Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (8 page)

Frank caught a glimpse of the black suits within the crowd, but no matter how urgently he tried to push past people buying from various stands, he couldn’t get closer.

“Wait!”

Vaguely aware of people staring at him, he saw the black suits disappear in the crowd. After another minute of searching, he had no idea which direction to take.

Baffled, Debby reached him.

“The two guys from the opera,” Frank explained. “It was them.”

“The opera?”

“Don’t you remember?”

People bumped past him, carrying sacks. Frank stepped onto a crate and scanned the crowd, looking for two men in black suits, but all he saw were people in shorts and T-shirts.

“Damn it, I had so many questions.”

Debby looked at him strangely.

Tires squealed. Metal and glass shattered. A woman screamed.

Frank ran toward a side street. Peering through the crowd, he and Debby saw what used to be their SUV. A pickup truck had slammed into it. A woman lay on the pavement, next to a bicycle, its wheels spinning.

“I saw the whole thing,” a man said. “The truck was weaving. Driver must be drunk. He swerved to avoid the girl on the bicycle and hit that car parked over there. It’s a lucky thing no one was killed.”

I
f I hadn’t noticed them,” Frank said, watching a tow truck haul their SUV away, “if they hadn’t distracted me, we’d have been at our car when the accident happened. They saved us. Saved us for a second time.”

“I didn’t see them. The opera? How could it be the same two men?”

T
he third time Frank noticed them was five years later. Thursday. December 10. Seven
P.M.
Debby had been recovering from a miscarriage, her fourth in their fifteen-year marriage. Finally accepting that they would never have children of their own, they discussed the possibility of adopting. Now that Debby felt well enough to leave the house, Frank tried to raise her spirits by taking her to a restaurant that had recently opened and was receiving fabulous reviews.

The restaurant was near Santa Fe’s historic plaza, so after they parked, they walked slightly out of their way to appreciate the holiday lights on the trees and the pueblo-style buildings.

“God, I love this town,” Frank said. Snow started to fall. “Are you warm enough?”

“Yes.” Debby put her hood up.

“Those two guys can’t be,” Frank said, noticing the only two other people in the area.

“Where?”

“There. Over by the museum. All they’re wearing is suits.”

Frank realized that one of them was short, slight, and elderly, with white hair and a matching goatee. Next to him was a tall, well-built young man, with short, dark hair and a square-jawed face.

“My God, it’s them,” he said.

“Who?”

Even at a distance, their eyes were intense.

“Hey!” he called, “Wait. I want to talk to you.”

They turned and walked away.

“Stop!”

They receded into the falling snow.

Frank hurried toward them, leaving the plaza, heading along a quiet street. The snow fell harder.

“Frank!” Debby called.

He looked back. “They went toward the restaurant!”

“Frank!” This time the word came from Alexander where he waited with Brother Richard in front of the restaurant.

Frank stepped toward them and felt his shoes slip on ice under the snow. He arched backward. His skull shattered against a lamppost.

S
tanding next to Alexander and Brother Richard, Frank watched Debby slump beside his body, sobbing. A siren wailed in the distance. People emerged from the restaurant and approached in shock.

Oddly numb, Frank couldn’t feel the cold or the snow falling on him. “I’m dead?”

“Yes,” the elderly man said.

“No.”

“Yes,” the young man said.

“I don’t want to leave my wife.”

“We understand,” Alexander said. “We had people we didn’t want to leave either.”

Snow fell on Debby, covering her coat as she sobbed next to Frank’s body. Bystanders gathered around her.

“Ice under the snow?” Frank asked. “I died because of a crazy accident?”

“Everything in life is an accident.”

“But you lured me toward it. You distracted me so I’d walk faster than I should have in the snow. I told Debby you were guarding us, but she didn’t believe me.”

“She was right. We’re not your guardians.”

“Then what
are
you?”

“Your companions. We stopped you from dying when you weren’t supposed to, and we helped you to die when it was your time,” Alexander said.

“We died as you drove past our wrecked car on the highway, going to the opera,” Brother Richard continued. “The rule is, you bond to someone in the vicinity of where you die. Then you help that person die when he or she is supposed to, and you stop it from happening sooner than it’s supposed to. Everything in its time.”

“The opera?”

“You weren’t supposed to be there. The storms, the difficulty of flying home from Los Angeles, they were supposed to make you stay away. When you went to such extreme efforts to come back to Santa Fe and go to the opera, we had to convince you to leave early.”

“You’re saying Debby and I would have been killed in a car accident if we stayed until the opera was finished?”

“Yes. In a crash in the storm. But only you. Your wife would have survived.”

“And at the farmers’ market?”

“You’d have been killed when the truck swerved to avoid the bicyclist.”

“Only me?”

“Yes. Again your wife would have survived.”

“I don’t want to leave her,” Frank said.

“Everybody dies. But in this case, you won’t be leaving her. She was so near you when you died that you’re now her companion.”

Frank slowly absorbed this information. “I can be with her until she dies?”

“Until you make sure that she dies when she’s supposed to,” Brother Richard said. “Eight months from now, she will die falling from a stepladder. Unless you stop her. Because that’s not her time. Six years from now, she will die in a fire. Unless you stop her from going to a particular hotel. Because, again, that’s not her time.”

“When
will
she die?”

“Twelve years from now. From cancer. That will take its natural course. You won’t need to assist her.”

Frank’s heart felt broken.

“She’ll have remarried by then. She and her new husband will adopt a little boy. Because you love her, you’ll share her happiness. Afterward, she, too, will become someone’s companion.”

“And after we fulfill our duty?” Frank asked.

“We’re allowed to find peace.”

Frank gazed at his sobbing wife as she kneeled beside his body. Blood flowed from his skull, congealing in the cold.

“One day I’ll be allowed to talk to her as you and I are talking?”

“Yes.”

“But in the meantime, she’ll eventually love someone else and adopt a child?”

“Yes.”

“For fifteen years, I was her companion. All I want is for her to be happy. Even if it means not sharing her happiness . . .”

Frank at last felt something: the sting of tears on his cheeks.

“I’ll be glad to be a different sort of companion to her for the rest of her life.”

About “The Companions”

I intended “The Companions” as a reverse take on Ray Bradbury’s “The Crowd.” The story is very personal. Everything that occurs in the first part of the story, all the events at the opera, actually happened to my wife and me. It was one of the eeriest evenings of my life, hurrying from L.A. to go to the opera, battling storms, meeting the old and young man (the younger man from Christ in the Desert) at the dinner, then sitting next to them at the opera, and then leaving the opera because of them, only to find that their car was parked next to ours. I began to think that perhaps my wife and I had guardian angels, that we were meant to leave the opera early to escape the storms, that I was in the land of Ray Bradbury.

—David Morrell

THE EXCHANGE

Thomas F. Monteleone

J
im Holloway was on fire.

Burning with the inexhaustible fuel of youth, fired by the bellows of imagination. Actor, writer, magician, inventor—his ambitions and his dreams as scattered as the stars in a midnight sky. At the advanced age of fifteen, he’d somehow managed to drag the sense of wonder about the world from his earliest years into adolescence, and he attacked each morning with a need to do something special—that day, and every other to follow. Something new and different before nightfall.

Every day.

The kids in his high school mostly thought he was an odd duck, but he didn’t care. His sun-bright blond hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses gave him a striking, memorable appearance, but it was when he spoke that people tended to pay closer attention. Jim had a . . . a
reverence
in his voice when he talked about the world he perceived. His curiosity stretched from the magic life in a drop of water to the mysteries of Mars.

He’d realized that life was an endless quest, full of discovery and adventure, if he would only allow it to be so.

Alone in an unfamiliar city, he walked its avenues in search of the shop of none other than Maestro the Magician. Ads in the back pages of
Amazing Stories
promised miracles of illusion from an address in Providence, Rhode Island, and from that arcane location, Jim had received “The Secret of the Oriental Rings.” Because of a family trip, he now had the chance of a lifetime—to actually roam the shop’s shadowy aisles, to uncover its treasures firsthand.

Other than a January wind to drive him through the streets, he had no idea where he was going. The cold air cut through him like an assassin’s blade, but he didn’t care. It was 1937 and Jim Holloway was on an adventure!

Turning a corner, pulling the collar of his coat closer to his neck, he encountered a palace of dreams—the Majestic Theater on Washington Street. A massive statement of stone, like a temple from a forgotten age, its marquee spoke to Jim:
THINGS TO COME.
He’d seen the film when it premiered in Los Angeles, but encountering it here in this cold New England town made his pulse jump. Yes, he thought with a smile, there are certainly things to come—good things, wondrous and full of magic. He surged past the box office empowered by his endless optimism.

But things changed when he spotted the thin man.

At the far corner, a willowy figure struggled to step up onto the curb, then collapsed like a wind-beaten scarecrow. It happened so quickly, James reacted without thinking. He rushed along the sidewalk to where the man lay motionless, his pipe-stem legs folded beneath him at alarming angles.

“Are you all right?” said James, leaning down to touch the man’s bony shoulder.

“I . . . don’t know if that’s a valid question.” The man looked up with a dour expression. He could have been thirty or sixty—there was no way to tell under the shadowing brim of his fedora.

“Let me help you up.” Jim extended his hand, grabbed the man’s, and gently pulled, surprised at the lack of resistance. So light and frail he seemed, as if his bones were bird-hollow.

Slowly, the man rose, pausing to gather up a package he’d dropped.

“I’ll get that,” said Jim as he scooped up the brown-paper parcel secured with tape and string. One corner had torn open to reveal a sheaf of stationery full of tight penmanship.

Slowly, the man gained his feet, absently brushed his trousers. Jim noticed that although the man was wearing a shirt and tie, his topcoat appeared thin and worn—and beyond that, he felt an essential
sadness
about this man.

Sadness . . . as if just by touching him, Jim felt he knew this brittle man.

Finally standing on his own, the man reached out for the torn package. “Thank you. Thank you very much. I am suffering from the grippe, I fear, and it has left me weak.”

Jim managed a weak smile. “I’m not surprised—if it’s always this cold around here . . .”

The man looked down at him, his face narrow as a hatchet. “Obviously, you’re not from New England.”

“Nope . . . Los Angeles, California! It’s a boomtown, my father says.”

The man seemed not to be listening as he inspected the damage to his package. “I’ve got to mend this before I can mail it,” he muttered. He took a step down the sidewalk and paused as his ankle gave way.

Catching him by the elbow, Jim buoyed him up. “Hey, mister, I think I’d better help you.”

“Nonsense, I’m fine. The postal office is nearby. I’ll be fine.”

Jim shrugged. “Okay by me, but how about if I just walk along with you a little while.”

“Don’t you have a previous destination?” The man spoke in precise clipped tones, as if always aware of each word he chose. He had a formal bearing, as if he’d time-traveled from an earlier age.

“Not really. I’ve been trying to find a store. Maestro’s Magical Shop of Wonders—you heard of it?”

The man paused his slow and deliberate gait. “You’re a magician?”

“Well, sorta. I mean, I want to be a
real
one someday!”

The man nodded. “Well, I have some sorrowful news for you, young man. There
is
no magical shop—”

“What?” Jim felt something
ping
in his heart. No shop? That just wasn’t possible! “What do you mean?”

The man sighed. “I have friends who are aficionados of illusion and theatrics. Maestro’s is a mail-order concern.”

“I don’t understand.” Jim couldn’t conceal the ache in his voice.

“No shop, just a warehouse where immigrants pack and ship the orders they get.”

“But the ads say—”

The man waved him off as they walked slowly toward the next intersection. “The ads, they are part of the illusion, so to speak. Do you think a famous performer such as Maestro would actually have the time, or the inclination, to be a
shopkeeper
?”

Jim noticed he’d intoned that last word as if he could have just as well have said
leper
.

“Nah, I guess you’re right.” Although he still supported the thin man with a deft touch at his elbow, Jim felt something sag within himself. He felt embarrassed when he replayed his oft-thought fantasy of actually meeting the great Maestro. Jeez, he felt like an idiot. But he also felt something far worse—a sense of terrible loss, of a dream dashed upon the rocks of a careless world. As Jim paced his companion, he fought the temptation to surrender to such defeat.

“We turn here,” said the man, indicating a left at the corner. “It’s not much farther.”

As they entered a street lined with giant oaks and shuttered Victorian homes, Jim was reminded of Green Town—his midwestern birthplace. He felt a flutter of memory that he would one day recognize as nostalgia, then tried to forget about the magic shop that never was.

Walking another block in silence, Jim listened to the man’s labored breath, punctuated by a series of greasy coughs. He carried his package against his chest as if it were a shield or a talisman, which fired Jim’s curiosity all the more. He had to know what secrets lay beneath the crinkled brown wrapper, and so he simply asked.

“It’s a partial manuscript,” said the man. “Part of a novel I’ve been badgered into starting.”

A smile widened on Jim’s full face. “Really? Are you a . . .
writer
?”

The man shrugged. “Of a sort. Although some such as that mountebank Tarkington would never think so . . .”

Jim had no idea what he was talking about, but he pushed on. “What do you write?”

For the first time since their encounter, the man enacted the suggestion of smile, a slight grin. “Articles on astronomy. Letters mostly.
Lots
of letters to lots of friends. But . . . I’ve done more than a handful of stories and novelettes for the shudder pulps.”

Jim almost grabbed him by his broomstick arm. “Stories? You write fiction? That’s what
I
want to do!”

“I thought you wanted to be a magician . . .”

“Well, that too! But I love Buck Rogers and H. G. Wells and Poe, and I can’t forget Burroughs . . .”

“You have . . . an energy,” said the man, pausing to look at Jim as though noticing him for the first time, “that I find familiar. What’s your name, boy?”

“James Holloway, but I like just plain Jim just fine.” He extended his hand as his mother had taught him to do.

“And I am Phillips Howard. I feel as though we may have been somehow fated to meet, just-plain-Jim.”

Their handshake was brief, but long enough for Jim to sense the weakness in Phillips’s grip. It was not that limp, dead fish that some people offered but an attempt at strength forever lost. Again, Jim felt overwhelmed by an essential sadness that seemed to radiate from this desiccated man who looked far older than his years.

A
fter departing the post office, Jim suggested they go to the nearest coffee shop, and Phillips couldn’t hide his obvious surprise.

“Upon that, I have several questions. How are you to afford the extravagance? And are you not a bit young to be using caffeine?”

Jim smiled as they returned to the sidewalk. “Well, I’ve got the money I’d saved for Maestro’s, and I figured it was about time I started drinking coffee.”

Phillips regarded him for a moment, then nodded his head. “Very well then. There’s a café down this way. It is run by some Italians, but the coffee is good on a cold day like this.”

As they walked in silence, Jim wondered about a man who considered cups of coffee an outrageous expense. This stiff, spindly man—where did he live?
How
did he live? Jim couldn’t imagine him going home to a cheery family in one of the clapboard houses that lined these cozy streets. Was he really a writer, or was he just an older version of Jim? A dreamer of lives not yet, and maybe never, lived.

T
he coffee shop was not crowded, and Phillips selected a table by the window where thin sunlight promised additional comfort. There was a pleasant conversational drone of other patrons mixed with the accented cries of the staff. Jim liked the frenetic charm of the place and allowed the waiter to recommend cappuccino and biscotti for both of them.

“Tell me about your stories,” said Jim. “Maybe I’ve read them already.”

Phillips looked off through the window as if seeking a reply somewhere in the distance. Then finally: “I doubt it. They appear infrequently and seem to be a strangely acquired taste.”

“What made you want to write?” Jim had never met anyone who’d actually written anything, much less been published. Imagining he might never have this chance again, he let loose his curiosity and his questions.

“I don’t think I had much choice in the matter. If you write, it is because you
must
. Does that make sense?”

“Sure! I feel that way all the time. I’ve been trying to write comics and draw them myself . . . when I’m not writing regular stories, that is. It’s like, well, like there’s the stuff of story all around us, and somebody’s got to recognize them, and then
tell
them, right?”

Phillips’s narrow face brightened for the briefest of instants. It was such an unnatural look for a man of such grim aspect that Jim almost laughed. “I’ve never heard the process explained exactly like that, but I think it certainly obtains.”

“You are
so
lucky,” said Jim. The sentiment just burst out of him, fueled by equal parts admiration and envy. “To see your name in print. I’d give anything to do that.”

“I already have . . . and I fear it’s not worth it.”

“What?” Jim was stunned.

“Have you never been admonished to be careful what you wish for?”

“I don’t think so. Besides, who cares? What you do is special—it’s magic is what it is!”

Phillips sipped from his large cup, savoring the rich brew as he paused to order his thoughts. “You use that word with great frequency.”

“What word?” Jim felt off balance, confused.

“Let me tell you something, Jim Holloway. You seem to be on some kind of frantic mission to . . . to capture lightning in a bottle. But just as there is no magic shop in Providence, there is no magic out in the world for the taking.”

“I don’t think I follow . . .” Jim let his voice trail off as Phillips leaned forward, his gray eyes focused on him.

“There’s only one place you’ll find any magic, and that’s in
here.
” Phillips tapped a fist lightly to his own concave chest. “And it’s a bit of a curse to be placed in charge of it.”

Jim’s expression must have belied his lack of comprehension. When he couldn’t find a proper reply, Phillips continued: “We are the only sad sorcerers you will ever know. Most of us only know one trick, and the true illusion is that we always believe we are the master of many.”

Jim wasn’t sure he understood any of what Phillips intended, but he was afraid to admit it. His companion was issuing some kind of strange warning, it seemed, but Jim was having none of that. Especially from another writer! Incredibly, he found himself getting upset with Phillips, who seemed to be growing insubstantial in the afternoon light, as if he might fade away like an unpleasant fog.