Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (6 page)

 
          
 
They floated in an immense sigh above a town
already made remote by the little space between themselves and the earth, a
town receding behind them in a black river and coming up in a tidal wave of
lights and color ahead, untouchable and a dream now, already smeared in their
eyes with nostalgia, with a panic of memory that began before the thing itself
was gone.

 
          
 
Blown quietly, eddying, they gazed secretly at
a hundred faces of dear friends they were leaving behind, the lamplit people
held and framed by windows which slid by on the wind, it seemed; all of Time
breathing them along. There was no tree they did not examine for old
confessions of love carved and whittled there, no sidewalk they did not skim
across as over fields of mica-snow. For the first time they knew their town was
beautiful and the lonely lights and the ancient bricks beautiful, and they both
felt their eyes grow large with the beauty of this feast they were giving themselves.
All floated upon an evening carrousel, with fitful drifts of music wafting up
here and there, and voices calling and murmuring from houses that were whitely
haunted by television.

 
          
 
The two women passed like needles, sewing one
tree to the next with their perfume. Their eyes were too full, and yet they
kept putting away each detail, each shadow, each solitary oak and elm, each
passing car upon the small snaking streets below, until not only their eyes but
their heads and then their hearts were too full.

 
          
 
I feel like Tm dead, thought Janice, and in
the graveyard on a spring night and everything alive but me and everyone moving
and ready to go on with fife without me. It's like I felt each spring when I
was sixteen, passing the graveyard and weeping for them because they were dead
and it didn't seem fair, on nights as soft as that, that I was alive. I was
guilty of living. And now, here, tonight, I feel they have taken me from the
graveyard and let me go above the town just once more to see what it's like to
be living, to be a town and a people, before they slam the black door on me
again.

 
          
 
Softly, softly, like two white paper lanterns
on a night wind, the women moved over their lifetime and their past, and over
the meadows where the tent cities glowed and the highways where supply trucks
would be clustered and running until dawn. They hovered above it all for a long
time.

 
          
 
The courthouse clock was booming
eleven forty-five
when they
came
hke spider webs floating from the stars, touching on the moonlit pavement
before Janice's old house. The city was asleep, and Janice's house waited for
them to come in searching for their sleep, which was not there.

 
          
 
"Is this us, here?" asked Janice.
"Janice Smith and Leonora Hohnes, in the year 2003?"

 
          
 
"Yes."

 
          
 
Janice licked her lips and stood straight.
"I wish it was some other year."

 
          
 
"1492? 1612?" Leonora sighed, and
the wind in the trees sighed with her, moving away. "It's always Columbus
Day or Plymouth Rock Day, and I'll be darned if I know what we women can do
about it."

 
          
 
"Be old maids."

 
          
 
"Or do just what we're doing."

 
          
 
They opened the door of the warm night house,
the sounds of the town dying slowly in their ears. As they shut the door, the
phone began to ring.

 
          
 
"The call!" cried Janice, running.

 
          
 
Leonora came into the bedroom after her and
already Janice had the receiver up and was saying, "Hello, hello!"
And the operator in a far city was readying the immense apparatus which would
tie two worlds together, and the two women waited, one sitting and pale, the
other standing, but just as pale, bent toward her.

 
          
 
There was a long pause, full of stars and
time, a waiting pause not unlike the last three years for all of them. And now
the moment had arrived, and it was Janice's turn to phone through millions upon
millions of miles of meteors and comets, running away from the yellow sun which
might boil or bum her words or scorch the meaning from them. But her voice went
like a silver needle through everything, in stitches of talking, across the big
night, reverberating from the moons of Mars. And then her voice found its way
to a man in a room in a city there on another world, five minutes by radio
away. And her message was this:

 
          
 
"Hello, Will. This is Janice!"

 
          
 
She swallowed.

 
          
 
"They say I haven't much time, A
minute."

 
          
 
She closed her eyes.

 
          
 
"I want to talk slow, but they say talk
fast and get it all in. So I want to say—I've decided. I will come up there.
I'll go on the Rocket tomorrow. I will come up there to you, after all. And I
love you. I hope you can hear me. I love you. It's been so long. . . ."

 
          
 
Her voice motioned on its way to that unseen
world. Now, with the message sent, the words said, she wanted to call them
back, to censor, to rearrange them, to make a prettier sentence, a fairer
explanation of her soul. But already the words were hung between planets and
if, by some cosmic radiation, they could have been illuminated, caught fire in
vaporous wonder there, her love would have lit a dozen worlds and startled the
night side of Earth into a premature dawn, she thought. Now the words were not
hers at all, they belonged to space, they belonged to no one until they
arrived, and they were traveling at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a
second to their destination.

 
          
 
What will he say to me? What will he say back
in his minute of time? she wondered. She fussed with and twisted the watch on
her wrist, and the light-phone receiver on her ear crackled and space talked to
her with electrical jigs and dances and audible auroras.

 
          
 
"Has he answered?" whispered
Leonora.

 
          
 
"Shhh!" said Janice, bending, as if
sick.

 
          
 
Then his voice came through space.

 
          
 
"I hear him!" cried Janice.

 
          
 
"What does he say?"

 
          
 
The voice called out from Mars and took itself
through the places where there was no sunrise or sunset, but always the night
with a sun in the middle of the blackness. And somewhere between Mars and Earth
everything of the message was lost, perhaps in a sweep of electrical gravity
rushing by on the flood tides of a meteor, or interfered with by a rain of
silver meteors. In any event, the small words and the unimportant words of the
message were washed away. And his voice came through saying only one word:

 
          
 
". . . love . . ."

 
          
 
After that there was the huge night again and
the sound of stars turning and suns whispering to themselves and the sound of
her heart, like another world in space, filling her earphones.

 
          
 
“Did you hear him?" asked Leonora.

 
          
 
Janice could only nod.

 
          
 
"What did he say, what did he say?"
cried Leonora.

 
          
 
But Janice could not tell anyone; it was much
too good to tell. She sat listening to that one word again and again, as her
memory played it back. She sat listening, while Leonora took the phone away
from her without her knowing it and put it down upon its hook.

 
          
 
Then they were in bed and the lights out and
the night wind blowing through the rooms a smell of the long journey in
darkness and stars, and their voices talking of tomorrow, and the days after
tomorrow which would not be days at all, but day-nights of timeless time; their
voices faded away into sleep or wakeful thinking, and Janice lay alone in her
bed.

 
          
 
Is this how it was over a century ago, she
wondered, when the women, the night before, lay ready for sleep, or not ready,
in the small towns of the East, and heard the sound of horses in the night and
the creak of the Conestoga wagons ready to go, and the brooding of oxen under
the trees, and the cry of children already lonely before their time?
All the sounds of arrivals and departures into the deep forests and
fields, the blacksmiths working in their own red hells through
midnight
?
And the smell of bacons and hams ready for the journeying,
and the heavy feel of the wagons like ships foundering with goods, with water
in the wooden kegs to tilt and slop across prairies, and the chickens
hysterical in their slung-beneath-the-wagon crates, and the dogs running out to
the wilderness ahead and, fearful, running back with a look of empty space in
their eyes? Is this, then, how it
was

 
          
 
So long ago?
On the
rim of the precipice, on the edge of the cliff of stars. In their time the
smell of buffalo, and in our time the smell of the Rocket. Is this, then, how
it was?

 
          
 
And she decided, as sleep assumed the dreaming
for her, that yes, yes indeed, very much so, irrevocably, this was as it had
always been and would forever continue to be.

 
          
 
William Acton rose to his feet. The clock on
the mantel ticked
midnight
.

 
          
 
He looked at his fingers and he looked at the
large room around him and he looked at the man lying on the floor. William
Acton, whose fingers had stroked typewriter keys and made love and fried ham
and eggs for early breakfasts, had now accomplished a murder with those same
ten whorled fingers.

 
          
 
He had never thought of himself as a sculptor
and yet, in this moment, looking down between his hands at the body upon the
polished hardwood floor, he realized that by some sculptural clenching and
remodeling and twisting of human clay he had taken hold of this man named
Donald Huxley and changed his physiognomy, the very frame of his body.

 
          
 
With a twist of his fingers he had wiped away
the exacting ghtter of Huxley's gray eyes; replaced it with a blind dullness of
eye cold in socket. The fips, always pink and sensuous, were gaped to show the
equine teeth, the yellow incisors, the nico-tined canines, the gold-inlaid
molars. The nose, pink also, was now mottled, pale, discolored, as were the
ears. Huxley's hands,

           
 
Upon the floor, were open, pleading for the
first time in their lives, instead of demanding.

 
          
 
Yes, it was an artistic conception. On the
whole, the change had done Huxley a share of good. Death made him a handsomer
man to deal with. You could talk to him now and he'd have to listen.

 
          
 
William Acton looked at his own fingers.

 
          
 
It was done. He could not change it back. Had
anyone heard? He listened. Outside, the normal late sounds of street traflic
continued. There was no banging of the house door, no shoulder wrecking the
portal into kindling, no voices demanding entrance. The murder, the sculpturing
of clay from warmth to coldness was done, and nobody knew.

 
          
 
Now what? The clock ticked
midnight
. His every impulse exploded him in
a hysteria
toward the door. Rush, get away, run, never come
back, board a train, hail a taxi, get, go, run, walk, saunter, but get the
blazes out of here!

 
          
 
His hands hovered before his eyes, floating,
turning.

 
          
 
He twisted them in slow deliberation; they
felt airy and feather-light. Why was he staring at them this way? he inquired
of himself. Was there something in them of immense interest that he should
pause now, after a successful throttling, and examine them whorl by whorl?

 
          
 
They were ordinary hands. Not thick, not thin,
not long, not short, not hairy, not naked, not manicured and yet not dirty, not
soft and yet not callused, not wrinkled and yet not smooth; not murdering hands
at all—and yet not innocent. He seemed to find them miracles to look upon.

 
          
 
It was not the hands as hands he was
interested in, nor the fingers as fingers. In the numb timelessness after an
accomplished violence he found interest only in the tips of his fingers.

 
          
 
The clock ticked upon the mantel.

 
          
 
He knelt by Huxley's body, took a handkerchief
from Huxley's pocket, and began methodically to swab Huxley's throat with it.
He brushed and massaged the throat and wiped the face and the back of the neck
with a fierce energy. Then he stood up.

           
 
He looked at the throat. He looked at the
polished floor. He bent slowly and gave the floor a few dabs with the
handkerchief, then he scowled and swabbed the floor; first, near the head of
the corpse; secondly, near the arms. Then he polished the floor all around the
body. He polished the floor one yard from the body on all sides. Then he
polished the floor two yards from the body on all sides. Then he polished the
floor three yards from the body in all directions. Then he—

 
          
 
He stopped.

 
          
 
There was a moment when he saw the entire
house, the mirrored halls, the carved doors, the splendid furniture; and, as
clearly as if it were being repeated word for word, he heard Huxley talking and
himself talking just the way they had talked only an hour ago.

 
          
 
Finger on Huxley's doorbell. Huxley's door
opening.

 
          
 
"Oh!" Huxley shocked. "It's
you,
Acton
."

 
          
 
"Where's my wife, Huxley?"

 
          
 
“Do you think I'd tell you, really? Don't
stand out there, you idiot. If you want to talk business, come in. Through that
door. There. Into the library."

 
          
 
Acton
had touched the library door.

 
          
 
'T
)rink
?"

 
          
 
"I need one. I can't believe Lily is
gone, that she—"

 
          
 
"There's a bottle of burgundy,
Acton
.
Mind fetching it from that cabinet?"

 
          
 
Yes, fetch it. Handle it. Touch it. He did.

 
          
 
"Some interesting first
editions there,
Acton
.
Feel this binding. Feel of it."

 
          
 
"I didn't come to see books, I—"

 
          
 
He had touched the books and the library table
and touched the burgundy bottle and burgundy glasses.

 
          
 
Now, squatting on the floor beside Huxley's
cold body with the polishing handkerchief in his fingers, motionless, he stared
at the house, the walls, the furniture about him, his eyes widening, his mouth
dropping, stunned by what he realized and what he saw. He shut his eyes,
dropped his head, crushed the handkerchief between his hands, wadding it,
biting his lips with his teeth, pulling in on himself.

 
          
 
The fingerprints were everywhere, everywhere!

 
          
 
"Mind getting the burgundy,
Acton
,
eh? The burgundy bottle, eh?
With your fingers, eh?
I'm terribly tired. You understand?"

 
          
 
A pair of gloves.

 
          
 
Before he did one more thing, before he
polished another area, he must have a pair of gloves, or he might
unintentionally, after cleaning a surface, redistribute his identity.

 
          
 
He put his hands in his pockets. He walked through
the house to the hall umbrella stand, the hatrack. Huxley's overcoat. He pulled
out the overcoat pockets.

 
          
 
No gloves.

 
          
 
His hands in his pockets again, he walked
upstairs, moving with a controlled swiftness, allowing himself nothing frantic,
nothing wild. He had made the initial error of not wearing gloves (but, after
all, he hadn't planned a murder, and his subconscious, which may have known of
the crime before its commitment, had not even hinted he might need gloves
before the night was finished), so now he had to sweat for his sin of omission.
Somewhere in the house there must be at least one pair of gloves. He would have
to hurry; there was every chance that someone might visit Huxley, even at this
hour. Rich friends drinking themselves in and out the door, laughing, shouting,
coming and going without so much as hello-good-by. He would have until six in
the morning, at the outside, when Huxley's friends were to pick Huxley up for
the trip to the airport and
Mexico City
.
. . .

 
          
 
Acton
hurried about upstairs opening drawers, using the handkerchief as blotter. He
untidied seventy or eighty drawers in six
rooms,
left
them with their tongues, so to speak, hanging out, ran on to new ones. He felt
naked, unable to do anything until he found gloves. He might scour the entire
house with the handkerchief, buffing every possible surface where fingerprints
might lie, then accidentally bump a wall here or there, thus sealing his own
fate with one microscopic, whirling symbol! It would be putting his stamp of approval
on the murder, that's what it would be! Like those waxen seals in the old days
when they rattled papyrus, flourished ink, dusted all with sand to dry the ink,
and pressed their signet rings in hot crimson tallow at the bottom. So it would
be if he left one, mind you, one fingerprint upon the scene! His approval of
the murder did not extend as far as affixing said seal.

 
          
 
More drawers! Be quiet, be curious, be
careful, he told himself.

 
          
 
At the bottom of the eighty-fifth drawer he
found gloves.

 
          
 
"Oh, my Lord, my Lord!" He slumped
against the bureau, sighing. He tried the gloves on, held them up, proudly
flexed them, buttoned them. They were soft, gray, thick, impregnable. He could
do all sorts of tricks with hands now and leave no trace. He thumbed his nose
in the bedroom mirror, sucking his teeth.

 
          
 
"NO!" cried Huxley.

 
          
 
What a wicked plan it had been.

 
          
 
Huxley had fallen to the floor, purposely! Oh,
what a wickedly clever man! Down onto the hardwood floor had dropped Huxley,
with
Acton
after him. They had
rolled and tussled and clawed at the floor, printing and printing it with their
frantic fingertips! Huxley had slipped away a few feet,
Acton
crawling after to lay hands on his neck and squeeze until the life came out
like paste from a tube!

 
          
 
Gloved, William Acton returned to the room and
knelt down upon the floor and laboriously began the task of swabbing every
wildly infested inch of it. Inch by inch, inch by inch, he polished and
polished until he could almost see his intent, sweating face in it. Then he
came to a table and polished the leg of it, on up its solid body and along the
knobs and over the top. He came to a bowl of wax fruit, burnished the filigree
silver, plucked out the wax fruit and wiped them clean, leaving the fruit at
the bottom unpolished.

 
          
 
"I'm sure I didn't touch them" he
said.

 
          
 
After rubbing the table he came to a picture
frame hung over it.

 
          
 
"I'm certain I didn't touch that" he
said.

 
          
 
He stood looking at it.

 
          
 
He glanced at all the doors in the room. Which
doors had he used tonight? He couldn't remember. Polish all of them, then. He
started on the doorknobs, shined them all up, and then he curried the doors
from head to foot, taking no chances. Then he went to all the furniture in the
room and wiped the chair arms.

 
          
 
"That chair you're sitting in,
Acton
,
is
an old Louis XTV piece. Feel that material," said Huxley.

 
          
 
"I didn't come to talk furniture, Huxley!
I came about Lily."

 
          
 
"Oh, come off it, you're not that serious
about her. She doesn't love you, you know. She's told me she'll go with me to
Mexico
City
tomorrow."

 
          
 
"You and your money and
your damned furniture!"

 
          
 
"It's nice furniture,
Acton
;
be a good guest and feel of it."