Bradbury Stories (75 page)

“She can't be much farther on.” Smith was ready to drop, but still he ran. He slugged his feet into the sand and gasped.

I wonder what she's like, thought Drew, moving in his thoughts, freely, wonderingly. I wonder if she's tall and slender or small and very thin. I wonder what color eyes, what color hair she has? I wonder what her voice is like? Sweet, high? Or soft and very low?

I wonder a lot of things. So does Smith. Smith's wondering, too, now. Listen to him wonder and gasp and run and wonder some more. This isn't any good. It'll lead us to something bad, I know. Why do we go on? A silly question. We go on, of course, because we're only human, no more, no less.

I just hope, he thought, that she doesn't have snakes for hair.

“A cave!”

They had come to the side of a small mountain, into which a cave went back through darkness. The footprints vanished within.

Smith snatched forth his electric torch and sent the beam inside, flashing it swiftly about, grinning with apprehension. He moved forward cautiously, his breath rasping in the earphones.

“It won't be long now,” said Drew.

Smith didn't look at him.

They walked together, elbows bumping. Every time Drew tried to draw ahead, Smith grunted and increased his pace; his face angry with color.

The tunnel twisted, but the footprints still appeared as they flicked the torch beam down.

Suddenly they came out into an immense cave. Across it, by a campfire which had gone out, a figure lay.

“There she is!” shouted Smith. “There she is!”

“Dibs,” whispered Drew quietly.

Smith turned, the gun was in his hand. “Get out,” he said.

“What?” Drew blinked at the gun.

“You heard what I said, get out!”

“Now, wait a minute—”

“Get back to the ship, wait for me there!”

“If you think you're going to—”

“I'll count to ten, if you haven't moved by then, I'll burn you where you stand—”

“You're crazy!”

“One, two, three, better start moving.”

“Listen to me, Smith, for Heaven's sake!”

“Four, five, six, I warned you—ah!”

The gun went off.

The bullet struck Drew in the hip, whirling him about to fall face down, crying out with pain. He lay in darkness.

“I didn't mean it, Drew, I didn't!” Smith cried. “It went off; my finger, my hand, nervous; I didn't mean it!” A figure bent down in the blazing light, turned him over. “I'l fix you up, I'm sorry. I'll get her to help us. Just a second!”

The pain in his side, Drew lay watching as the torch turned and Smith rushed loudly across the long cave toward the sleeping figure by the black fire. He heard Smith call out once or twice, saw him approach and bend down to the figure, touch it.

For a long time, Drew waited.

Smith turned the figure over.

From a distance, Drew heard Smith say, “She's dead.”

“What!” called Drew. With fumbling hands he was taking out a small kit of medicine. He broke open a vial of white powder which he swallowed. The pain in his side stopped instantly. Now he went about bandaging the wound. It was bad enough, but not too bad. In the middle distance he saw Smith standing all alone, his torch senselessly in his numb hand, looking down at the woman's figure.

Smith came back and sat down and looked at nothing.

“She's—she's been dead a long long time.”

“But the footprints? What about them?”

“This world, of course, this world. We didn't stop to think. We just ran. I just ran. Like a fool. This world, I didn't think until now. Now I know.”

“What is it?”

“There's no wind, nothing. No seasons, no rain, no storms, no nothing. Ten thousand years ago, in a dying world, that woman there walked across the sands, alone. Maybe the last one alive. With a few oxygen tins to keep her going. Something happened to the planet. The atmosphere drained off into space. No wind, no oxygen, no seasons. And her walking alone.” Smith shaped it in his mind before telling it quietly to Drew, not looking at him. “And she came to this cave and lay down and died.”

“Ten thousand years ago?”

“Ten thousand years. And she's been here ever since. Perfect. Lying here, waiting for us to come and make fools of ourselves. A cosmic joke. Ah, yes! Very funny.”

“But the footprints?”

“No wind. No rain. The footprints look just as fresh as the day she made them, naturally. Everything looks new and fresh. Even her. Except there's something about her. Just by seeing her you know she's been dead a long long while. I don't know what it is.”

His voice faded away.

Suddenly he remembered Drew. “My gun. You. Can I help?”

“I got it all dressed. It was an accident. Let's put it that way.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“You won't try and kill me for this?”

“Shut your mouth. Your finger slipped.”

“It did—it really did! I'm sorry.”

“I know it did. Shut up.” Drew finished packing the wound. “Give me a hand now, we've got to get back to the ship.” Smith helped him grunt to his feet and stand swaying. “Now walk me over so I can take a look at Miss Mars, ten thousand
B.C.
After all that running and this trouble I ought to get a look at her, anyway.”

Smith helped him slowly over to stand above the sprawling form. “Looks like she's only sleeping,” said Smith. “But she's dead, awful dead. Isn't she pretty?”

She looks just like Anna, thought Drew, with a sense of shock. Anna sleeping there, ready to wake and smile and say hello.

“She looks just like Marguerite,” Smith said.

Drew's mouth twitched. “Marguerite?” He hesitated. “Yes. Y-yes, I guess she does.” He shook his head. “All depends on how you look at it. I was just thinking myself—”

“What?”

“Never mind. Let her lie. Leave her there. Now, we've got to hurry. Back to the ship for us.”

“I wonder who she was?”

“We'll never know. A princess maybe. A stenographer in some ancient city, a dancing maid? Come on, Smith.”

They made it back to the rocket in half an hour, slowly and painfully.

“Aren't we fools, though? Really prime fools?”

The rocket door slammed.

The rocket fired up on fountains of red and blue flame.

Below, the sand was stirred and blasted and blown. The footprints, for the first time in ten thousands years were disturbed. They blew away in fine particles. When the fire wind died, the prints were gone.

T
O 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 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?”

“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!
”