Through the
Looking-Glass.
A month later you reborrowed both. 'But,' I said, 'you've already read them!'
'But,' you said, 'not enough so I can speak. I want to be able to tell them
out loud.'
"My God," he said quietly, "did I say that?"
"You did. Here's more you read a dozen times. Greek myths, Roman, Egyptian.
Norse myths, Chinese. You were ravenous."
"King Tut arrived from the tomb when I was three. His picture in the
Rotogravure started me. What else have you there?"
"Tarzan of the Apes. You borrowed it . .
"Three dozen times! John Carter, Warlord of Mars, four dozen. My God, dear
lady, how come you remember all this?"
"You never left. Summertimes you were here when I unlocked the doors. You went
home for lunch but sometimes brought sandwiches and sat out by the stone lion
at noon. Your father pulled you home by your ear some nights when you stayed
late.
How could I forget a boy like that?"
"But still-"
"You never played, never ran out in baseball weather, or football, I imagine.
Why?"

He glanced toward the front door. "They were waiting for me."
"They?"
"You know. The ones who never borrowed books, never read. They. Them. Those."
She looked and remembered. "Ah, yes. The bullies. Why did they chase you?"
"Because they knew I loved books and didn't much care for them."
"It's a wonder you survived. I used to watch you getting, reading hunchbacked,
late afternoons. You looked so lonely."
"No. I had these. Company."
"Here's more."
She put down Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, and Treasure Island.
"Oh," he said, "and dear and strange Mr. Poe. How I loved his Red Death."
"You took it so often I told you to keep it on permanent loan unless someone
else asked. Someone did, six months later, and when you brought it in I could
see it was a terrible blow. A few days later I let you have Poe for another
year. I don't recall, did you ever-?"
"It's out in California. Shall I-"
"No, no. Please. Well, here are your books. Let me bring others."
She came out not carrying many books but one at a time, as if each one were,
indeed, special.
She began to make a circle inside the other Stonehenge circle and as she
placed the books, in lonely splendor, he said their names and then the names
of the authors who had written them and then the names of those who had sat
across from him so many years ago and read the books quietly or sometimes
whispered the finest parts aloud, so beautifully that no one said Quiet or
Silence or even
Shh!
She placed the first book and there was a wild field of broom and a wind
blowing a young woman across that field as it began to snow and someone, far
away, called "Kathy" and as the snows fell he saw a girl he had walked to
school in the sixth grade seated across the table, her eyes fixed to the
windblown field and the snow and the lost woman in another time of winter.
A second book was set in place and a black and beauteous horse raced across a
summer field of green and on that horse was another girl, who hid behind the
book and dared to pass him notes when he was twelve.

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And then there was the far ghost with a snow-maiden face whose hair was a long
golden harp played by the summer airs; she who was always sailing to Byzantium
where Emperors were drowsed by golden birds that sang in clockwork cages at
sunset and dawn. She who always skirted the outer rim of school and went to
swim in the deep lake ten thousand afternoons ago and never came out, so was
never found, but suddenly now she made landfall here in the green-shaded light
and opened Yeats to at last sail home from Byzantium.
And on her right: John Huff, whose name came clearer than the rest, who
claimed to have climbed every tree in town and fallen from none, who had raced
through watermelon patches treading melons, never touching earth, to knock
down rainfalls of chestnuts with one blow, who yodeled at your sun-up window
and wrote the same Mark Twain book report in four different grades before the
teachers caught on, at which he said, vanishing, "Just call me Huck."
And to his right, the pale son of the town hotel owner who looked as if he had
gone sleepless forever, who swore every empty house was haunted and took you
there to prove it, with a juicy tongue, compressed nose, and throat gargling
that sounded the long October demise, the terrible and unutterable fall of the
House of Usher.
And next to him was yet another girl.
And next to her ...
And just beyond ...
Miss Adams placed a final book and he recalled the fair creature, long ago,
when such things were left unsaid, glancing up at him one day when he was an

unknowing twelve and she was a wise thirteen to quietly say: "I am Beauty. And
you, are you the Beast?"
Now, late in time, he wanted to answer that small and wondrous ghost: "No. He
hides in the stacks and when the clock strikes three, will prowl forth to
drink."
And it was finished, all the books were placed, the outer ring of his selves
and the inner ring of remembered faces, deathless, with summer and autumn
names.
He sat for a long moment and then another long moment and then, one by one,
reached for and took all of the books that had been his, and still were, and
opened them and read and shut them and took another until he reached the end
of the outer circle and then went to touch and turn and find the raft on the
river, the field of broom where the storms lived, and the pasture with the
black and beauteous horse and its lovely rider. Behind him, he heard the lady
librarian quietly back away to leave him with words .
A long while later he sat back, rubbed his yes, and looked around at the
fortress, the encirclement, the Roman encampment of books, and nodded, his
eyes wet.
"Yes."
He heard her move behind him.
"Yes, what?"
"What you said, Thomas Wolfe, the title of that book of his. Wrong.
Everything's here. Nothing's changed."
"Nothing will as long as I can help it,,, she said.
"Don't ever go away."
"I won't if you'll come back more often."
Just then, from below the town, not so very far off, a train whistle blew. She
said:
"Is that yours?"
"No, but the one soon after," he said and got up and moved around the small
monuments that stood very tall and one by one, shut the covers, his lips
moving to sound the old titles and the old, dear names.
"Do we have to put them back on the shelves?" he said. She looked at him and
at the double circle and after a long moment said, "Tomorrow will do. Why?"
"Maybe," he said, "during the night, because of the color of those lamps,

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green, the jungle, maybe those creatures you mentioned will come out and turn
the pages with their breath. And maybe-"
"What else?"
"Maybe my friends, who've hid in the stacks all these years, will come out,
too.', "They're already here," she said quietly.
"Yes." He nodded. "They are."
And still he could not move.
She backed off across the room without making any sound, and when she reached
her desk she called back, the last call of the night.
"Closing time. Closing time, children."
And turned the lights quickly off and then on and then halfway between; a
library twilight.
He moved from the table with the double circle of books and came to her and
said, "I Can go now."
"Yes," she said. "William Henry Spaulding. You can." They walked together as
she turned out the lights, turned out the lights, one by one. She helped him
into his coat and then, hardly thinking to do so, he took her hand and kissed
her fingers.
It was so abrupt, she almost laughed, but then she said, "Remember what Edith
Whanon said when Henry James did what you just did?"
"What?"
'The flavor starts at the elbow.'

They broke into laughter together and he turned and went down the marble steps
toward the stained-glass entry. At the bottom of the stairs he looked up at
her and said:
"Tonight, when you're going to sleep, remember what I called you when I was
twelve, and say it out loud."
"I don't remember," she said.
"Yes, you do."
Below the town, a train whistle blew again.
He opened the front door, stepped out, and he was gone. Her hand on the last
light switch, looking in at the double circle of books on the far table, she
thought: What was it he called me?
"Oh, yes," she said a moment later.
And switched off the light.






FREE DIRT




The cemetery was in the center of the city. On four sides it was bounded by
gliding streetcars on glistening blue tracks and cars with exhaust fumes and
sound. But, once inside the wall, the world was lost. For half a mile in four
directions the cemetery raised midnight trees and headstones that grew from
the earth, like pale mushrooms, moist and cold. A gravel path led back into
darkness and within the gate stood a Gothic Victorian house with six gables
and a cupola.
The front-porch light showed an old man there alone, not smoking, not reading,
not moving, silent. If you took a deep breath he smelled of the sea, of urine,
of papyrus, of kindling, of ivory, and of teak. His false teeth moved his
mouth automatically when it wanted to talk. His tiny yellow seed eyes twitched
and his poke-hole nostrils thinned as a stranger crunched up the gravel path

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and set foot on the porch step.
"Good evening!" said the stranger, a young man, perhaps twenty.
The old man nodded, but his hands lay quietly on his knees "I saw that sign
out front," the stranger went on. "FREE DIRT, it said."
The old man almost nodded.
The stranger tried a smile. "Crazy, but that sign caught my eye.
There was a glass fan over the front door. A light shone through this glass
fan, colored blue, red, yellow, and touched the old man's face. It seemed not
to bother him.
"I wondered, free dirt? Never struck me you'd have much left over. When you
dig a hole and put the coffin in and refill the hole, you haven't much dirt
left, have you? I should think..."
The old man leaned forward. It was so unexpected that the stranger pulled his
foot off the bottom step.
"You want some?" said the old man.
"Why, no, no, I was just curious. Signs like that make you curious."
"Set down," said the old man.
"Thanks." The young man sat uneasily on the steps. "You know how it is, you
walk around and never think how it is to own a graveyard."
"And?" said the old man.
"I mean, like how much time it takes to dig graves."
The old man leaned back in his chair. "On a cool day:

two hours. Hot day, four. Very hot day, six. Very cold day, not cold so it
freezes, but real cold, a man can dig a grave in one hour so he can head in
for hot chocolate, brandy in the chocolate. Then again, you get a good man on
a hot day, he's no better than a bad man in the cold. Might take eight hours
to open up, but here's easy-digging soil here. All loam, no rocks."
"I'm curious about winter."
"In blizzards we got a icebox mausoleum to stash the dead, undelivered mail,
until spring and a whole month of shovels and spades."
"Seeding and planting time, eh?" The stranger laughed.
"You might say that."
"Don't you dig in winter anyhow? For special funerals? Special dead?"
"Some yards got a hose-shovel contraption. Pump hot water through the blade;
shape a grave quick, like placer mining, even with the ground an ice-pond. We
don't cotton to that. Use picks and shovels."
The young man hesitated. "Does it bother you?"
"You mean, I get scared ever?"
"Well . . . yes."
The old man at last took out and stuffed his pipe with tobacco, tamped it with
a callused thumb, lit it, let out a small stream of smoke.
"No," he said at last.
The young man's shoulders sank. "Disappointed?" said the old man. "I thought
maybe once .
"Oh, when you're young, maybe. One time ..."
"Then there was a time!" The young man shifted up a step. The old man glanced
at him sharply, then resumed smoking. "One time." He stared at the marbled
hills and the dark trees. "My grandpa owned this yard. I was born here. A
gravedigger'
5 son learns to ignore things."
The old man took a number of deep puffs and said:
"I was just eighteen, folks off on vacation, me left to tend things, alone,
mow the lawn, dig holes and such. Alone, four graves to dig in October and a
cold came hard off the lake, frost on the graves, tombstones like snow, ground
froze solid.
"One night I walked out. No moon. Hard grass underfoot, could see my breath,
hands in my pockets, walking, listening."
The old man exhaled frail ghosts from his thin nostrils. "Then I heard this

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sound, deep under. I froze. It was a voice, screaming. Someone woke up buried,
heard me walk by, cried out. I just stood. They screamed and screamed. Earth
banged. On a cold night, ground's like porcelain, rings, you see?
"Well-" The old man shut his eyes to remember. "I stood like the wind off the
lake stopped my blood. A joke? I searched around and thought, Imagination! No,
it was underfoot, sharp, clear. A woman's voice. I knew all the gravestones."
The old man's eyelids trembled. "Could recite them alphabetical, year, month,
day. Name any year, and I'll tell. How about 1899? Jake Smith departed. And
1923? Betty Dallman lost. And 1933? P. H. Moran! Name a month. August? August
last year, buried Henrietta Wells. August 1918? Grandma Hanlon, whole family!
Influenza! Name a day, August fourth? Smith, Burke, Shelby carried off.
Williamson? He's on that hill, pink marble. Douglas? By the creek ..."
"The story," the young man urged.
"Eh?"
"The story you were telling."
"Oh, the voice below? Well, I knew all the stones. Standing there, I guessed
that voice out of the ground was Henrietta Fremwell, fine girl, twenty-four
years, played piano at the Elite Theatre. Tall, graceful, blond. How did I
know her voice? I stood where there was only men's graves. Hers was the only
woman's.
I ran to put my ear on her stone. Yes! Her voice, way down, screaming!
"'Miss Fremwell!' I shouted.
"'Miss Fremwell,' I yelled again.

"Deep down I heard her, only weeping now. Maybe she heard me, maybe not. She
just cried. I ran downhill so fast I tripped and split my head on a stone, got
up, screamed myself! Got to the tool shed, all blood, dragged out the tools,
and just stood there in the moonlight with one shovel. The ground was ice
solid, solid. I fell back against a tree. It would take three minutes to get
back to her grave, and eight hours of cold night to dig to her box. The ground
was like glass. A coffin is a coffin; only so much space for air. Henrietta
Fremwell had been buried two days before the freeze, been asleep all that
time, using up air, and it rained just before the cold spell and the earth
over her, soaked with rainwater now, froze. I'd have to dig maybe eight hours.
And the way she cried, there wasn't another hour of air left."
The old man's pipe had gone out. He rocked in his chair, back and forth, back
and forth, silently.
"But," said the young man, "what did you do?"
"Nothing," said the old man.
"Nothing!?"
"Nothing I could do. That ground was solid. Six men couldn't have dug that
grave. No hot water near. And she might've been screaming hours before I
heard, so . .
"You did-nothing?"
"Something Put the shovel and pick back in the tool shed, locked it and went
back to the house and built a fire and drank some hot chocolate, shivering and
shivering. Would you have done different?"
"I-"
"Would you have dug for eight hours in hard ice rock so's to reach her when
she was truly dead of exhaustion, cold, smothered, and have to bury her all
over again? Then call her folks and tell them?"
The young man was silent. On the porch, the mosquitoes hummed about the naked
light bulb.
"I see," said the young man.
The old man sucked his pipe. "I think I cried all night because there was
nothing I could do." He opened his eyes and stared about, surprised, as if he
had been listening to someone else.
"That's quite a story," said the young man.
"No," said the old man, "God's truth. Want to hear more? See that big stone

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with the ugly angel? That was Adam Crispin's. Relatives fought, got a writ
from a judge, dug him up hoping for poison. Found nothing. Put him back, but
by that time the dirt from his grave mixed with other dirts. We shoveled in
stuff from all around. Next plot, the angel with broken wings? Mary-Lou
Phipps. Dug her up to lug her off to Elgin, Illinois. More relatives. Where
she'd been, the pit stayed open, oh, three weeks. No funerals. Meanwhile, her
dirt got cross-
shoveled with others. Six stones over, one stone north, that was Henry Douglas
Jones. Became famous sixty years after no one paid attention. Now he's planted
under the Civil War monument. His grave lay wide two months, nobody wanted to
utilize the hole of a Southerner, all of us leaning North with Grant. So his
dirt got scattered. That give you some notion of what that FREE DIRT sign
means?"
The young man eyed the cemetery landscape. "Well," he said, "where is that
dirt you're handing out?"
The old man pointed with his pipe and the stranger looked and indeed, by a
nearby wall was a sizable hillock some ten feet long by about three feet high,
loam and grass tufts of many shades of tan, brown, and burnt umber.
"Go look," said the old man.
The young man walked slowly over to stand by the mound.
"Kick it," said the old man. "See if it's real."
The young man kicked and his face paled.
"Did you hear that?" he said.

"What?" said the old man, looking somewhere else.
The stranger listened and shook his head. "Nothing."
"Well, now," said the old man, knocking out the ashes from his pipe. "How much
free dirt you need?"
"I hadn't thought."
"Yes, you have," said the old man, "or you wouldn't have driven your
lightweight delivery truck up by the cemetery gate. I got cat's ears. Heard
your motor just when you stopped. How much?"
"Oh," said the young man uneasily. "My backyard's eighty feet by forty. I
could use a good inch of topsoil. So ...?"
"I'd say," said the old man, "half of that mound there. Hell, take it all.
Nobody wants it."
"You mean-"
"I mean, that mound has been growing and diminishing, diminishing and growing,
mixtures up and down, since Grant took Richmond and Sherman reached the sea.
There's Civil dirt there, coffin splinters, satin casket shreds from when
Lafayette met the Honor Guard's Edgar Allan Poe. There's funeral flowers,
blossoms from ten hundred obsequies. Condolence-card confetti for Hessian
troopers, Parisian gunners who never shipped home. That soil is so laced with
bone meal and casket corsages, I should charge you to buy the lot. Grab a
spade before I do."
"Stay right there." The young man raised one hand.
"I'm not going anywhere," said the old man. "Nor is anyone else nearby."

The half-truck was pulled up by the dirt mound and the young man was reaching
in for a spade when the old man said:
"No, I think not."
The old man went on:
"Graveyard spade's best. Familiar metal, familiar soil. Easy digging when like
takes to like. So."
The old man's head indicated a spade half stuck in the dark mound. The young
man shrugged and moved.
The cemetery spade came free with a soft whispering. Pellets of ancient mound
fell with similar whispers.
He began to dig and shift and fill the back of his half-truck as the old man

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from the corners of his eyes observed:
"It's more than dirt, as I said. War of 1812, San Juan Hill, Manassas,
Gettysburg, October flu epidemic 1918, all strewn from graves filled and
evicted to be refilled. Various occupants leavened out to dust, various
glories melted to mixtures, rust from metal caskets, coffin handles, shoelaces
but no shoes, hairs long and short. Ever see wreaths made of hair saved to
weave crowns to fix on mortal pictures? All that's left of a smile or that
funny look in the eyes of someone who knows she's not alive anymore, ever.
Hair, epaulettes, not whole ones, but one strand of epaulette, all there along
with blood that's gone to silt."
The young man finished, sweating, and started to thrust the spade back in the
earth when the old man said:
"Take it. Cemetery dirt, cemetery spade, like takes to like."
"I'll bring it back tomorrow." The young man tossed the spade into the mounded
truck.
"No. You got the dirt, so keep the spade. Just don't bring the free dirt
back."
"Why would I do that?"
"Just don't," said the old man, but did not move as the young man climbed in
his truck to start the engine.
He sat listening to the dirt mound tremble and whisper in the flatbed.
"What're you waiting for?" asked the old man.

*
* *

The flimsy half-truck ran toward the last of the twilight, pursued by the
ever-
encroaching dark. Clouds raced overhead, perturbed by the invisible. Back on
the horizon, thunder sounded. A few drops of rain fell on the windshield,
causing the young man to ram his foot on the gas and swerve into his home
street even as the sun truly died, the wind rose, and the trees around his
cottage bent and beckoned.
Climbing out, he stared at the sky and then his house and then the empty
garden.
A few drops of cold rain on his cheeks decided him; he drove the rattling
half-
truck into the empty garden, unlatched the metal back-flap, opened it just an
inch so as to allow a proper flow, and then began motoring back and forth
across the garden, letting the dark stuffs whisper down, letting the strange
midnight earth sift and murmur, until at last the truck was empty and he stood
in the blowing night, watching the wind stir the black soil.
Then he locked the truck in the garage and went to stand on the back porch,
thinking, I won't need water. The storm will soak the ground.
He stood for a long while simply staring at the graveyard mulch, waiting for
rain, until he thought, what am I waiting for? Jesus! And went in.
At ten o'clock a light rain tapped on the windows and sifted over the dark
garden. At eleven it rained so steadily that the gutter drains swallowed and
rattled.
At midnight the rain grew heavy. He looked to see if it was eroding the new
dark earth but saw only the black muck drinking the downpour like a great
black sponge, lit by distant flares of lightning.
Then, at one in the morning, the greatest Niagara of all shuddered the house,
rinsed the windows to blindness, and shook the lights.
And then, abruptly, the downpour, the immense Niagara ceased, followed by one
great downfell blow of lightning which plowed and pinioned the dark earth
close by, near, outside, with explosions of light as if ten thousand
flashbulbs had been fired off. Then darkness fell in curtains of thunder,
cracking, breaking the bones.

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In bed, wishing for the merest dog to hold for lack of human company, hugging
the sheets, burying his head, then rising full to the silent air, the dark
air, the storm gone, the rain shut, and a silence that spread in whispers as
the last drench melted into the trembling soil.
He shuddered and then shivered and then hugged himself to stop the shivering
of his cold flesh, and he was thirsty but could not make himself move to find
the kitchen and drink water, milk, leftover wine, anything. He lay back, dry-
mouthed, with unreasonable tears filling his eyes.
Free dirt, he thought. My God, what a damn-fool night. Free dirt!
At two o'clock he heard his wristwatch ticking softly.
At two-thirty he felt his pulse in his wrists and ankles and neck and then in
his temples and inside his head.
The entire house leaned into the wind, listening.
Outside in the still night, the wind failed and the yard lay soaked and
waiting.
And at last ... yes. He opened his eyes and turned his head toward the shaded
window.
He held his breath. what? Yes? Yes? What?
Beyond the window, beyond the wall, beyond the house, outside somewhere, a
whisper, a murmur, growing louder and louder. Grass growing? Blossoms opening?
Soil shifting, crumbling?
A great whisper, a mix of shadows and shades. Something rising. Something
moving.
Ice froze beneath his skin. His heart ceased.
Outside in the dark, in the yard.
Autumn had arrived.

October was there.
His garden gave him ...
A harvest





LAST RITES





Harrison Cooper was not that old, only thirty-nine, touching at the warm rim
of forty rather than the cold rim of thirty, which makes a great difference in
temperature and attitude. He was a genius verging on the brilliant, unmarried,
unengaged, with no children that he could honestly claim, so having nothing
much else to do, woke one morning in the summer of 1999, weeping.
"Why!?"
Out of bed, he faced his mirror to watch the tears, examine his sadness, trace
the woe. Like a child, curious after emotion, he charted his own map, found no
capital city of despair, but only a vast and empty expanse of sorrow, and went
to shave.
Which didn't help, for Harrison Cooper had stumbled on some secret supply of
melancholy that, even as he shaved, spilled in rivulets down his soaped
cheeks.
"Great God," he cried. "I'm at a funeral, but who's dead?!"
He ate his breakfast toast somewhat soggier than usual and plunged off to his
laboratory to see if gazing at his Time Traveler would solve the mystery of
eyes that shed rain while the rest of him stood fair.
Time Traveler? All, yes.

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For Harrison Cooper had spent the better part of his third decade wiring
circuitries of impossible pasts and as yet untouchable futures. Most men
philosophize in their as-beautiful-as-women cars. Harrison Cooper chose to
dream and knock together from pure air and electric thunderclaps what he
called his
Mobius Machine.
He had told his friends, with wine-colored nonchalance, that he was taking a
future strip and a past strip, giving them a now half twist, so they looped on
a single plane. Like those figure-eight ribbons, cut and pasted by that dear
mathematician A. F. Mobius in the nineteenth century.
"Ah, yes, Mobius," friends murmured.
What they really meant was, "Ah, no. Good night."
Harrison Cooper was not a mad scientist, but he was irretrievably boring.
Knowing this, he had retreated to finish the Mobius Machine. Now, this strange
morning, with cold rain streaming from his eyes, he stood staring at the
damned contraption, bewildered that he was not dancing about with Creation's
joy.
He was interrupted by the ringing of the laboratory doorbell and opened the
door to find one of those rare people, a real Western Union delivery boy on a
real bike. He signed for the telegram and was about to shut the door when he
saw the lad staring fixedly at the Mobius Machine.
"What," exclaimed the boy, eyes wide, "is that?"
Harrison Cooper stood aside and let the boy wander in a great circle around
his
Machine, his eyes dancing up, over, and around the immense circling figure
eight of shining copper, brass, and silver.
"Sure!" cried the boy at last, beaming. "A Time Machine!"
''Bull's-eye!''

"When do you leave?" said the boy. "Where will you go to meet which person
where? Alexander? Caesar? Napoleon! Hitler?!"
"No, no!"
The boy exploded his list. "Lincoln-"
"More like it."
"General Grant! Roosevelt! Benjamin Franklin?"
"Franklin, yes!"
"Aren't you lucky?"
"Am I?" Stunned, Harrison Cooper found himself nodding. "Yes, by God, and
suddenly-"
Suddenly he knew why he had wept at dawn. He grabbed the young lad's hand.
"Much thanks. You're a catalyst-"
"Cat-?"
"A Rorschach test-making me draw my own list-now gently, swiftly-out! No
offense."
The door slammed. He ran for his library phone, punched numbers, waited,
scanning the thousand books on the shelves.
"Yes, yes, he murmured, his eyes flicking over the gorgeous sun-bright titles.
"Some of you. Two, three, maybe four. Hello! Sam? Samuel! Can you get here in
five minutes, make it three? Dire emergency. Come!"
He slammed the phone, swiveled to reach out and touch.
"Shakespeare," he murmured. "Willy-William, will it be-you?"

The laboratory door opened and Sam/Samuel stuck his head in and froze.
For there, seated in the midst of his great Mobius figure eight, leather
jacket and boots shined, picnic lunch packed, was Harrison Cooper, arms
flexed, elbows out, fingers alert to the computer controls.
"Where's your Lindbergh cap and goggles?" asked Samuel.
Harrison Cooper dug them out, put them on, smirking. "Raise the Titanic; then
sink it!" Samuel strode to the lovely machine to confront its rather outre'

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occupant. "Well, Cooper, what?" he cried.
"I woke this morning in tears."
"Sure. I read the phone book aloud last night. That did it!"
"No. You read me these!"
Cooper handed the books over.
"Sure! We gabbed till three, drunk as owls on English Lit!''
"To give me tears for answers!"
"To what?"
"To their loss. To the fact that they died unknown, unrecognized; to the grim
fact that some were only truly recognized, republished, raved over from 1920
on!"
"Cut the cackle and move the buns," said Samuel. "Did you call to sermonize or
ask advice?"
Harrison Cooper leaped from his machine and elbowed Samuel into the library.
"You must map my trip for me!"
"Trip? Trip!"
"I go a-journeying, far-traveling, the Grand Literary Tour. A Salvation Army
of one!"
"To save lives?"
"No, souls! What good is life if the soul's dead? Sit! Tell me all the authors
we raved on by night to weep me at dawn. Here's brandy. Drink! Remember?"
"I do!"
"List them, then! The New England Melancholic first. Sad, recluse from land,
should have drowned at sea, a lost soul of sixty! Now, what other sad geniuses
did we maunder over-"
"God!" Samuel cried. "You're going to tour them? Oh, Harrison, Harry, I love
you!"

"Shut up! Remember how you write jokes? Laugh and think backwards! So let us
cry and leap up our tear ducts to the source. Weep for Whales to find
minnows!"
"Last night I think I quoted-"
"Yes?"
"And then we spoke-"
"Go on-"
''Well.''
Samuel gulped his brandy. Fire burned his eyes.
"Write this down!"
They wrote and ran.

"What will you do when you get there, Librarian Doctor?"
Harrison Cooper, seated back in the shadow of the great hovering Mobius
ribbon, laughed and nodded. "Yes! Harrison Cooper, L.M.D. Literary Meadow
Doctor. Curer of fine old lions off their feed, in dire need of tender love,
small applause, the wine of words, all in my heart, all on my tongue. Say
'Ah!' So long. Good-
bye!"
"God bless!"
He slammed a lever, whirled a knob, and the machine, in a spiral of metal, a
whisk of butterfly ribbon, very simply-vanished.
A moment later, the Mobius Machine gave a twist of its atoms and-returned.
"Voila!" cried Harrison Cooper, pink-faced and wild-eyed. 'It's done!"
"So soon?" exclaimed his friend Samuel "A minute here, but hours there!"
"Did you succeed?"
"Look! Proof positive."
For tears dripped off his chin.
"What happened? what?!"
"This, and this ... and ...this!"

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A gyroscope spun, a celebratory ribbon spiraled endlessly on itself, and the
ghost of a massive window curtain haunted the air, exhaled, and then ceased.
As if fallen from a delivery-chute, the books arrived almost before the
footfalls and then the half-seen feet and then the fog-wrapped legs and body
and at last the head of a man who, as the ribbon spiraled itself back into
emptiness, crouched over the volumes as if warming himself at a hearth.
He touched the books and listened to the air in the dim hallway where
dinnertime voices drifted up from below and a door stood wide near his elbow,
from which the faint scent of illness came and went, arrived and departed,
with the stilted breathing of some patient within the room. Plates and
silverware sounded from the world of evening and quiet good health downstairs.
The hall and the sickroom were for a time deserted. In a moment, someone might
ascend with a tray for the half-sleeping man in the intemperate room.
Harrison Cooper rose with stealth, checking the stairwell, and then, carrying
a sweet burden of books, moved into the room, where candles lit both sides of
a bed on which the dying man lay supine, arms straight at his sides, head
weighting the pillow, eyes grimaced shut, mouth set as if daring the ceiling,
mortality itself, to sink and extinguish him.
At the first touch of the books, now on one side, now on the other, of his
bed, the old man's eyelids fluttered, his dry lips cracked; the air whistled
from his nostrils:
"who's there?" he whispered. "what time is it?"
"whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp,
drizzly November in my soul, then I account it high time to get to sea as soon
as I can," replied the traveler at the foot of the bed, quietly.
"what, what?" the old man in the bed whispered swiftly. "It is a way I have of
driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation," quoted the visitor,
who

now moved to place a book under each of the dying man's hands where his
tremoring fingers could scratch, pull away, then touch, Braille-like, again.
One by one, the stranger held up book after book, to show the covers, then a
page, and yet another title page where printed dates of this novel surfed up,
adrift, but to stay forever on some far future shore.
The sick man's eyes lingered over the covers, the tides, the dates, and then
fixed to his visitor's bright face. He exhaled, stunned. "My God, you have the
look of a traveler. From where?"
"Do the years show?" Harrison Cooper leaned forward. "Well, then-I bring you
an
Annunciation."
"Such things come to pass only with virgins," whispered the old man. "No
virgin lies here buried under his unread books."
"I come to unbury you. I bring tidings from a far place." The sick man's eyes
moved to the books beneath his trembling hands.
"Mine?" he whispered.
The traveler nodded solemnly, but began to smile when the color in the old
man's face grew warmer arid the expression in his eyes and on his mouth was
suddenly eager.
"Is there hope. then?"
"There is!"
"I believe you." The old man took a breath and then wondered, "Why?"
"Because," said the stranger at the foot of the bed, "I love you."
"I do not know you, sir!"
"But I know you fore and aft, port to starboard, main topgallants to gunnels,
every day in your long life to here!"
"Oh, the sweet sound!" cried the old man. "Every word that you say, every
light from your eyes, is foundation-of-the-world true! How can it be?" Tears
winked from the old man's lids. "Why?"
"Because I am the truth," said the traveler. "I have come a long way to find

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and say: you are not lost. Your great Beast has only drowned some little
while. In another year, lost ahead, great and glorious, plain and simple men
will gather at your grave and shout: he breeches, he rises, he breeches, he
rises! and the white shape will surface to the light, the great terror lift
into the storm and thunderous St. Elmo's fire and you with him, each bound to
each, and no way to tell where he stops and you start or where you stop and he
goes off around the world lifting a fleet of libraries in his and your wake
through nameless seas of sub-sub-librarians and readers mobbing the docks to
chart your far journeyings, alert for your lost cries at three of a wild
morn."
"Christ's wounds!" said the man in his winding-sheet bedclothes. "To the
point, man, the point! Do you speak truth!?"
"I give you my hand on it, and pledge my soul and my heart's blood." The
visitor moved to do just this, and the two men's fists fused as one. "Take
these gifts to the grave. Count these pages like a rosary in your last hours.
Tell no one where they came from. Scoffers would knock the ritual beads from
your fingers.
So tell this rosary in the dark before dawn, and the rosary is this: you will
live forever. You are immortal."
"No more of this, no more! Be still."
"I can not. Hear me. Where you have passed a fire path will burn, miraculous
in the Bengal Bay, the Indian Seas, Hope's Cape, and around the Horn, past
perdition's landfall, as far as living eyes can see."
He gripped the old man's fist ever more tightly.
"I swear. In the years ahead, a million millions will crowd your grave to
sleep you well and warm your bones. Do you hear?"
"Great God, you are a proper priest to sound my Last Rites. And will I enjoy
my own funeral? I will."
His hands, freed, clung to the books at each side, as the ardent visitor
raised yet other books and intoned the dates:

"Nineteen twenty-two . . . 1930 . . . 1935 . . . 1940 . 1955... 1970. Can you
read and know what it means?"
He held the last volume close to the old man's face. The fiery eyes moved. The
old mouth creaked.
"Nineteen ninety?"
"Yours. One hundred years from tonight."
"Dear God!"
"I must go, but I would hear. Chapter One. Speak."
The old man's eyes slid and burned. He licked his lips, traced the words, and
at last whispered, beginning to weep:
"'Call me Ishmael.'

There was snow and more snow and more snow after that. In the dissolving
whiteness, the silver ribbon twirled in a massive whisper to let forth in an
exhalation of Time the journeying librarian and his book bag. As if slicing
white bread rinsed by snow, the ribbon, as the traveler ghosted himself to
flesh, sifted him through the hospital wall into a room as white as December.
There, abandoned, lay a man as pale as the snow and the wind. Almost young, he
slept with his mustaches oiled to his lip by fever. He seemed not to know nor
care that a messenger had invaded the air near his bed. His eyes did not stir,
nor did his mouth increase the passage of breath. His hands at his sides did
not open to receive. He seemed already lost in a bomb and only his unexpected
visitor's voice caused his eyes to roll behind their shut lids.
"Are you forgotten?" a voice asked.
"Unborn," the pale man replied.
"Never remembered?"
"Only. Only in. France."
"Wrote nothing at all?"

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"Not worthy."
"Feel the weight of what I place on your bed. No, don't look. Feel."
"Tombstones."
"With names, yes, but not tombstones. Not marble but paper. Dates, yes, but
the day after tomorrow and tomorrow and ten thousand after that. And your name
on each."
"It will not be."
"Is. Let me speak the names. Listen. Masque?"
"Red Death."

"The Fall of-"
-

"Usher!"

"Pit?"

"Pendulum!"
"Tell-tale?"
"Heart! My heart. Heart!"
"Repeat: for the love of God, Montresor." "Silly."
"Repeat: Montresor, for the love of God." "For the love of God, Montresor'."
"Do you see this label?"
"I see!"
"Read the date."
"Nineteen ninety-four. No such date."
"Again, and the name of the wine."
"Nineteen ninety-four. Amontillado. And my name!"
"Yes! Now shake your head. Make the fool's-cap bells ring. Here's mortar for
the last brick. Quickly. I'm here to bury you alive with books. When death
comes, how will you greet him? With a shout and-?"
"Requiescat in pace?"
"Say it again."
"Requiescat in pace!"

The Time Wind roared, the room emptied. Nurses ran in, summoned by laughter,
and tried to seize the books that weighed down his joy.
"What's he saying?" someone cried.

In Paris, an hour, a day, a year, a minute later, there was a run of St.
Elmo's fire along a church steeple, a blue glow in a dark alley, a soft tread
at a street corner, a turnabout of wind like an invisible carousel, and then
footfalls up a stair to a door which opened on a bedroom where a window looked
out upon cafes filled with people and far music, and in a bed by the window, a
tall man lying, his pale face immobile, until he heard alien breath in his
room.
The shadow of a man stood over him and now leaned down so that the light from
the window revealed a face and a mouth as it inhaled and then spoke. The
single word that the mouth said was:
"Oscar?"






THE OTHER HIGHWAY

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They drove into green Sunday-morning country, away from the hot aluminum city,
and watched as the sky was set free and moved over them like a lake they had
never known was there, amazingly blue and with white breakers above them as
they traveled.
Clarence Travers slowed the car and felt the cool wind move over his face with
the smell of cut grass. He reached over to grasp his wife's hand and glanced
at his son and daughter in the backseat, not fighting, at least for this
moment, as the car moved through one quiet beauty after another in what might
be a Sunday so lush and green it would never end.
"Thank God we're doing this," said Cecelia Travers. "It's been a million years
since we got away." He felt her hand hug his and then relax completely. "when
I
think of all those ladies dropping dead from the heat at the cocktail parry
this afternoon, welt"
"Well, indeed," said Clarence Travers. "Onward!"
He pressed the gas pedal and they moved faster. Their progress out of the city
had been mildly hysterical, with cars shrieking and shoving them toward
islands of wilderness praying for picnics that might not be found. Seeing that
he had put the car in the fast lane, he slowed to gradually move himself and
his family through the banshee traffic until they were idling along at an
almost reasonable fifty miles an hour. The scents of flowers and trees that
blew in the window made his move worthwhile. He laughed at nothing at all and
said:
"Sometimes, when I get this far out, I think let's just keep driving, never go
back to the damned city."
"Let's drive a hundred miles," shouted his son.
"A thousand!" cried his daughter.
"A thousand!" said Clarence Travers. "But one slow mile at a time." And then
said, softly, "Hey!"
And as suddenly as if they had dreamed it up, the lost highway came into view.
"Wonderful!" said Mr. Clarence Travers.
"What?" asked the children.

"Look!" said Clarence Travers, leaning over his wife, pointing. "That's the
Old road. The one they used a long time ago."
"That?" said his wife.
"It's awfully small," said his son.
"Well, there weren't many cars then, they didn't need much."
"It looks like a big snake," said his daughter.
"Yeah, the old roads used to twist and turn, all right. Remember?"
Cecelia Travers nodded. The car had slowed and they gazed over at that narrow
concrete strip with the green grass buckling it gently here or there and
sprays of wildflowers nestling up close to either side and the morning
sunlight coming down through the high elms and maples and oaks that led the
way toward the forest.
"I know it like the nose on my face," said Clarence Travers. "How would you
like to ride on it?"
"Oh, Clarence, now
"I mean it."
"Oh, Daddy, could we?"
"All right, we'll do it," he said decisively.
"We can't!" said Cecelia Travers. "It's probably against the law. It can't be
safe."
But before his wife could finish, he turned off the freeway and let all the
swift cars rush on while he drove, smiling at each bump, down over a small

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ditch, toward the old road.
"Clarence, please! we'll be arrested!"
"For going ten miles an hour on a highway nobody uses anymore? Let's not kick
over any beehives, it's too nice a day. I'll buy you all soda pops if you
behave."
They reached the old road.
"See how simple? Now which way, kids?"
"That way, that way!"
"Easy as pie!"
And he let the car take them away on the old highway, the great white-gray boa
constrictor that lashed now slowly this way in green moss-velvet meadows,
looped over gentle hills, and lowered itself majestically into caves of
moist-smelling trees, through the odor of cricks and spring mud and crystal
water that rustled like sheets of cellophane over small stone falls. They
drove slow enough to see the waterspiders' enigmatic etchings on quiet pools
behind dams of last
October's leaves.
"Daddy, what are those?"
"What, the water-skaters? No one has ever caught one. You wait and wait and
put your hand out and bang! The spider's gone. They're the first things in
life you can't grab onto. The list gets bigger as you grow old, so start
small. Don't believe in them. They're not really there."
"It's fun thinking they are."
"You have just stated a deep philosophical truth. Now, drive on, Mr. Travers."
And obeying his own command with good humor, he drove on.
And they came to a forest that had been like November all through the winter
and now, reluctantly, was putting out green flags to welcome the season.
Butterflies in great tosses of confetti leaped from the deeps of the forest to
ramble drunkenly on the air, their thousand torn shadows following over grass
and water.
"Let's go back now," said Cecelia Travers.
"Aw, Mom," said the son and daughter.
"Why?" said Clarence Travers. "My God, how many kids back in that damned hot
town can say they drove on a road nobody else has used in years? Not one! Not
one with a father brave enough to cross a little grass to take the old way.
Right?"

Mrs. Travers lapsed into silence.
"Right there," said Clarence Travers, "over that hill, the highway turns left,
then right, then left again, an S curve, and another S. Wait and see."
"Left."
"Right."
"Left."
"An S curve."
The car purred.
"Another S!"
"Just like you said!"
"Look." Clarence Travers pointed. A hundred yards across the way from them,
the freeway suddenly appeared for a few yards before it vanished, screaming
behind stacks of playing-card billboards. Clarence Travers stared fixedly at
it and the grass between it and this shadowed path, this silent place like the
bottom of an old stream where tides used to come but came no more, where the
wind ran through nights making the old sound of far traffic.
"You know something," said the wife. "That freeway over there scares me."
"Can we drive home on this old road instead, Dad?" said the son.
"I wish we could."
"I've always been scared," said the wife, watching that other traffic roaring
by, gone before it arrived.
"We're all afraid," said Clarence Travers. "But you pay your money and take

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your chance. Well?"
His wife sighed. "Damn, get back on that dreadful thing."
"Not quite yet," said Clarence Travers and drove to reach a small, very small
village, all quite unexpected, a settlement no more than a dozen white
clapboard houses mossed under giant trees, dreaming in a green tide of water
and leaf-
shadow, with wind shaking the rocking chairs on weathered porches and dogs
sleeping in the cool nap of grass-carpeting at noon, and a small general store
with a dirty red gas pump out front.
They drew up there and got out and stood, unreal in the sudden lack of motion,
not quite accepting these houses lost in the wilderness.
The door to the general store squealed open and an old man stepped out,
blinked at them, and said, "Say, did you folks just come down that old road?"
Clarence Travers avoided his wife's accusing eyes. "Yes, sir.
"No one on that road in twenty years."
"We were out for a lark," said Mr. Travers. "And found a peacock," he added.
"A sparrow," said his wife.
"The freeway passed us by, a mile over there, if you want it," said the old
man.
"When the new road opened, this town just died on the vine. We got nothing
here now but people like me. That is: old."
"Looks like there'd be places here to rent."
"Mister, just walk in, knock out the bats, stomp the spiders, and any place is
yours for thirty bucks a month. I own the whole town."
"Oh, we're not really interested," said Cecelia Travers.
"Didn't think you would be," said the old man. "Too far out from the city, too
far off the freeway. And that dirt road there slops over when it rains, all
muck and mud. And, heck, it's against the law to use that path. Not that they
ever patrol it." The old man snorted, shaking his head. "And not that I'll
turn you in. But it gave me a nice start just now to see you coming down that
rut. J had to give a quick look at my calendar, by God, and make sure it
wasn't 1929!"
Lord, I remember, thought Clarence Travers. This is Fox Hill. A thousand
people lived here. I was a kid, we passed through on summer nights. We used to
stop here late late, and me sleeping in the backseat in the moonlight. My
grandmother and grandfather in back with me. It's nice to sleep in a car
driving late and the road all white, watching the stars turn as you take the
curves, listening to the grown-ups' voices underwater, remote, talking,
talking, laughing, murmuring,

whispering. My father driving, so stolid. Just to be driving in the summer
dark, up along the lake to the Dunes, where the poison ivy grew out on the
lonely beach and the wind stayed all the time and never went away. And us
driving by that lonely graveyard place of sand and moonlight and poison ivy
and the waves tumbling in like dusty ash on the shore, the lake pounding like
a locomotive on the sand, coming and going. And me crumpled down and smelling
Grandmother's wind-cooled coat and the voices comforting and blanketing me
with their solidity and their always-will-be-here sounds that would go on
forever, myself always young and us always riding on a summer night in our old
Kissel with the side flaps down. And stopping here at nine or ten for
Pistachio and Tutti-frutti ice cream that tasted, faintly, beautifully, of
gasoline. All of us licking and biting the cones and smelling the gasoline and
driving on, sleepy and snug, toward home, Green Town, thirty years ago.
He caught himself and said:
"About these houses, would it be much trouble fixing them up?" He squinted at
the old man.
"Well, yes and no, most of 'em over fifty years old, lots of dust. You could
buy one off me for ten thousand, a real bargain now, you'll admit. If you were
an artist, now, a painter, or something like that."

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"I write copy in an advertising firm."
"Write stories, too, no doubt? Well, now, you get a writer out here, quiet, no
neighbors, you'd do lots of writing."
Cecelia Travers stood silently between the old man and her husband. Clarence
Travers did not look at her, but looked at the cinders around the porch of the
general store. "I imagine I could work here."
"Sure," said the old man.
"I've often thought," said Mr. Travers, "it's time we got away from the city
and took it a little easy."
"Sure," said the old man.
Mrs. Travers said nothing but searched in her purse and took out a minor.
"Would you like some drinks?" asked Clarence Travers with exaggerated concern.
"Three Orange Crushes, make it four," he told the old man. The old man moved
inside the store, which smelled of nails and crackers and dust.
When the old man was gone, Mr. Travers turned to his wife, and his eyes were
shining. "We've always wanted to do it! Let's!"
"Do what?" she said.
"Move out here, snap decision, why not? Why? We've promised ourselves every
year: get away from the noise, the confusion, so the kids'd have a place to
play. And . .
"Good grief" the wife cried.
The old man moved inside the store, coughing. "Ridiculous." She lowered her
voice. "We've got the apartment paid up, you've got a fine job, the kids have
school with friends, I belong to some fine clubs. And we've just spent a
bundle redecorating. We-"
"Listen," he said, as if she were really listening. " None of that's
important.
Out here, we can breathe. Back in town, hell, you complain ..."
"Just to have something to complain about."
"Your clubs can't be that important."
"It's not clubs, it's friends!"
"How many would care if we dropped dead tomorrow?" he said. "If I got hit in
that traffic, how many thousand cars would run over me before one stopped to
see if I was a man or dog left in the road?"
"Your job . . ." she started to say.
"My God, ten years ago we said, in two more years we'll have enough money to
quit and write my novel! But each year we've said next year! and next year and
next year!"
"We've had fun, haven't we?"

"Sure! Subways are fun, buses are fun, martinis and drunken friends are fun.
Advertising? Yeah! But I've used all the fun there is! I want to write about
what I've seen now, and there's no better place than this. Look at that house
over there! Can't you just see me in the front window banging the hell out of
my typewriter?"
"Stop hyperventilating!"
"Hyperventilate? God, I'd jump for joy to quit. I've gone as far as I can go.
Come on, Cecelia, let's get back some of the spunk in our marriage, take a
chance!"
"The children
"We'd love it here!" said the son.
"I think," said the daughter.
"I'm not getting any younger," said Clarence Travers.
"Nor am I," she said, touching his arm. "But we can't play hopscotch now. When
the children leave, yes, we'll think about it."
"Children, hopscotch, my God, I'll take my typewriter to the grave!"
"It won't be long. We-"
The shop door squealed open again and whether the old man had been standing in
the screen shadow for the last minute, there was no telling. It did not show

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in his face. He stepped out with four lukewarm bottles of Orange Crush in his
rust-
spotted hands.
"Here you are," he said.
Clarence and Cecelia Travers turned to stare at him as if he were a stranger
come out to bring them drinks. They smiled and took the bottles.
The four of them stood drinking the soda pop in the warm sunlight. The summer
wind blew through the grottoes of trees in the old, shady town. It was like
being in a great green church, a cathedral, the trees so high that the people
and cottages were lost far down below. All night long you would imagine those
trees rustling Their leaves like an ocean on an unending shore. God, thought
Clarence Travers, you could really sleep here, the sleep of the dead and the
peace-fill-of-heart.
He finished his drink and his wife half finished hers and gave it to the
children to argue over, inch by compared inch. The old man stood silent,
embarrassed by the thing he may have stirred up among them.
"Well, if you're ever out this way, drop in," he said. Clarence Travers
reached for his wallet.
"No, no!" said the old man. "It's on the house."
"Thank you, thank you very much."
"A pleasure."
They climbed back into their car.
"If you want to get to the freeway," said the old man, peering through the
front window into the cooked-upholstery smell of the car, "just take your old
dirt road back. Don't rush, or you'll break an axle."
Clarence Travers looked straight ahead at the radiator fixture on the car
front and started the motor.
"Good-bye," said the old man.
"Good-bye," the children yelled, and waved. The car moved away through the
town.
"Did you hear what the old man said?" asked the wife.
"What?"
"Did you hear him say which way to the freeway?"
"I heard."
He drove through the cool, shady town, staring at the porches and the windows
with the colored glass fringing them. If you looked from the inside of those
windows out, people had different-colored faces for each pane you looked
through. They were Chinese if you looked through one, Indian through another,
pink, green, violet, burgundy, wine, chartreuse, the candy colors, the lemon-

lime cool colors, the water colors of the windows looking out on lawns and
trees and this car slowly driving past.
"Yes, I heard him," said Clarence Travers.
They left the town behind and took the dirt road to the freeway. They waited
their chance, saw an interval between floods of cars hurtling by, swerved out
into the stream, and, at fifty miles an hour, were soon hurtling toward the
city.
"That's better," said Cecelia Travers brightly. She did not look over at her
husband. "Now I know where we are."
Billboards flashed by; a mortuary, a pie crust, a cereal, a garage, a hotel. A
hotel in the tar pits of the city, where one day is the pitiless glare of the
noon sun, thought Mr. Travers, all of the great Erector-set buildings, like
prehistoric dinosaurs, will sink down into the bubbling tar-lava and be
encased, bone by bone, for future civilizations. And in the stomachs of the
electric lizards, inside the iron dinosaurs, the probing scientists of A.D.
One Million will find the little ivory bones, the thinly articulated skeletons
of advertising executives and clubwomen and children. Mr. Travers felt his
eyes flinch, watering. And the scientists will say, so this is what the iron
cities fed on, is it? and give the bones a kick. So this is what kept the iron

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stomachs full, eh? Poor things, they never had a chance. Probably kept by the
iron monsters who needed them in order to survive, who needed them for
breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Aphids, in a way, aphids, kept in a great metal
cage.
"Look, Daddy, look, look, before it's too late!"

The children pointed, yelling. Cecelia Travers did not look. Only the children
saw it.

The old highway, two hundred yards away, at their left, sprang back into sight
for an instant, wandered aimlessly through field, meadow, and stream, gentle
and cool and quiet.
Mr. Travers swung his head sharply to see, but in that instant it was gone.
Billboards, trees, hills rushed it away. A thousand cars, honking, shrieking,
shouldered them, and bore Clarence and Cecelia Travers and their captive
children stunned and silent down the concourse, onward ever onward into a city
that had not seen them leave and did not look to see them return
"Let's see if this car will do sixty or sixty-five," said Clarence Travers.
It could and did.






TAKE HASTE TO LIVE: AN AFTERWORD






When I was eight years old, in 1928, an incredible event occurred on the back
wall outside the Academy motion picture theater in Waukegan, Illinois. An
advertising broadside, some thirty feet long and twenty feet high, dramatized
Black-stone the Magician in half a dozen miraculous poses: sawing a lady in
half; tied to an Arabian cannon that exploded, taking him with it; dancing a
live handkerchief in midair; causing a birdcage with a live canary to vanish
between his fingers; causing an elephant to . . . well, you get the idea. I
must

have stood there for hours, frozen with awe. I knew then that someday I must
become a magician.
That's what happened, didn't it? I'm not a science fiction, fantasy, magic-
realism writer of fairy tales and surrealist poems. Quicker Than the Eye may
well be the best title I have ever conjured for a new collection. I pretend to
do one thing, cause you to blink, and in the instant seize twenty bright silks
out of a bottomless hat.
How does he do that? may well be asked. I really can't say. I don't write
these stories, they write me. Which causes me to live with a boundless
enthusiasm for writing and life that some misinterpret as optimism.
Nonsense. I am merely a practitioner of optimal behavior, which means behave
yourself; listen to your Muses, get your work done, and enjoy the sense that
you just might live forever.
I don't have to wait for inspiration. It jolts me every morning. Just before
dawn, when I would prefer to sleep in, the damned stuff speaks between my ears
with my Theater of Morning voices. Yes, yes, I know, that sounds awfully
artsy, and no, no, I am not preaching some sort of Psychic Summons. The voices
exist because I stashed them there every day for a lifetime by reading,

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writing, and living. They accumulated and began to speak soon after high
school.
In other words, I do not greet each day with a glad cry but am forced out of
bed by these whispering nags, drag myself to the typewriter, and am soon awake
and alive as the notion/fancy/concept quits my ears, runs down my elbows and
out my fingers. Two hours later, a new story is done that, all night, hid
asleep behind my medulla oblongata.
That, don't you agree, is not optimism. It's behavior. Optimal.
I dare not oppose these morning voices. If I did, they would ransack my
conscience all day. Besides, I am as out of control as a car off a cliff. What
began as a numbed frenzy before breakfast, ends with elation at noon lunch.
How did I find these metaphors? Let me count the ways:
You discover your wife is pregnant with your first child soon to be born, so
you name the embryonic presence "Sascha" and converse with this increasingly
bright fetus that evolves into a story that you love but no one wants. So here
it is.
You wonder whatever happened to Dorian Gray's portrait. Your second thoughts
grow to an outsize horror by nightfall. You upchuck this hairball into your
typewriter.
Some of these stories "happened" to me. "Quicker Than the Eye" was part of a
magic show I attended where, with dismay, I saw someone much like myself being
made a fool of onstage.
"No News, or What Killed the Dog?" was a Victrola record I played all day
every day when I was five, until the neighbors offered to break me or the
record, choose.
"That Woman on the Lawn" was first a poem that then turned into a story about
my mother as a young and needful woman; a topic we care to discuss only with
euphemisms.
"Another Fine Mess" resulted from my writing "The Laurel and Hardy Love
Affair."
There had to be a sequel, because when I arrived in Ireland forty years ago,
the
Irish Times announced LAUREL AND HARDY, ONE TIME ONLY, IN PERSON! FOR THE
IRISH
ORPHANS. OLYMPIA THEATER, DUBLIN. I rushed to the theater and bought the last
ticket, front row center!
The curtain rose and there they were, Stan and Ollie, doing all their old,
sweet, wondrous routines. I sat with happy tears streaming down my face. Later
I
went backstage and stood by their dressing room door watching them greet
friends. I didn't introduce myself. I just wanted to warm my hands and heart.
After twenty minutes of ambience bathing, I slipped away. Thus "Another Fine
Mess."
"Unterderseaboat Doktor" is an example of people not hearing themselves talk.
A
writer friend at lunch some years back described his psychiatrist, a former

submarine captain in Hitler's undersea fleet. "Holy God," I cried, "give me a
pencil!" I scribbled a title and finished the tale that night. My writer
friend hated me for weeks.
"Last Rites" wrote itself because I am the greatest lover of other writers,
old or new, who ever lived. I have never been jealous of any writer, I only
wanted to write and dream like them. That makes for an enormous list, some of
them first-class ladies as well as writers first class: Willa Cather, Jessamyn
West, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Weelty, and, long before her current fame,
Edith
Wharton. "Last Rites" shuttles in Time to pay my respects to three of my
heroes, Poe, Melville, and a third writer, nameless until the finale. It
crazed me to perceive that these giants died thinking they were to be buried

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unknown and unread. I had to invent a Time Machine to celebrate them on their
deathbeds.
Some of the stories are self-evident. "At the End of the Ninth Year" is the
sort of quasi-scientific factoid we all discuss a dozen times, but neglect to
write.
"The Other Highway" lies beside the main route heading north from Los Angeles.
It has all but vanished under grass, bushes, trees, and avalanched soil. Here
and there you can still bike it for some few hundred yards before it melts
into the earth.
"Once More, Legato" spontaneously combusted one afternoon when I heard a
treeful of birds orchestrating Berlioz and then Albeniz.
If you know the history of Paris during the 1870s' Commune and Haussmann, who
tore it down and built it back to the wonder it is now, and if you have
experienced some Los Angeles earthquakes, you' could guess the genesis of
"Zaharoff/Richter Mark V." During the last High Shake, two years ago, I
thought:
My God, the damn fools built the city on the San Andreas Fault! My next
thought:
what if they built it that way on purpose?!
Two hours later, the story was cooling on the windowsill.
That's not all, but it should do.
My final advice to myself; the boy magician grown old, and you?
When your dawn theater sounds to clear your sinuses:
don't delay. Jump. Those voices may be gone before you hit the shower to align
your wits.
Speed is everything. The 90-mph dash to your machine is a sure cure for life
rampant and death most real.
Make haste to live.
Oh, God, yes.
Live. And write. With great haste.

Ray Bradbury: The Foghorn

------------------------------------------------------------------------

OUT there in the cold water, far from land, we waited every night for the
coming of the fog, and it came, and we oiled the brass machinery and lit
the fog light up in the stone tower. Feeling like two birds in the grey
sky, McDunn and I sent the light touching out, red, then white, then red
again, to eye the lonely ships. And if they did not see our light, then
there was always our Voice, the great deep cry of our Fog Horn shuddering
through the rags of mist to startle the gulls away like decks of scattered
cards and make the waves turn high and foam.

"It's a lonely life, but you're used to it now, aren't you?" asked McDunn.

"Yes," I said. "You're a good talker, thank the Lord."

"Well, it's your turn on land tomorrow," he said, smiling, "to dance the
ladies and drink gin."

"What do you think McDunn, when I leave you out here alone?"

"On the mysteries of the sea." McDunn lit his pipe. It was a quarter past
seven of a cold November evening, the heat on, the light switching its tail in
two hundred directions, the Fog Horn bumbling in the high throat of the
tower. There wasn't a town for a hundred miles down the coast, just a road,
which came lonely through dead country to the sea, with few cars on it, a
stretch of two miles of cold water out to our rock, and rare few ships.

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"The mysteries of the sea," said McDunn thoughtfully. "You know, the
ocean’s the biggest damned snowflake ever? It rolls and swells a thousand
shapes and colours, no two alike. Strange. One night, years ago, I was here
alone, when all of the fish of the sea surfaced out there. Something made
them swim in and lie in the bay, sort of trembling and staring up at the
tower light going red, white, red, white across them so I could see their
funny eyes. I turned cold. They were like a big peacock's tail, moving out
there until midnight. Then, without so much as a sound, they slipped away,
the million of them was gone. I kind of think maybe, in some sort of way,
they came all those miles to worship. Strange. But think how the tower must
look to them, standing seventy feet above the water, the God-light flashing
out from it, and the tower declaring itself with a monster voice. They
never came back, those fish, but don't you think for a while they thought
they were in the Presence?"

I shivered. I looked out at the long grey lawn of the sea stretching away
into nothing and nowhere.

"Oh, the sea's full." McDunn puffed his pipe nervously, blinking. He had
been nervous all day and hadn't said why. "For all our engines and so
called submarines, it'll be ten thousand centuries before we set foot on
the real bottom of the sunken lands, in the fairy kingdoms there, and know
real terror. Think of it, it's still the year 300,000 Before Christ down
under there. While we've paraded around with trumpets, lopping off each
other's countries and heads, they have been living beneath the sea twelve
miles deep and cold in a time as old as the beard of a comet."

"Yes, it's an old world."

"Come on. I got something special I been saving up to tell you."

We ascended the eighty steps, talking and taking our time. At the top,
McDunn switched off the room lights so there'd be no reflection in the
plate glass. The great eye of the light was humming, turning easily in its
oiled socket. The Fog Horn was blowing steadily, once every fifteen
seconds.

"Sounds like an animal, don't it?" McDunn nodded to himself. "A big lonely
animal crying in the night. Sitting here on the edge of ten billion years
calling out to the Deeps, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. And the Deeps do
answer, yes, they do. You been here now for three months, Johnny, so I
better prepare you. About this time of year," he said, studying the murk
and fog, "something comes to visit the lighthouse."

"The swarms of fish like you said?"

"No, this is something else. I've put off telling you because you might
think I'm daft. But tonight's the latest I can put it off, for if my
calendar's marked right from last year, tonight's the night it comes. I won t
go into detail, you'll have to see it yourself. Just sit down there. If you
want, tomorrow you can pack your duffel and take the motorboat into land
and get your car parked there at the dinghy pier on the cape and drive on back
to some little inland town and keep your lights burning nights. I
won't question or blame you. It's happened three years now, and this is the
only time anyone's been here with me to verify it. You wait and watch."

Half an hour passed with only a few whispers between us. When we grew tired
waiting, McDunn began describing some of his ideas to me. He had some

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theories about the Fog Horn itself.

"One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean
on a cold sunless shore and said, 'We need a voice to call across the water,
to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of
the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you
all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees
in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a
sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a
sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep
in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem
better to all who hear it in the distant towns.
I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and
whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of
life.’"

The Fog Horn blew.

"I made up that story," said McDunn quietly, "to try to explain why this thing
keeps coming back to the lighthouse every year. The Fog Horn calls, I
think, it comes. . ."

"But-" I said.

"Sssst!" said McDunn. "There!" He nodded out to the Deeps.

Something was swimming towards the lighthouse tower.

It was a cold night, as I have said; the high tower was cold, the light coming
and going, and the Fog Horn calling and calling through the ravelling mist.
You couldn't see far and you couldn't see plain, but there was the deep sea
moving on its way about the night earth, flat and quiet, the colour of grey
mud, and here were the two of us alone in the high tower, and there, far out
at first, was a ripple, followed by a wave, a rising, a bubble, a bit of
froth. And then, from the surface of the cold sea came a head, a large head,
dark-coloured, with immense eyes, and then a neck. And then--not a body--but
more neck and more! The head rose a full forty feet above the water on a
slender and beautiful dark neck. Only then did the body, like a little island
of black coral and shells and crayfish, drip up from the subterranean. There
was a flicker of tail. In all, from head to tip of tail, I estimated the
monster at ninety or a hundred feet.

I don't know what I said. I said something.

"Steady, boy, steady," whispered McDunn.

"It's impossible!" I said.

"No, Johnny, we're impossible. It's like it always was ten million years ago.
It hasn't changed. It's us and the land that've changed, become impossible.
Us!"

It swam slowly and with a great dark majesty out in the icy waters, far
away. The fog came and went about it, momentarily erasing its shape. One of
the monster eyes caught and held and flashed back our immense light, red,
white, red, white, like a disc held high and sending a message in primaeval
code. It was as silent as the fog through which it swam.

"It's a dinosaur of some sort--" I crouched down, holding to the stair

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rail.

"Yes, one of the tribe."

"But they died out!"

"No, only hid away in the Deeps. Deep, deep down in the deepest Deeps.
Isn't that a word now, Johnny, a real word, it says so much: the Deeps.
There's all the coldness and darkness and deepness in the world in a word
like that."

"What'll we do?"

"Do? We got our job, we can't leave. Besides, we're safer here than in any
boat trying to get to land. That thing's as big as a destroyer and almost as
swift."

"But here, why does it come here?"

The next moment I had my answer.

The Fog Horn blew.

And the monster answered.

A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and
alone that it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at
the tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster roared again. The Fog Horn blew.
The monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound that came from it
was the sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far away. The
sound of isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the
sound.

"Now," whispered McDunn, "do you know why it comes here?"

I nodded.

"All year long, Johnny, that poor monster there lying far out, a thousand
miles at sea, and twenty miles deep maybe, biding its time, perhaps it’s a
million years old, this one creature. Think of it, waiting a million years;
could you wait that long? Maybe it's the last of its kind. I sort of think
that's true. Anyway, here come men on land and build this lighthouse, five
years ago. And set up their Fog Horn and sound it and sound it out towards
the place where you bury yourself in sleep and sea memories of a world
where there were thousands like yourself, but now you're alone, all alone in
a world not made for you, a world where you have to hide."

"But the sound of the Fog Horn comes and goes, comes and goes, and you stir
from the muddy bottom of the Deeps, and your eyes open like the lenses of
two-foot cameras and you move, slow, slow, for you have the ocean sea on
your shoulders, heavy. But that Fog Horn comes through a thousand miles of
water, faint and familiar, and the furnace in your belly stokes up, and you
begin to rise, slow, slow. You feed yourself on great slakes of cod and
minnow, on rivers of jellyfish, and you rise slow through the autumn
months, through September when the fogs started, through October with more
fog and the horn still callin g you on, and then, late in November, after
pressurizing yourself day by day, a few feet higher every hour, you are
near the surface and still alive, You've got to go slow; if you surfaced
all at once you'd explode. So it takes you all of three months to surface,

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and then a number of days to swim through the cold waters to the
lighthouse. And there you are, out there, in the night, Johnny, the biggest
damn monster in creation. And here's the lighthouse calling to you, with a
long neck like your neck sticking way up out of the water, and a body like
your body, and, most important of all, a voice like your voice. Do you
understand now, Johnny, do you understand?"

The Fog Horn blew.

The monster answered.

I saw it all, I knew it all--the million years of waiting alone, for
someone to come back who never came back. The million years of isolation at
the bottom of the sea, the insanity of time there, while the skies cleared of
reptile-birds, the swamps dried on the continental lands, the sloths and
sabre-tooths had their day and sank in tar pits, and men ran like white
ants upon the hills.

The Fog Horn blew.

"Last year," said McDunn, "that creature swam round and round, round and
round, all night. Not coming too near, puzzled, I'd say. Afraid, maybe. And a
bit angry after coming all this way. But the next day, unexpectedly, the

fog lifted, the sun came out fresh, the sky was as blue as a painting. And
the monster swam off away from the heat and the silence and didn't come
back. I suppose it's been brooding on it for a year now, thinking it over
from every which way."

The monster was only a hundred yards off now, it and the Fog Horn crying at
each other. As the lights hit them, the monster's eyes were fire and ice,
fire and ice.

"That's life for you," said McDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who
never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing
loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so
it can't hurt you no more."

The monster was rushing at the lighthouse.

The Fog Horn blew.

"Let's see what happens," said McDunn.

He switched the Fog Horn off.

The ensuing minute of silence was so intense that we could hear our hearts
pounding in the glassed area of the tower, could hear the slow greased turn of
the light.

The monster stopped and froze. Its great lantern eyes blinked. Its mouth
gaped. It gave a sort of rumble, like a volcano. It twitched its head this
way and that, as if to seek the sounds now dwindled off into the fog. It
peered at the lighthouse. It rumbled again. Then its eyes caught fire. It
reared up, threshed the water, and rushed at the tower, its eyes filled
with angry torment.

"McDunn!" I cried. "Switch on the horn!"

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McDunn fumbled with the switch. But even as he flicked it on, the monster
was rearing up. I had a glimpse of its gigantic paws, fish-skin glittering in
webs between the finger-like projections, clawing at the tower. The huge eye
on the right side of its anguished head glit tered before me like a
cauldron into which I might drop, screaming. The tower shook. The Fog Horn
cried; the monster cried. It seized the tower and gnashed at the glass,
which shattered in upon us.

McDunn seized my arm. "Downstairs!"

The tower rocked, trembled, and started to give. The Fog Horn and the
monster roared. We stumbled and half fell down the stairs. "Quick!"

We reached the bottom as the tower buckled down towards us. We ducked under
the stairs into the small stone cellar. There were a thousand concussions as
the rocks rained down; the Fog Horn stopped abruptly. The monster
crashed upon the tower. The tower fell. We knelt together, McDunn and I,
holding tight, while our world exploded.

Then it was over, and there was nothing but darkness and the wash of the
sea on the raw stones.

That and the other sound.

"Listen," said McDunn quietly. "Listen."

We waited a moment. And then I began to hear it. First a great vacuumed
sucking of air, and then the lament, the bewilderment, the loneliness of
the great monster, folded over and upon us, above us, so that the sickening
reek of its body filled the air, a stone's thickness away from our cellar.
The monster gasped and cried. The tower was gone. The light was gone. The
thing that had called to it across a million years was gone. And the
monster was opening its mouth and sending out great sounds. The sounds of a
Fog Horn, again and again. And ships far at sea, not finding the light, not
seeing anything, but passing and hearing late that night, must've thought:
There it is, the lonely sound, the Lonesome Bay horn. All's well. We've
rounded the cape.

And so it went for the rest of that night.

The sun was hot and yellow the next afternoon when the rescuers came out to
dig us from our stoned-under cellar.

"It fell apart, is all," said Mr. McDunn gravely. "We had a few bad knocks
from the waves and it just crumbled." He pinched my arm.

There was nothing to see. The ocean was calm, the sky blue. The only thing
was a great algaic stink from the green matter that covered the fallen
tower stones and the shore rocks. Flies buzzed about. The ocean washed
empty on the shore.

The next year they built a new lighthouse, but by that time I had a job in
the little town and a wife and a good small warm house that glowed yellow on
autumn nights, the doors locked, the chimney puffing smoke. As for
McDunn, he was master of the new lighthouse, built to his own
specifications out of steel-reinforced concrete. "Just in case," he said.

The new lighthouse was ready in November. I drove down alone one evening
late and parked my car and looked across the grey waters and listened to

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the new horn sounding, once, twice, three, four times a minute far out
there, by itself.

The monster?

It never came back.

"It's gone away," said McDunne "It's gone back to the Deeps. It's learned
you can't love anything too much in this world. It's gone into the deepest
Deeps to wait another million years. Ah, the poor thing! Waiting out there,
and waiting out there, while man comes and goes on this pitiful little
planet. waiting and waiting."

I sat in my car, listening. I couldn't see the lighthouse or the light
standing out in Lonesome Bay. I could only hear the Horn, the Horn, the
Horn. It sounded like the monster calling.

I sat there wishing there was something I could say.

Ray Bradbury
The October Game

He put the gun back into the bureau drawer and shut the drawer.
No, not that way. Louise wouldn't suffer. It was very important that
this thing have, above all duration. Duration through imagination.
How to prolong the suffering? How, first of all, to bring it about? Well.
The man standing before the bedroom mirror carefully fitted his cuff-links
together. He paused long enough to hear the children run by switftly on the
street below, outside this warm two-storey house, like so many grey mice the
children, like so many leaves.
By the sound of the children you knew the calendar day. By their screams
you knew what evening it was. You knew it was very late in the year. October.
The last day of October, with white bone masks and cut pumpkins and the smell
of dropped candle wax.
No. Things hadn't been right for some time. October didn't help any. If
anything it made things worse. He adjusted his black bow-tie.
If this were spring, he nodded slowly, quietly, emotionlessly, at his image
in the mirror, then there might be a chance. But tonight all the world was
burning down into ruin. There was no green spring, none of the freshness, none
of the promise.
There was a soft running in the hall. "That's Marion", he told himself.
"My'little one". All eight quiet years of her. Never a word.
Just her luminous grey eyes and her wondering little mouth. His
daughter had been in and out all evening, trying on various masks, asking
him which was most terrifying, most horrible. They had both finally
decided on the skeleton mask. It was 'just awful!' It would
'scare the beans' from people!
Again he caught the long look of thought and deliberation he gave himself in
the mirror. He had never liked October. Ever since he first lay in the autumn
leaves before his granmother's house many years ago and heard the wind and
sway the empty trees. It has made him cry, without a reason. And a little of
that sadness returned each year to him. It always went away with spring.
But, it was different tonight.
There was a feeling of autumn coming to last a million years. There would
be no spring.
He had been crying quietly all evening. It did not show, not a vesitge
of it, on his face. It was all hidden somewhere and it wouldn't stop.
The rich syrupy smell of sweets filled the bustling house. Louise had laid
out apples in new skins of toffee; there were vast bowls of punch

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fresh-mixed, stringed apples in each door, scooped, vented pumpkins
peering triangularly from each cold window. There was a water tub in the
centre of the living room, waiting, with a sack of apples nearby, for
dunking to begin. All that was needed was the catalyst, the impouring of
children, to start the apples bobbing, the srtinged apples to penduluming in
the crowded doors, the sweets to vanish, the halls to echo with fright or
delight, it was all the same.
Now, the house was silent with preparation. And just a little more than that.
Louise had managed to be in every other room save the room he was in today.
It was her very fine way of intimating, Oh look Mich, see how busy I am! So
busy that when you walk into a room I'm in there's always something I need
to do in another room! Just see how I dash about!
For a while he had played a little game with her, a nasty childish

game. When she was in the kitchen then he came to the kitchen saying,
'I need a glass of water.' After a moment, he standing, drinking water,
she like a crystal witch over the caramel brew bubbling like a
prehistoric mudpot on the stove, she said, 'Oh, I must light the pumpkins!'
and she rushed to the living room to make the pumpkins smile with light.
He came after, smiling, 'I must get my pipe.' 'Oh, the cider!' she had
cried, running to the dining room.
'I'll check the cider,' he had said. But when he tried following she ran to
the bathroom and locked the door.
He stood outside the bathroom door, laughing strangely and
senselessly, his pipe gone cold in his mouth, and then, tired of the game,
but stubborn, he waited another five minutes. There was not a sound from
the bath. And lest she enjoy in any way knowing that he waited outside,
irritated, he suddenly jerked about and walked upstairs, whistling
merrily.
At the top of the stairs he had waited. Finally he had heard the bathroom
door unlatch and she had come out and life below-stairs and resumed, as
life in a jungle must resume once a terror has passed on away and the antelope
return to their spring.
Now, as he finished his bow-tie and put his dark coat there was a
mouse-rustle in the hall. Marion appeared in the door, all skeletons in her
disguise.
'How do I look, Papa?'
'Fine!'
From under the mask, blonde hair showed. From the skull sockets small
blue eyes smiled. He sighed. Marion and Louise, the two silent denouncers of
his virility, his dark power. What alchemy had there been in Louise that
took the dark of a dark man and bleached the dark brown eyes and black hair
and washed and bleached the ingrown baby all during the period before
birth until the child was born, Marion, blonde, blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked?
Sometimes he suspected that Louise had conceived the child as an idea,
completely asexual, an immaculate conception of contemptuous mind and cell.
As a firm rebuke to him she had produced a child in her own image, and, to top
it, she had somehow fixed the doctor so he shook his head and said,
'Sorry, Mr Wilder, your wife will never have another child. This is the last
one.'
'And I wanted a boy,' Mich had said eight years ago.
He almost bent to take hold of Marion now, in her skull mask. He felt an
inexplicable rush of pity for her, because she had never had a father's love,
only the crushing, holding love of a loveless mother.
But most of all he pitied himself, that somehow he had not made the most
of a bad birth, enjoyed his daughter for herself, regardless of her not being
dark and a son and like himself. Somewhere he had missed out. Other things
being equal, he would have loved the child. But
Louise hadn't wanted a child, anyway, in the first place. She had been

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frightened of the idea of birth. He had forced the child on her, and from
that night, all through the year until the agony of the birth itself,
Louise had lived in another part of the house. She had expected to
die with the forced child. It had been very easy for
Louise to hate this husband who so wanted a son that he gave his only wife
over to the mortuary.
But - Louise had lived. And in truimph! Her eyes, the day he came to the
hospital, were cold. I'm alive they said. And I have a blonde daughter! Just
look! And when he had put out a hand to touch, the mother had turned away
to conspire with her new pink daughter-child -
away from that dark forcing murderer. It had all been so beautifully ironic.
His selfishness deserved it.

But now it was October again. There had been other Octobers and when he
thought of the long winter he had been filled with horror year after year to
think of the endless months mortared into the house by an insane fall of
snow, trapped with a woman and child, neither of whom loved him, for months
on end. During the eight years there had been respites. In spring and summer
you got out, walked, picknicked;
these were desperate solutions to the desperate problem of a hated man.
But, in winter, the hikes and picnics and escapes fell away with leaves.
Life, like a tree, stood empty, the fruit picked, the sap run to earth. Yes,
you invited people in, but people were hard to get in winter with blizzards
and all. Once he had been clever enough to save for a Florida trip. They had
gone south. He had walked in the open.
But now, the eighth winter coming, he knew things were finally at an end.
He simply could not wear this one through. There was an acid walled off in
him that slowly had eaten through tissue and bone over the years, and now,
tonight, it would reach the wild explosive in him and all would be over!
There was a mad ringing of the bell below. In the hall, Louise went to see.
Marion, without a word, ran down to greet the first arrivals.
There were shouts and hilarity.
He walked to the top of the stairs.
Louise was below, taking cloaks. She was tall and slender and blonde to
the point of whiteness, laughing down upon the new children.
He hesitated. What was all this? The years? The boredom of living?
Where had it gone wrong? Certainly not with the birth of the child alone.
But it had been a symbol of all their tensions, he imagined.
His jealousies and his business failures and all the rotten rest of it.
Why didn't he just turn, pack a suitcase, and leave? No. Not without
hurting Louise as much as she had hurt him. It was simple as that. Divorce
wouldn't hurt her at all. It would simply be an end to numb indecision. If he
thought divorce would give her pleasure in any way he would stay married
the rest of his life to her, for damned spite. No he must hurt her. Figure
some way, perhaps, to take Marion away from her, legally. Yes. That was it.
That would hurt most of all.
To take Marion.
'Hello down there!' He descended the stairs beaming.
Louise didn't look up.
'Hi, Mr Wilder!'
The children shouted, waved, as he came down.
By ten o'clock the doorbell had stopped ringing, the apples were bitten
from stringed doors, the pink faces were wiped dry from the apple
bobbling, napkins were smeared with toffee and punch, and he, the husband,
with pleasant efficiency had taken over. He took the party right out of
Louise's hands. He ran about talking to the twenty children and the twelve
parents who had come and were happy with the special spiked cider he had
fixed them. He supervised pin the tail on the donkey, spin the bottle,
musical chairs, and all the rest, amid fits of shouting laughter. Then, in the

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triangular-eyed pumpkin shine, all house lights out, he cried, 'Hush! Follow
me!' tiptoeing towards the cellar.
The parents, on the outer periphery of the costumed riot, commented to each
other, nodding at the clever husband, speaking to the lucky wife. How well he
got on with children, they said.
The children, crowded after the husband, squealing.
'The cellar!' he cried. 'The tomb of the witch!'
More squealing. He made a mock shiver. 'Abandon hope all ye who

enter here!'
The parents chuckled.
One by one the children slid down a slide which Mich had fixed up from
lengths of table-section, into the dark cellar. He hissed and shouted
ghastly utterances after them. A wonderful wailing filled dark pumpkin-lighted
house. Everybody talked at once. Everybody but Marion.
She had gone through all the party with a minimum of sound or talk; it was
all inside her, all the excitement and joy. What a little troll, he thought.
With a shut mouth and shiny eyes she had watched her own party, like so many
serpentines thrown before her.
Now, the parents. With laughing reluctance they slid down the short incline,
uproarious, while little Marion stood by, always wanting to see it all, to be
last. Louise went down without help. He moved to aid her, but she was gone
even before he bent.
The upper house was empty and silent in the candle-shine. Marion stood by
the slide. 'Here we go,' he said, and picked her up.
They sat in a vast circle in the cellar. Warmth came from the distant
bulk of the furnace. The chairs stood in a long line along each wall,
twenty squealing children, twelve rustling relatives, alternatively
spaced, with Louise down at the far end, Mich up at this end, near the
stairs. He peered but saw nothing. They had all grouped to their chairs,
catch-as-you-can in the blackness. The entire

programme from here on was to be enacted in the dark, he as Mr
Interlocutor. There was a child scampering, a smell of damp cement, and the
sound of the wind out in the October stars.
'Now!' cried the husband in the dark cellar. 'Quiet!'
Everybody settled.
The room was black black. Not a light, not a shine, not a glint of an eye.
A scraping of crockery, a metal rattle.
'The witch is dead,' intoned the husband.
'Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,' said the children.
'The witch is dead, she has been killed, and here is the knife she was killed
with.' He handed over the knife. It was passed from hand to hand, down and
around the circle, with chuckles and little odd cries and comments from the
adults.
'The witch is dead, and this is her head,' whispered the husband, and handed
an item to the nearest person.
'Oh, I know how this game is played,' some child cried, happily, in the dark.
'He gets some old chicken innards from the icebox and hands them around and
says, "These are her innards!" And he makes a clay head and passes it for
her head, and passes a soup bone for her arm.
And he takes a marble and says, "This is her eye!" And he takes some corn
and says, "This is her teeth!" And he takes a sack of plum pudding and
gives that and says, "This is her stomach!&" I know how this is played!'
'Hush, you'll spoil everything,' some girl said.
'The witch came to harm, and this is her arm,' said Mich.
'Eeeeeeeeeeee!'
The items were passed and passed, like hot potatoes, around the cirle.
Some children screamed, wouldn't touch them. Some ran from their chairs

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to stand in the centre of the cellar until the grisly items had passed.
'Aw, it's only chicken insides,' scoffed a boy. 'Come back, Helen!'
Shot from hand to hand, with small scream after scream, the items went down,
down, to be followed by another and another.

'The witch cut apart, and this is her heart,' said the husband.
Six or seven items moving at once through the laughing, trembling dark.
Louise spoke up. 'Marion, don't be afraid; it's only play."
Marion didn't say anything.
'Marion?, asked Louise. 'Are you afraid?'
Marion didn't speak.
'She's all right,' said the husband. 'She's not afraid.'
On and on the passing, the screams, the hilarity.
The autumn wind sighed about the house. And he, the husband stood at the
head of the dark cellar, intoning the words, handing out the items.
'Marion?' asked Louise again, from far across the cellar.
Everybody was talking.
'Marion?' called Louise.
Everybody quieted.
'Marion, answer me, are you afraid?'
Marion didn't answer.
The husband stood there, at the bottom of the cellar steps.
Louise called 'Marion, are you there?'
No answer. The room was silent.
'Where's Marion?' called Louise.
'She was here', said a boy.
'Maybe she's upstairs.'
'Marion!'
No answer. It was quiet.
Louise cried out, 'Marion, Marion!'
'Turn on the lights,' said one of the adults.
The items stopped passing. The children and adults sat with the witch's
items in their hands.
'No.' Louise gasped. There was a scraping of her chair, wildly, in the dark.
'No. Don't turn on the lights, oh, God, God, God, don't turn them on, please,
don't turn on the lights, don't!.Louise was shrieking now. The entire cellar
froze with the scream.
Nobody moved.
Everyone sat in the dark cellar, suspended in the suddenly frozen task of
this October game; the wind blew outside, banging the house, the smell of
pumpkins and apples filled the room with the smell of the objects in their
fingers while one boy cried, 'I'll go upstairs and look!' and he ran
upstairs hopefully and out around the house, four times around the house,
calling, 'Marion, Marion, Marion!' over and over and at last coming
slowly down the stairs into the waiting breathing cellar and saying to the
darkenss, 'I can't find her.'

Then ...... some idiot turned on the lights.

The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury


The sign on the wall seemed to quaver under a film of sliding warm water,
Eckels felt his eyelids blink over his stare, and the sign burned in this
momentary darkness:
TIME SAFARI, INC.
SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST.
YOU NAME THE ANIMAL.

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WE TAKE YOU THERE.
YOU SHOOT IT.

A warm phlegm gathered in Eckels’ throat; he swallowed and pushed it down. The
muscles around his mouth formed a smile as he put his hand slowly out upon the
air, and in that hand waved a check for ten thousand dollars to the man behind
the desk.
“Does this safari guarantee I come back alive?” “We guarantee nothing,” said
the official, “except the dinosaurs.” He turned. “This is Mr. Travis, your
Safari Guide in the Past. He’ll tell you what and where to shoot. If he says
no shooting, no shooting. If you disobey instructions, there’s a stiff penalty
of another ten thousand dollars, plus possible government action, on your
return.” Eckels glanced across the vast office at a mass and tangle, a snaking
and humming of wires and steel boxes, at an aurora that flickered now orange,
now silver, now blue. There was a sound like a gigantic bonfire burning all
of Time, all the years and all the parchment calendars, all the hours piled
high and set aflame.
A touch of the hand and this burning would, on the instant, beautifully
reverse itself. Eckels remembered the wording in the advertisements to the
letter. Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals, like golden
salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap; roses sweeten the
air, white hair turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish; all, everything fly back to
seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings, suns rise in western skies
and set in glorious easts, moons eat themselves opposite to the custom, all
and everything cupping one in another like Chinese boxes, rabbits in hats, all
and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the green death,
to the time before the beginning. A touch of a hand might do it, the merest
touch of a hand.
“Hell and damn,” Eckels breathed, the light of the Machine on his thin face.
“A real Time
Machine.” He shook his head. “Makes you think. If the election had gone badly
yesterday, I might be here now running away from the results. Thank God Keith
won. He’ll make a fine President of the United States.”
“Yes,” said the man behind the desk. “Were lucky. If Deutscher had gotten in,
we’d have the worst kind of dictatorship. There’s an anti-everything man for
you, a militarist, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual. People
called us up, you know, joking but not joking. Said if Deutscher became
President they wanted to go live in 1492. Of course it’s not our business to
conduct Escapes, but to form Safaris. Anyway, Keith’s President now. All you
got to worry about is” “Shooting my dinosaur,” Eckels finished it for him. “A
Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Thunder Lizard, the damnedest monster in history. Sign
this release. Anything happens to you, we’re not responsible. Those dinosaurs
are hungry.” Eckels flushed angrily. “Trying to scare me!” “Frankly, yes. We
don’t want

anyone going who’ll panic at the first shot. Six Safari leaders were killed
last year, and a dozen hunters. We’re here to give you the damnedest thrill a
real hunter ever asked for. Travelling you back sixty million years to bag the
biggest damned game in all Time. Your personal check’s still there. Tear it
up.” Mr. Eckels looked at the check for a long time. His fingers twitched.
“Good luck,” said the man behind the desk. “Mr. Travis, he’s all yours.”
They moved silently across the room, taking their guns with them, toward the
Machine, toward the silver metal and the roaring light.
First a day and then a night and then a day and then a night, then it was
day-night-day-night-day.
A week, a month, a year, a decade! A.D. 2055. A.D. zoic). 1999! 1957! Gone!
The Machine roared.
They put on their oxygen helmets and tested the intercoms. Eckels swayed on
the padded seat, his face pale, his jaws stiff. He felt the trembling in his

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arms and he looked down and found his hands tight on the new rifle. There were
four other men in the Machine. Travis, the Safari Leader, his assistant,
Lesperance, and two other hunters, Billings and Kramer. They sat looking at
each other, and the years blazed around them.
“Can these guns get a dinosaur cold?” Eckels felt his mouth saying.
“If you hit them right,” said Travis on the helmet radio. “Some dinosaurs
have two brains, one in the head, another far down the spinal column. We stay
away from those. That’s stretching luck.
Put your first two shots into the eyes, if you can, blind them, and go back
into the brain.” The
Machine howled. Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons
fled after them.
“Good God,” said Eckels. “Every hunter that ever lived would envy us today.
This makes Africa seem like Illinois.” The Machine slowed; its scream fell to
a murmur. The Machine stopped.
The sun stopped in the sky.
The fog that had enveloped the Machine blew away and they were in an old time,
a very old time indeed, three hunters and two Safari Heads with their blue
metal guns across their knees.
“Christ isn’t born yet,” said Travis. “Moses has not gone to the mountain to
talk with God. The
Pyramids are still in the earth, waiting to be cut out and put up. Remember
that, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, none of them exists.” The men
nodded.
“That” Mr. Travis pointed” is the jungle of sixty million two thousand and
fifty-five years before
President Keith.” He indicated a metal path that struck off into green
wilderness, over steaming swamp, among giant ferns and palms.
“And that,” he said, “is the Path, laid by Time Safari for your use. It floats
six inches above the earth. Doesn’t touch so much as one grass blade, flower,
or tree. It’s an anti-gravity metal. Its purpose is to keep you from touching
this world of the past in any way. Stay on the Path. Don’t go off it. I
repeat. Don’t go off. For any reason! If you fall off, there’s a penalty. And
don’t shoot any animal we don’t okay.”
“Why?” asked Eckels.
They sat in the ancient wilderness. Far birds’ cries blew on a wind, and the
smell of tar and an old salt sea, moist grasses, and flowers the colour of
blood. “We don’t want to change the Future. We don’t belong here in the Past.
The government doesn’t like us here. We have to pay big graft to keep our
franchise. A Time Machine is damn finicky business. Not knowing it, we might
kill an

important animal, a small bird, a roach, a flower even, thus destroying an
important link in a growing species.” “That’s not clear,” said Eckels.
“All right,” Travis continued, “say we accidentally kill one mouse here. That
means all the future families of this one particular mouse are destroyed,
right?” “Right.”
“And all the families of the families of that one mouse! With a stamp of your
foot, you annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a
billion possible mice” “So they’re dead,” said
Eckels. “So what?” “So what?” Travis snorted quietly. “Well, what about the
foxes that’ll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies.
For want of ten foxes, a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of
insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and
destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine million years
later, a cave man, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar
or saber-tooth tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers
in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the cave man starves. And
the cave man, please note, is not just any expendable man, no I He is an

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entire future nation. From his loins would have sprung ten sons. From their
loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilisation. Destroy this one
man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life. It is
comparable to slaying some of Adam’s grandchildren. The stomp of your foot, on
one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our
earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations. With the
death of that one cave man, a billion others yet unborn are throttled in the
womb. Perhaps Rome never rises on its seven hills. Perhaps Europe is forever a
dark forest, and only Asia waxes healthy and teeming. Step on a mouse and you
crush the
Pyramids. Step on a mouse and you leave your print, like a Grand Canyon,
across Eternity. Queen
Elizabeth might never be born, Washington might not cross the Delaware, there
might never be a
United States at all. So be careful. Stay on the Path, Never step off!” “I
see,” said Eckels. “Then it wouldn’t pay for us even to touch the grass?”
“Correct. Crushing certain plants could add up infinitesimally. A little
error here would multiply in sixty million years, all out of proportion. Of
course maybe our theory is wrong. Maybe Time can’t be changed by us. Or maybe
it can be changed only in little subtle ways. A dead mouse here makes an
insect imbalance there, a population disproportion later, a bad harvest
further on, a depression, mass starvation, and, finally, a change in social
temperament in far-flung countries. Something much more subtle, like that.
Perhaps only a soft breath, a whisper, a hair, pollen on the air, such a
slight, slight change that unless you looked close you wouldn’t see it. Who
knows? Who really can say he knows? We don’t know. We’re guessing. But until
we do know for certain whether our messing around in Time can make a big roar
or a little rustle in history, we’re being damned careful. This Machine, this
Path, your clothing and bodies, were sterilised, as you know, before the
journey. We wear these oxygen helmets so we can’t introduce our bacteria into
an ancient atmosphere.”
“How do we know which animals to shoot?” “They’re marked with red paint,” said
Travis. “Today, before our journey, we sent Lesperance here back with the
Machine. He came to this particular era and followed certain animals.”
“Studying them?”
“Right,” said Lesperance. “I track them through their entire existence, noting
which of them lives longest. Very few. How many times they mate. Not often.
Life’s short. When I find one that’s going to die when a tree falls on him, or
one that drowns in a tar pit, I note the exact hour, minute, and second. I
shoot a paint bomb. It leaves a red patch on his hide. We can’t miss it. Then
I

correlate our arrival in the Past so that we meet -the Monster not more than
two minutes before he would have died anyway. This way, we kill only animals
with no future, that are never going to mate again. You see how careful we
are?” “But if you came back this morning in Time,” said
Eckels eagerly, “you must’ve bumped into us, our Safari] How did it turn out?
Was it successful?
Did all of us get through-alive?”
Travis and Lesperance gave each other a look. “That’d be a paradox,” said the
latter. “Time doesn’t permit that sort of mess a man meeting himself. When
such occasions threaten, Time steps aside. Like an airplane hitting an air
pocket. You felt the Machine jump just before we stopped?
That was us passing ourselves on the way back to the Future. We saw nothing.
There’s no way of telling if this expedition was a success, if we got our
monster, or whether all of us meaning you, Mr. Eckels, got out alive.”
Eckels smiled palely.
“Cut that,” said Travis sharply. “Everyone on his feet!”
They were ready to leave the Machine.

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The jungle was high and the jungle was broad and the jungle was the entire
world forever and forever. Sounds like music and sounds like flying tents
filled the sky, and those were pterodactyls soaring with cavernous grey wings,
gigantic bats out of a delirium and a night fever. Eckels, balanced on the
narrow Path, aimed his rifle playfully. “Stop that!” said Travis. “Don’t even
aim for fun, damn it! If your gun should go off” Eckels flushed. “Where’s our
Tyrannosaurus?”
Lesperance checked his wrist watch. “Up ahead. Well bisect his trail in sixty
seconds. Look for the red paint, for Christ’s sake. Don’t shoot till we give
the word. Stay on the Path. Stay on the path
They moved forward in the wind of morning. “Strange,” murmured Eckels. “Up
ahead, sixty million years, Election Day over. Keith made President. Everyone
celebrating. And here we are, a million years lost, and they don’t exist. The
things we worried about for months, a life-time, not even born or thought
about yet.” “Safety catches off, everyone!” ordered Travis. “You, first shot,
Eckels. Second, Billings. Third, Kramer.” “I’ve hunted tiger, wild boar,
buffalo, elephant, but
Jesus, this is it,” said Eckels. “I’m shaking like a kid.” “Ah,” said Travis.
Everyone stopped.
Travis raised his hand. “Ahead,” he whispered. “In the mist. There he is.
There’s His Royal
Majesty now.” The jungle was wide and full of twitterings, rustlings, murmurs,
and sighs.
Suddenly it all ceased, as if someone had shut a door.
Silence.
A sound of thunder.
Out of the mist, one hundred yards away, came Tyrannosaurus Rex.
“Jesus God,” whispered Eckels.
“Shit”
It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It lowered thirty feet above
half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws
close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand
pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam
of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior, Each thigh was a ton of
meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper
body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might
pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck

coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the
sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its eyes rolled,
ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a
death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its
taloned feet clawing damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep wherever it
settled its weight. It ran with a gliding ballet step, far too poised and
balanced for its ten tons. It moved into a sunlit arena warily, its beautiful
reptile hands feeling the air. “My God!” Eckels twitched his mouth. “It could
reach up and grab the moon.”
“Shit” Travis jerked angrily. “He hasn’t seen us yet.” “It can’t be
killed.” Eckels pronounced this verdict quietly, as if there could be no
argument. He had weighed the evidence and this was his considered opinion. The
rifle in his hands seemed a cap gun. “We were fools to come. This is
impossible.”
“Shut up!” hissed Travis.
“Nightmare.”
“Turn around,” commanded Travis. “Walk quietly to the Machine. We’ll remit
one-half your fee.”
“I didn’t realise it would be this big,” said Eckels. “I miscalculated, that’s
all. And now I want out.”
“It sees us!”

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“There’s the red paint on its chest!”
The Thunder Lizard raised itself. Its armoured flesh glittered like a thousand
green coins. The coins, crusted with slime, steamed. In the slime, tiny
insects wriggled, so that the entire body seemed to twitch and undulate, even
while the monster itself did not move. It exhaled. The stink of raw flesh blew
down the wilderness.
“Get me out of here,” said Eckels. “It was never like this before, I was
always sure I’d come through alive, I had good guides, good safaris, and
safety. This time, I figured wrong. I’ve met my match and admit it. This is
too much for me to get hold of.”
“Don’t run,” said Lesperance. “Turn around. Hide in the Machine.”
“Yes.” Eckels seemed to be numb. He looked at his feet as if trying to make
them move. He gave a grunt of helplessness.
“Eckels”
He took a few steps, blinking, shuffling.
“Not that way!”
The Monster, at the first motion, lunged forward with a terrible scream. It
covered one hundred yards in four seconds. The rifles jerked up and blazed
fire. A windstorm from the beast’s mouth engulfed them in the stench of slime
and old blood. The Monster roared, teeth glittering with sun.
Eckels, not looking back, walked blindly to the edge of the Path, his gun limp
in his arms, stepped off the Path, and walked, not knowing it, in the jungle.
His feet sank into green moss. His legs moved him, and he felt alone and
remote from the events behind.
The rifles cracked again. Their sound was lost in shriek and lizard thunder.
The great lever of the reptile’s tail swung up, lashed sideways. Trees
exploded in clouds of leaf and branch. The Monster twitched its jeweller’s
hands down to fondle at the men, to twist them in half, to crush them like

berries, to cram them into its teeth and its screaming throat. Its
boulder-stone eyes levelled with the men. They saw themselves mirrored. They
fired at the metallic eyelids and the blazing black iris.
Like a stone idol, like a mountain avalanche, Tyrannosaurs fell. Thundering,
it clutched trees, pulled them with it. It wrenched and tore the metal
Path, The men flung themselves back and away. The body hit, ten tons of
cold flesh and stone. The guns fired. The Monster lashed its armoured tail,
twitched its snake jaws, and lay still. A
fount of blood spurted from its throat. Somewhere inside, a sac of fluids
burst. Sickening gushes drenched the hunters. They stood, red and glistening.
The thunder faded.
The jungle was silent. After the avalanche, a green peace.
After the nightmare, morning.
Billings and Kramer sat on the pathway and threw up. Travis and Lesperance
stood with smoking rifles, cursing steadily.
In the Time Machine, on his face, Eckels lay shivering. He had found his way
back to the Path, climbed into the Machine.
Travis came walking, glanced at Eckels, took cotton gauze from a metal box,
and returned to the others, who were sitting on the Path.
“Clean up.”
They wiped the blood from their helmets. They began to curse too. The Monster
lay, a hill of solid flesh. Within, you could hear the sighs and murmurs as
the furthest chambers of it died, the organs malfunctioning, liquids running a
final instant from pocket to sac to spleen, everything shutting off, closing
up forever. It was like standing by a wrecked locomotive or a steam shovel at
quitting time, all valves being released or levered tight. Bones cracked; the
tonnage of its own flesh, off balance, dead weight, snapped the delicate
forearms, caught underneath. The meat settled, quivering.
Another cracking sound. Overhead, a gigantic tree branch broke from its heavy
mooring, fell. It crashed upon the dead beast with finality.

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“There.” Lesperance checked his watch. “Right on time. That’s the giant tree
that was scheduled to fall and kill this animal originally.” He glanced at the
two hunters. “You want the trophy picture?”
“What?”
“We can’t take a trophy back to the Future. The body has to stay right here
where it would have died originally, so the insects, birds, and bacteria can
get at it, as they were intended to. Everything in balance. The body stays.
But we can take a picture of you standing near it.” The two men tried to
think, but gave up, shaking their heads.
They let themselves be led along the metal Path. They sank wearily into the
Machine cushions.
They gazed back at the ruined Monster, the stagnating mound, where already
strange reptilian birds and golden insects were busy at the steaming armour.
A sound on the floor of the Time Machine stiffened them.
Eckels sat there, shivering.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last.
“Get up!” cried Travis.

Eckels got up.
“Go out on that Path alone,” said Travis. He had his rifle pointed. “You’re
not coming back in the
Machine. We’re leaving you here!”
Lesperance seized Travis’ arm. “Wait”
“Stay out of this!” Travis shook his hand away. “This son of a bitch nearly
killed us. But it isn’t that so much. Hell, no. It’s his shoes Look at them!
He ran off the Path. My God, that ruins us I
Christ knows how much we’ll forfeit. Tens of thousands of dollars of insurance
We guarantee no one leaves the Path. He left it. Oh, the damn fool! Ill have
to report to the government. They might revoke our license to travel. God
knows what he’s done to Time, to History!” “Take it easy, all he did was kick
up some dirt.”
“How do we know?” cried Travis. “We don’t know anything!
It’s all a damn mystery! Get out there, Eckels!” Eckels fumbled his shirt.
“Ill pay anything. A
hundred thousand dollars!”
Travis glared at Eckels’ chequebook and spat. “Go out there. The Monster’s
next to the Path. Stick your arms up to your elbows in his mouth. Then you can
come back with us.”
“That’s unreasonable!”
“The Monsters dead, you yellow bastard. The bullets! The bullets can’t be
left behind. They don’t belong in the Past; they might change something.
Here’s my knife. Dig them out!”
The jungle was alive again, full of the old tremorings and bird cries. Eckels
turned slowly to regard that primeval garbage dump, that hill of nightmares
and terror. After a long time, like a sleepwalker, he shuffled out along the
Path. He returned, shuddering, five minutes later, his arms soaked and red to
the elbows. He held out his hands. Each held a number of steel bullets. Then
he fell. He lay where he fell, not moving.
“You didn’t have to make him do that,” said Lesperance. “Didn’t I? It’s too
early to tell.” Travis nudged the still body. “He’ll live. Next time he won’t
go hunting game like this. Okay.” He jerked his thumb wearily at Lesperance.
“Switch on. Let’s go home.”
1492. 1776. 1812.
They cleaned their hands and faces. They changed their caking shirts and
pants. Eckels was up and around again, not speaking. Travis glared at him for
a full ten minutes. “Don’t look at me,” cried
Eckels. “I haven’t done anything.”
“Who can tell?”
“Just ran off the Path, that’s all, a little mud on my shoes what do you want

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me to get down and pray?” “We might need it. I’m warning you, Eckels, I might
kill you yet. I’ve got my gun ready.”
“I’m innocent. I’ve done nothing.”
1999. 2000. 2055.
The Machine stopped.
“Get out,” said Travis.

The room was there as they had left it. But not the same as they had left it.
The same man sat behind the same desk. But the same man did not quite sit
behind the same desk. Travis looked around swiftly. “Everything okay here?”
he snapped.
“Fine. Welcome home!”
Travis did not relax. He seemed to be looking at the very atoms of the air
itself, at the way the sun poured through the one high window.
“Okay, Eckels, get out. Don’t ever come back.”
Eckels could not move.
“You heard me,” said Travis. “What’re you staring at?” Eckels stood smelling
of the air, and there was a thing to the air, a chemical taint so subtle, so
slight, that only a faint cry of his subliminal senses warned him it was
there. The colours, white, grey, blue, orange, in the wall, in the furniture,
in the sky beyond the window, were . . . were . . . And there was a feel. His
flesh twitched. His hands twitched.
He stood drinking the oddness with the pores of his body. Somewhere, someone
must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear. His
body screamed silence in return.
Beyond this room, beyond this wall, beyond this man who was not quite the same
man seated at this desk that was not quite the same desk . . . lay an entire
world of streets and people. What sort of world it was now, there was no
telling. He could feel them moving there, beyond the walls, almost, like so
many chess pieces blown in a dry wind. . . .
But the immediate thing was the sign painted on the office wall, the same sign
he had read earlier today on first entering.
Somehow, the sign had changed:
TYME SEFARI INC.
SEFARIS TU ANY YEEH EN THE PAST.
YU NAIM THE ANIMALL.
WEE TAEK YOU THAIR.
YU SHOOT ITT.

Eckels felt himself tall into a chair. He fumbled crazily at the thick slime
on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling. “No, it can’t be. Not a
little thing like that. No!” Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold
and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful, and very dead. “Not a little
thing like that! Not a butterfly!” cried Eckels.
It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset
balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and
then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across
Time. Eckels’ mind whirled. It couldn’t change things. Killing one butterfly
couldn’t be that important! Could it?
His face was cold. His mouth trembled, asking: “Who won the presidential
election yesterday?”
The man behind the desk laughed. “You joking? You know damn well. Deutscher,
of course! Who else? Not that damn weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a
man with guts, by God!” The official stopped. “What’s wrong?” Eckels moaned.
He dropped to his knees. He scrabbled at the golden butterfly with shaking
fingers. “Can’t we,” he pleaded to the world, to himself, to the officials, to
the Machine, “can’t we take it back, can’t we make it alive again? Can’t we
start over?

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Can’t we” He did not move. Eyes shut, he waited, shivering. He heard Travis
breathe loud in the room; he heard Travis shift his rifle, click the safety
catch, and raise the weapon. There was a sound of thunder.

Ray Bradbury. The Veldt

"George, I wish you'd look at the nursery."
"What's wrong with it?"
"I don't know."
"Well, then."
"I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look
at it."
"What would a psychologist want with a nursery?"
"You know very well what he'd want." His wife paused in the middle of the
kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.
"It's just that the nursery is different now than it was."
"All right, let's have a look."
They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had
cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and
fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them.
Their approach sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked
on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the
halls, lights went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft
automaticity.
"Well," said George Hadley.

They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across
by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as
the rest of the house. "But nothing's too good for our children,"
George had said.
The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon.
The walls were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia
Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede
into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt
appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the
final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a
hot yellow sun.
George Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow.
"Let's get out of this sun," he said. "This is a little too real. But I
don't see anything wrong."
"Wait a moment, you'll see," said his wife.
Now the hidden odorophonics were beginning to blow a wind of odor at the
two people in the middle of the baked veldtland. The hot straw smell of lion
grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell
of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air. And now the
sounds: the thump of distant antelope feet on grassy sod, the papery rustling
of vultures. A shadow passed through the sky. The shadow flickered on George
Hadley's upturned, sweating face.
"Filthy creatures," he heard his wife say.
"The vultures."
"You see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they're on their way to
the water hole. They've just been eating," said Lydia. "I don't know what."
"Some animal." George Hadley put his hand up to shield off the burning light
from his squinted eyes. "A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe."
"Are you sure?" His wife sounded peculiarly tense.
"No, it's a little late to be sure," be said, amused. "Nothing over there
I can see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what's left."
"Did you bear that scream?" she asked.

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'No."
"About a minute ago?"
"Sorry, no."
The lions were coming. And again George Hadley was filled with
admiration for the mechanical genius who had conceived this room. A miracle
of efficiency selling for an absurdly low price. Every home should have one.
Oh, occasionally they frightened you with their clinical accuracy, they
startled you, gave you a twinge, but most of the time what fun for everyone,
not only your own son and daughter, but for yourself when you felt like a
quick jaunt to a foreign land, a quick change of scenery. Well, here it was!
And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and
startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your
mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts,
and the yellow of them was in your eyes like the yellow of an
exquisite French tapestry, the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the
sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the
smell of meat from the panting, dripping mouths.
The lions stood looking at George and Lydia Hadley with terrible
green-yellow eyes.
"Watch out!" screamed Lydia.
The lions came running at them.
Lydia bolted and ran. Instinctively, George sprang after her. Outside, in the
hall, with the door slammed he was laughing and she was crying, and they
both stood appalled at the other's reaction.
"George!"
"Lydia! Oh, my dear poor sweet Lydia!"
"They almost got us!"
"Walls, Lydia, remember; crystal walls, that's all they are. Oh, they look
real, I must admit - Africa in your parlor - but it's all dimensional,
superreactionary, supersensitive color film and mental tape film behind
glass screens. It's all odorophonics and sonics, Lydia. Here's my
handkerchief."


"I'm afraid." She came to him and put her body against him and cried
steadily. "Did you see? Did you feel? It's too real."
"Now, Lydia..."
"You've got to tell Wendy and Peter not to read any more on Africa."
"Of course - of course." He patted her.
"Promise?"
"Sure."
"And lock the nursery for a few days until I get my nerves settled."
"You know how difficult Peter is about that. When I punished him a month
ago by locking the nursery for even a few hours - the tantrum be threw!
And Wendy too. They live for the nursery."
"It's got to be locked, that's all there is to it."
"All right." Reluctantly he locked the huge door. "You've been working too
hard. You need a rest."
"I don't know - I don't know," she said, blowing her nose, sitting down in a
chair that immediately began to rock and comfort her. "Maybe I don't have
enough to do. Maybe I have time to think too much. Why don't we shut the
whole house off for a few days and take a vacation?"
"You mean you want to fry my eggs for me?"
"Yes." She nodded.
"And dam my socks?"
"Yes." A frantic, watery-eyed nodding.
"And sweep the house?"

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"Yes, yes - oh, yes!''
"But I thought that's why we bought this house, so we wouldn't have to do
anything?"
"That's just it. I feel like I don't belong here. The house is wife and mother
now, and nursemaid. Can I compete with an African veldt? Can I give a bath and
scrub the children as efficiently or quickly as the automatic scrub bath can?
I cannot. And it isn't just me. It's you. You've been awfully nervous
lately."
"I suppose I have been smoking too much."
"You look as if you didn't know what to do with yourself in this house,
either. You smoke a little more every morning and drink a little more every
afternoon and need a little more sedative every night. You're beginning to
feel unnecessary too."
"Am I?" He paused and tried to feel into himself to see what was really there.
"Oh, George!" She looked beyond him, at the nursery door. "Those lions can't
get out of there, can they?"
He looked at the door and saw it tremble as if something had jumped
against it from the other side.
"Of course not," he said.

At dinner they ate alone, for Wendy and Peter were at a special plastic
carnival across town and bad televised home to say they'd be late, to go
ahead eating. So George Hadley, bemused, sat watching the dining-room table
produce warm dishes of food from its mechanical interior.
"We forgot the ketchup," he said.
"Sorry," said a small voice within the table, and ketchup appeared.
As for the nursery, thought George Hadley, it won't hurt for the
children to be locked out of it awhile. Too much of anything isn't good for
anyone. And it was clearly indicated that the children had been spending a
little too much time on Africa. That sun. He could feel it on his neck,
still, like a hot paw. And the lions. And the smell of blood. Remarkable how
the nursery caught the telepathic emanations of the children's minds and
created life to fill their every desire. The children thought lions, and
there were lions. The children thought zebras, and there were zebras. Sun -
sun. Giraffes - giraffes. Death and death.
That last. He chewed tastelessly on the meat that the table bad cut for him.
Death thoughts. They were awfully young, Wendy and Peter, for death
thoughts. Or, no, you were never too young, really. Long before you knew
what death was you were wishing it on someone else. When you were two years
old you were shooting people with cap pistols.
But this - the long, hot African veldt-the awful death in the jaws of a lion.
And repeated again and again.
"Where are you going?"
He didn't answer Lydia. Preoccupied, be let the lights glow softly on ahead
of him, extinguish behind him as he padded to the nursery door. He
listened against it. Far away, a lion roared.
He unlocked the door and opened it. Just before he stepped inside, he heard
a faraway scream. And then another roar from the lions, which subsided
quickly.
He stepped into Africa. How many times in the last year had he opened this
door and found Wonderland, Alice, the Mock Turtle, or Aladdin and his
Magical Lamp, or Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz, or Dr. Doolittle, or the cow
jumping over a very real-appearing moon-all the delightful contraptions of a
make-believe world. How often had he seen Pegasus flying in the sky ceiling,
or seen fountains of red fireworks, or heard angel voices singing. But now,
is yellow hot Africa, this bake oven with murder in the heat. Perhaps Lydia

was right. Perhaps they needed a little vacation from the fantasy which was

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growing a bit too real for ten-year-old children. It was all right to
exercise one's mind with gymnastic fantasies, but when the lively child mind
settled on one pattern... ? It seemed that, at a distance, for the past
month, he had heard lions roaring, and smelled their strong odor seeping as
far away as his study door. But, being busy, he had paid it no attention.
George Hadley stood on the African grassland alone. The lions looked up from
their feeding, watching him. The only flaw to the illusion was the open door
through which he could see his wife, far down the dark hall, like a framed
picture, eating her dinner abstractedly.
"Go away," he said to the lions.
They did not go.
He knew the principle of the room exactly. You sent out your thoughts.
Whatever you thought would appear. "Let's have Aladdin and his lamp," he
snapped. The veldtland remained; the lions remained.
"Come on, room! I demand Aladin!" he said.
Nothing happened. The lions mumbled in their baked pelts.
"Aladin!"
He went back to dinner. "The fool room's out of order," he said. "It won't
respond."
"Or--"
"Or what?"
"Or it can't respond," said Lydia, "because the children have thought about
Africa and lions and killing so many days that the room's in a rut."
"Could be."
"Or Peter's set it to remain that way."
"Set it?"
"He may have got into the machinery and fixed something."
"Peter doesn't know machinery."
"He's a wise one for ten. That I.Q. of his -"
"Nevertheless -"
"Hello, Mom. Hello, Dad."
The Hadleys turned. Wendy and Peter were coming in the front door, cheeks
like peppermint candy, eyes like bright blue agate marbles, a smell of ozone
on their jumpers from their trip in the helicopter.
"You're just in time for supper," said both parents.
"We're full of strawberry ice cream and hot dogs," said the children,
holding hands. "But we'll sit and watch."
"Yes, come tell us about the nursery," said George Hadley.
The brother and sister blinked at him and then at each other.
"Nursery?"
"All about Africa and everything," said the father with false
joviality.
"I don't understand," said Peter.
"Your mother and I were just traveling through Africa with rod and reel;
Tom Swift and his Electric Lion," said George Hadley.
"There's no Africa in the nursery," said Peter simply.
"Oh, come now, Peter. We know better."
"I don't remember any Africa," said Peter to Wendy. "Do you?"
"No."
"Run see and come tell."
She obeyed
"Wendy, come back here!" said George Hadley, but she was gone. The house
lights followed her like a flock of fireflies. Too late, he realized he had
forgotten to lock the nursery door after his last inspection.
"Wendy'll look and come tell us," said Peter.
"She doesn't have to tell me. I've seen it."

"I'm sure you're mistaken, Father."
"I'm not, Peter. Come along now."

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But Wendy was back. "It's not Africa," she said breathlessly.
"We'll see about this," said George Hadley, and they all walked down the
hall together and opened the nursery door.
There was a green, lovely forest, a lovely river, a purple mountain, high
voices singing, and Rima, lovely and mysterious, lurking in the trees with
colorful flights of butterflies, like animated bouquets, lingering in her
long hair. The African veldtland was gone. The lions were gone. Only
Rima was here now, singing a song so beautiful that it brought tears to your
eyes.
George Hadley looked in at the changed scene. "Go to bed," he said to the
children.
They opened their mouths.
"You heard me," he said.
They went off to the air closet, where a wind sucked them like brown leaves
up the flue to their slumber rooms.
George Hadley walked through the singing glade and picked up something that
lay in the comer near where the lions had been. He walked slowly back to his
wife.
"What is that?" she asked.
"An old wallet of mine," he said.
He showed it to her. The smell of hot grass was on it and the smell of a
lion. There were drops of saliva on it, it bad been chewed, and there were
blood smears on both sides.
He closed the nursery door and locked it, tight.

In the middle of the night he was still awake and he knew his wife was awake.
"Do you think Wendy changed it?" she said at last, in the dark room.
"Of course."
"Made it from a veldt into a forest and put Rima there instead of
lions?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I don't know. But it's staying locked until I find out."
"How did your wallet get there?"
"I don't know anything," he said, "except that I'm beginning to be sorry
we bought that room for the children. If children are neurotic at all, a room
like that -"
"It's supposed to help them work off their neuroses in a healthful way."
"I'm starting to wonder." He stared at the ceiling.
"We've given the children everything they ever wanted. Is this our
reward-secrecy, disobedience?"
"Who was it said, 'Children are carpets, they should be stepped on
occasionally'? We've never lifted a hand. They're insufferable - let's admit
it. They come and go when they like; they treat us as if we were offspring.
They're spoiled and we're spoiled."
"They've been acting funny ever since you forbade them to take the rocket
to New York a few months ago."
"They're not old enough to do that alone, I explained."
"Nevertheless, I've noticed they've been decidedly cool toward us
since."
"I think I'll have David McClean come tomorrow morning to have a look at
Africa."
"But it's not Africa now, it's Green Mansions country and Rima."
"I have a feeling it'll be Africa again before then."

A moment later they heard the screams.
Two screams. Two people screaming from downstairs. And then a roar of lions.
"Wendy and Peter aren't in their rooms," said his wife.
He lay in his bed with his beating heart. "No," he said. "They've broken

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into the nursery."
"Those screams - they sound familiar."
"Do they?"
"Yes, awfully."
And although their beds tried very bard, the two adults couldn't be rocked
to sleep for another hour. A smell of cats was in the night air.

"Father?" said Peter.
"Yes."
Peter looked at his shoes. He never looked at his father any more, nor at his
mother. "You aren't going to lock up the nursery for good, are you?"
"That all depends."
"On what?" snapped Peter.
"On you and your sister. If you intersperse this Africa with a little
variety - oh, Sweden perhaps, or Denmark or China -"
"I thought we were free to play as we wished."
"You are, within reasonable bounds."
"What's wrong with Africa, Father?"
"Oh, so now you admit you have been conjuring up Africa, do you?"
"I wouldn't want the nursery locked up," said Peter coldly. "Ever."
"Matter of fact, we're thinking of turning the whole house off for about
a month. Live sort of a carefree one-for-all existence."
"That sounds dreadful! Would I have to tie my own shoes instead of
letting the shoe tier do it? And brush my own teeth and comb my hair and
give myself a bath?"
"It would be fun for a change, don't you think?"
"No, it would be horrid. I didn't like it when you took out the picture
painter last month."
"That's because I wanted you to learn to paint all by yourself, son."
"I don't want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is
there to do?"
"All right, go play in Africa."
"Will you shut off the house sometime soon?"
"We're considering it."
"I don't think you'd better consider it any more, Father."
"I won't have any threats from my son!"
"Very well." And Peter strolled off to the nursery.

"Am I on time?" said David McClean.
"Breakfast?" asked George Hadley.
"Thanks, had some. What's the trouble?"
"David, you're a psychologist."
"I should hope so."
"Well, then, have a look at our nursery. You saw it a year ago when you
dropped by; did you notice anything peculiar about it then?"
"Can't say I did; the usual violences, a tendency toward a slight
paranoia here or there, usual in children because they feel persecuted by
parents constantly, but, oh, really nothing."
They walked down the ball. "I locked the nursery up," explained the
father, "and the children broke back into it during the night. I let them
stay so they could form the patterns for you to see."
There was a terrible screaming from the nursery.

"There it is," said George Hadley. "See what you make of it."
They walked in on the children without rapping.
The screams had faded. The lions were feeding.
"Run outside a moment, children," said George Hadley. "No, don't change the
mental combination. Leave the walls as they are. Get!"
With the children gone, the two men stood studying the lions clustered at a

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distance, eating with great relish whatever it was they had caught.
"I wish I knew what it was," said George Hadley. "Sometimes I can almost
see. Do you think if I brought high-powered binoculars here and -"
David McClean laughed dryly. "Hardly." He turned to study all four walls.
"How long has this been going on?"
"A little over a month."
"It certainly doesn't feel good."
"I want facts, not feelings."
"My dear George, a psychologist never saw a fact in his life. He only hears
about feelings; vague things. This doesn't feel good, I tell you.
Trust my hunches and my instincts. I have a nose for something bad. This is
very bad. My advice to you is to have the whole damn room torn down and your
children brought to me every day during the next year for treatment."
"Is it that bad?"
"I'm afraid so. One of the original uses of these nurseries was so that we
could study the patterns left on the walls by the child's mind, study at our
leisure, and help the child. In this case, however, the room has become a
channel toward-destructive thoughts, instead of a release away from them."
"Didn't you sense this before?"
"I sensed only that you bad spoiled your children more than most. And now
you're letting them down in some way. What way?"
"I wouldn't let them go to New York."
"What else?"
"I've taken a few machines from the house and threatened them, a month ago,
with closing up the nursery unless they did their homework. I did close it for
a few days to show I meant business."
"Ah, ha!"
"Does that mean anything?"
"Everything. Where before they had a Santa Claus now they have a
Scrooge. Children prefer Santas. You've let this room and this house replace
you and your wife in your children's affections. This room is their mother
and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents. And
now you come along and want to shut it off. No wonder there's hatred here.
You can feel it coming out of the sky. Feel that sun. George, you'll have to
change your life. Like too many others, you've built it around creature
comforts. Why, you'd starve tomorrow if something went wrong in your
kitchen. You wouldn't know bow to tap an egg. Nevertheless, turn everything
off. Start new. It'll take time. But we'll make good children out of bad in a
year, wait and see."
"But won't the shock be too much for the children, shutting the room up
abruptly, for good?"
"I don't want them going any deeper into this, that's all."
The lions were finished with their red feast.
The lions were standing on the edge of the clearing watching the two men.
"Now I'm feeling persecuted," said McClean. "Let's get out of here. I
never have cared for these damned rooms. Make me nervous."
"The lions look real, don't they?" said George Hadley. I don't suppose
there's any way -"
"What?"
"- that they could become real?"

"Not that I know."
"Some flaw in the machinery, a tampering or something?"
"No."
They went to the door.
"I don't imagine the room will like being turned off," said the father.
"Nothing ever likes to die - even a room."
"I wonder if it hates me for wanting to switch it off?"
"Paranoia is thick around here today," said David McClean. "You can follow

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it like a spoor. Hello." He bent and picked up a bloody scarf. "This yours?"
"No." George Hadley's face was rigid. "It belongs to Lydia."
They went to the fuse box together and threw the switch that killed the
nursery.

The two children were in hysterics. They screamed and pranced and threw
things. They yelled and sobbed and swore and jumped at the furniture.
"You can't do that to the nursery, you can't!''
"Now, children."
The children flung themselves onto a couch, weeping.
"George," said Lydia Hadley, "turn on the nursery, just for a few
moments. You can't be so abrupt."
"No."
"You can't be so cruel..."
"Lydia, it's off, and it stays off. And the whole damn house dies as of here
and now. The more I see of the mess we've put ourselves in, the more it
sickens me. We've been contemplating our mechanical, electronic navels for
too long. My God, how we need a breath of honest air!"
And he marched about the house turning off the voice clocks, the
stoves, the heaters, the shoe shiners, the shoe lacers, the body scrubbers
and swabbers and massagers, and every other machine be could put his hand
to.
The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical
cemetery. So silent. None of the humming hidden energy of machines waiting
to function at the tap of a button.
"Don't let them do it!" wailed Peter at the ceiling, as if he was
talking to the house, the nursery. "Don't let Father kill everything." He
turned to his father. "Oh, I hate you!"
"Insults won't get you anywhere."
"I wish you were dead!"
"We were, for a long while. Now we're going to really start living.
Instead of being handled and massaged, we're going to live."
Wendy was still crying and Peter joined her again. "Just a moment, just one
moment, just another moment of nursery," they wailed.
"Oh, George," said the wife, "it can't hurt."
"All right - all right, if they'll just shut up. One minute, mind you, and
then off forever."
"Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!" sang the children, smiling with wet faces.
"And then we're going on a vacation. David McClean is coming back in half
an hour to help us move out and get to the airport. I'm going to dress.
You turn the nursery on for a minute, Lydia, just a minute, mind you."
And the three of them went babbling off while he let himself be
vacuumed upstairs through the air flue and set about dressing himself. A
minute later Lydia appeared.
"I'll be glad when we get away," she sighed.
"Did you leave them in the nursery?"
"I wanted to dress too. Oh, that horrid Africa. What can they see in it?"

"Well, in five minutes we'll be on our way to Iowa. Lord, how did we ever
get in this house? What prompted us to buy a nightmare?"
"Pride, money, foolishness."
"I think we'd better get downstairs before those kids get engrossed with
those damned beasts again."
Just then they heard the children calling, "Daddy, Mommy, come quick -
quick!"
They went downstairs in the air flue and ran down the hall. The
children were nowhere in sight. "Wendy? Peter!"
They ran into the nursery. The veldtland was empty save for the lions
waiting, looking at them. "Peter, Wendy?"

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The door slammed.
"Wendy, Peter!"
George Hadley and his wife whirled and ran back to the door.
"Open the door!" cried George Hadley, trying the knob. "Why, they've locked
it from the outside! Peter!" He beat at the door. "Open up!"
He heard Peter's voice outside, against the door.
"Don't let them switch off the nursery and the house," he was saying.
Mr. and Mrs. George Hadley beat at the door. "Now, don't be ridiculous,
children. It's time to go. Mr. McClean'll be here in a minute and..."
And then they heard the sounds.
The lions on three sides of them, in the yellow veldt grass, padding
through the dry straw, rumbling and roaring in their throats.
The lions.
Mr. Hadley looked at his wife and they turned and looked back at the beasts
edging slowly forward crouching, tails stiff.
Mr. and Mrs. Hadley screamed.
And suddenly they realized why those other screams bad sounded
familiar.

"Well, here I am," said David McClean in the nursery doorway, "Oh,
hello." He stared at the two children seated in the center of the open glade
eating a little picnic lunch. Beyond them was the water hole and the yellow
veldtland; above was the hot sun. He began to perspire. "Where are your
father and mother?"
The children looked up and smiled. "Oh, they'll be here directly."
"Good, we must get going." At a distance Mr. McClean saw the lions
fighting and clawing and then quieting down to feed in silence under the
shady trees.
He squinted at the lions with his hand tip to his eyes.
Now the lions were done feeding. They moved to the water hole to drink.
A shadow flickered over Mr. McClean's hot face. Many shadows flickered.
The vultures were dropping down the blazing sky.
"A cup of tea?" asked Wendy in the silence.
Last-modified: Wed, 01 Mar 2000 06:01:50 GMT
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