The Stories of Ray Bradbury (82 page)

‘She was my assistant, that’s all. I simply used her as a model.’

‘You’re making me sweat,’ said the detective. ‘Do you think I’m a fool? Do you think I don’t know love when I see it? I’ve watched you handle the marionette, I’ve seen you talk to it, I’ve seen how you make it react to you. You’re in love with the puppet naturally, because you loved the original woman very, very much. I’ve lived too long not to sense that. Hell, Fabian, stop fencing around.’

Fabian lifted his pale slender hands, turned them over, examined them and let them fall.

‘All right. In 1934 I was billed as Fabian and Sweet William. Sweet William was a small bulb-nosed boy dummy I carved a long time ago. I was in Los Angeles when this girl appeared at the stage door one night. She’d followed my work for years. She was desperate for a job and she hoped to be my assistant…’

He remembered her in the half light of the alley behind the theatre and how startled he was at her freshness and eagerness to work with and for
him and the way the cool rain touched softly down through the narrow alleyway and caught in small spangles through her hair, melting in dark warmness, and the rain beaded upon her white porcelain hand holding her coat together at her neck.

He saw her lips’ motion in the dark and her voice, separated off on another sound track, it seemed, speaking to him in the autumn wind, and he remembered that without his saying yes or no or perhaps she was suddenly on the stage with him, in the great pouring bright light, and in two months he, who had always prided himself on his cynicism and disbelief, had stepped off the rim of the world after her, plunging down a bottomless place of no limit and no light anywhere.

Arguments followed, and more than arguments—things said and done that lacked all sense and sanity and fairness. She had edged away from him at last, causing his rages and remarkable hysterias. Once he burned her entire wardrobe in a fit of jealousy. She had taken this quietly. But then one night he handed her a week’s notice, accused her of monstrous disloyalty, shouted at her, seized her, slapped her again and again across the face, bullied her about and thrust her out the door, slamming it!

She disappeared that night.

When he found the next day that she was really gone and there was nowhere to find her, it was like standing in the center of a titanic explosion. All the world was smashed flat and all the echoes of the explosion came back to reverberate at midnight, at four in the morning, at dawn, and he was up early, stunned with the sound of coffee simmering and the sound of matches being struck and cigarettes lit and himself trying to shave and looking at mirrors that were sickening in their distortion.

He clipped out all the advertisements that he took in the papers and pasted them in neat rows in a scrapbook—all the ads describing her and telling about her and asking for her back. He even put a private detective on the case. People talked. The police dropped by to question him. There was more talk.

But she was gone like a piece of white incredibly fragile tissue paper, blown over the sky and down. A record of her was sent to the largest cities, and that was the end of it for the police. But not for Fabian. She might be dead or just running away, but wherever she was he knew that somehow and in some way he would have her back.

One night he came home, bringing his own darkness with him, and collapsed upon a chair, and before he knew it he found himself speaking to Sweet William in the totally black room.

‘William, it’s all over and done. I can’t keep it up!’

And William cried, ‘Coward! Coward!’ from the air above his head, out of the emptiness. ‘You can get her back if you want!’

Sweet William squeaked and clappered at him in the night. ‘Yes, you
can!
Think!
’ he insisted. ‘Think of a way. You can do it. Put me aside, lock me up. Start all over.’

‘Start all over?’

‘Yes,’ whispered Sweet William, and darkness moved within darkness. ‘Yes. Buy wood. Buy fine new wood. Buy hard-grained wood. Buy beautiful fresh new wood. And carve. Carve slowly and carve carefully. Whittle away. Cut delicately. Make the little nostrils so. And cut her thin black eyebrows round and high, so, and make her cheeks in small hollows. Carve, carve…’

‘No! It’s foolish. I could never do it!’

‘Yes, you could. Yes you could, could, could, could…’

The voice faded, a ripple of water in an underground stream. The stream rose up and swallowed him. His head fell forward. Sweet William sighed. And then the two of them lay like stones buried under a waterfall.

The next morning, John Fabian bought the hardest, finest-grained piece of wood that he could find and brought it home and laid it on the table, but could not touch it. He sat for hours staring at it. It was impossible to think that out of this cold chunk of material he expected his hands and his memory to re-create something warm and pliable and familiar. There was no way even faintly to approximate that quality of rain and summer and the first powderings of snow upon a clear pane of glass in the middle of a December night. No way, no way at all to catch the snowflake without having it melt swiftly in your clumsy fingers.

And yet Sweet William spoke out, sighing and whispering, after midnight, ‘You can do it. Oh, yes, yes, you can do it!’

And so he began. It took him an entire month to carve her hands into things as natural and beautiful as shells lying in the sun. Another month and the skeleton, like a fossil imprint he was searching out, stamped and hidden in the wood, was revealed, all febrile and so infinitely delicate as to suggest the veins in the white flesh of an apple.

And all the while Sweet William lay mantled in dust in his box that was fast becoming a very real coffin. Sweet William croaking and wheezing some feeble sarcasm, some sour criticism, some hint, some help, but dying all the time, fading, soon to be untouched, soon to be like a sheath molted in summer and left behind to blow in the wind.

As the weeks passed and Fabian molded and scraped and polished the new wood, Sweet William lay longer and longer in stricken silence, and one day as Fabian held the puppet in his hand Sweet William seemed to look at him a moment with puzzled eyes and then there was a death rattle in his throat.

And Sweet William was gone.

Now as he worked, a fluttering, a faint motion of speech began far back in his throat, echoing and re-echoing, speaking silently like a breeze among
dry leaves. And then for the first time he held the doll in a certain way in his hands and memory moved down his arms and into his fingers and from his fingers into the hollowed wood and the tiny hands flickered and the body became suddenly soft and pliable and her eyes opened and looked up at him.

And the small mouth opened the merest fraction of an inch and she was ready to speak and he knew all of the things that she must say to him, he knew the first and the second and the third things he would have her say. There was a whisper, a whisper, a whisper.

The tiny head turned this way gently, that way gently. The mouth half opened again and began to speak. And as it spoke he bent his head and he could feel the warm breath—of
course
it was there!—coming from her mouth, and when he listened very carefully, holding her to his head, his eyes shut, wasn’t
it
there, too, softly,
gently
—the beating of her heart?

Krovitch sat in a chair for a full minute after Fabian stopped talking. Finally he said, ‘I
see
. And your wife?’

‘Alyce? She was my second assistant, of course. She worked very hard and, God help her, she loved me. It’s hard now to know why I ever married her. It was unfair of me.’

‘What about the dead man—Ockham?’

‘I never saw him before you showed me his body in the theater basement yesterday.’

‘Fabian,’ said the detective.

‘It’s the truth!’

‘Fabian.’

‘The truth, the truth, damn it, I swear it’s the truth!’

‘The truth.’ There was a whisper like the sea coming in on the gray shore at early morning. The water was ebbing in a fine lace on the sand. The sky was cold and empty. There were no people on the shore. The sun was gone. And the whisper said again, ‘The truth.’

Fabian sat up straight and took hold of his knees with his thin hands. His face was rigid. Krovitch found himself making the same motion he had made the day before—looking at the gray ceiling as if it were a November sky and a lonely bird going over and away, gray within the cold grayness.

‘The truth.’ Fading. ‘The truth.’

Krovitch lifted himself and moved as carefully as he could to the far side of the dressing room where the golden box lay open and inside the box the thing that whispered and talked and could laugh sometimes and could sometimes sing. He carried the golden box over and set it down in front of Fabian and waited for him to put his living hand within the gloved delicate hollowness, waited for the fine small mouth to quiver and the eyes to focus. He did not have to wait long.

‘The first letter came a month ago.’

‘No.’

‘The first letter came a month ago.’

‘No,
no
!’

‘The letter said. “Riabouchinska, born 1914, died 1934. Born again in 1935.” Mr Ockham was a juggler. He’d been on the same bill with John and Sweet William years before. He remembered that once there had been a woman, before there was a puppet.’

‘No, that’s not true!’

‘Yes,’ said the voice.

Snow was falling in silences and even deeper silences through the dressing room. Fabian’s mouth trembled. He stared at the blank walls as if seeking some new door by which to escape. He half rose from his chair. ‘Please…’

‘Ockham threatened to tell about us to everyone in the world.’

Krovitch saw the doll quiver, saw the fluttering of the lips, saw Fabian’s eyes widen and fix and his throat convulse and tighten as if to stop the whispering.

‘I—I was in the room when Mr Ockham came. I lay in my box and I listened and heard, and I
know
.’ The voice blurred, then recovered and went on. ‘Mr Ockham threatened to tear me up, burn me into ashes if John didn’t pay him a thousand dollars. Then suddenly there was a falling sound. A cry. Mr Ockham’s head must have struck the floor. I heard John cry out and I heard him swearing, I heard him sobbing. I heard a gasping and a choking sound.’

‘You heard nothing! You’re deaf, you’re blind! You’re wood!’ cried Fabian.

‘But I
hear
!’ she said, and stopped as if someone had put a hand to her mouth.

Fabian had leaped to his feet now and stood with the doll in his hand. The mouth clapped twice, three times, then finally made words. ‘The choking sound stopped. I heard John drag Mr Ockham down the stairs under the theater to the old dressing rooms that haven’t been used in years. Down, down, down, I heard them going away and away—down…’

Krovitch stepped back as if he were watching a motion picture that had suddenly grown monstrously tall. The figures terrified and frightened him, they were immense, they towered! They threatened to inundate him with size. Someone had turned up the sound so that it screamed.

He saw Fabian’s teeth, a grimace, a whisper, a clenching. He saw the man’s eyes squeeze shut.

Now the soft voice was so high and faint it trembled toward nothingness.

‘I’m not made to live this way. This way. There’s nothing for us now.
Everyone will know, everyone will. Even when you killed him and I lay asleep last night, I dreamed. I knew, I realized. We both knew, we both realized that these would be our last days, our last hours. Because while I’ve lived with your weakness and I’ve lived with your lies, I can’t live with something that kills and hurts in killing. There’s no way to go on from here. How
can
I live alongside such knowledge?…’

Fabian held her into the sunlight which shone dimly through the small dressing-room window. She looked at him and there was nothing in her eyes. His hand shook and in shaking made the marionette tremble, too. Her mouth closed and opened, closed and opened, closed and opened, again and again and again. Silence.

Fabian moved his fingers unbelievingly to his own mouth. A film slid across his eyes. He looked like a man lost in the street, trying to remember the number of a certain house, trying to find a certain window with a certain light. He swayed about, staring at the walls, at Krovitch, at the doll, at his free hand, turning the fingers over, touching his throat, opening his mouth. He listened.

Miles away in a cave, a single wave came in from the sea and whispered down in foam. A gull moved soundlessly, not beating its wings—a shadow.

‘She’s gone. She’s gone. I can’t find her. She’s run off. I can’t find her. I can’t find her. I try, I try, but she’s run away off far. Will you help me? Will you help me find her? Will you help me find her? Will you please help me find her?’

Riabouchinska slipped bonelessly from his limp hand, folded over and glided noiselessly down to lie upon the cold floor, her eyes closed, her mouth shut.

Fabian did not look at her as Krovitch led him out the door.

Hugh Fortnum woke to Saturday’s commotions and lay, eyes shut, savoring each in its turn.

Below, bacon in a skillet; Cynthia waking him with fine cookings instead of cries.

Across the hall, Tom
actually
taking a shower.

Far off in the bumblebee dragonfly light, whose voice was already damning the weather, the time, and the tides? Mrs Goodbody? Yes. That Christian giantess, six-foot tall with her shoes off, the gardener extraordinary, the octogenarian dietician and town philosopher.

He rose, unhooked the screen and leaned out to hear her cry, ‘There! Take
that
!
This’ll
fix you! Hah!’

‘Happy Saturday, Mrs Goodbody!’

The old woman froze in clouds of bug spray pumped from an immense gun.

‘Nonsense!’ she shouted. ‘With these fiends and pests to watch for?’

‘What kind
this
time?’ called Fortnum.

‘I don’t want to shout it to the jaybirds, but’—she glanced suspiciously around—‘what would you say if I told you I was the first line of defense concerning flying saucers?’

‘Fine,’ replied Fortnum. ‘There’ll be rockets between the worlds any year now.’

‘There already
are
!’ She pumped, aiming the spray under the hedge. ‘There! Take that!’

He pulled his head back in from the fresh day, somehow not as highspirited as his first response had indicated. Poor soul, Mrs Goodbody. Always the essence of reason. And now what? Old age?

The doorbell rang.

He grabbed his robe and was half down the stairs when he heard a voice say. ‘Special delivery. Fortnum?’ and saw Cynthia turn from the front door, a small packet in her hand.

‘Special-delivery airmail for your son.’

Tom was downstairs like a centipede.

‘Wow! That must be from the Great Bayou Novelty Greenhouse!’

‘I wish I were as excited about ordinary mail,’ observed Fortnum.

‘Ordinary?!’ Tom ripped the cord and paper wildly. ‘Don’t you read the back pages of
Popular Mechanics
? Well, here
they
are!’

Everyone peered into the small open box.

‘Here,’ said Fortnum, ‘
what
are?’

‘The Sylvan Glade Jumbo-Giant Guaranteed Growth Raise-Them-in-Your-Cellar-for-Big-Profit Mushrooms!’

‘Oh, of course,’ said Fortnum. ‘How silly of me.’

Cynthia squinted. ‘Those little teeny bits?’

‘“Fabulous growth in twenty-four hours,”’ Tom quoted from memory. ‘“Plant them in your cellar…”’

Fortnum and wife exchanged glances.

‘Well,’ she admitted, ‘it’s better than frogs and green snakes.’

‘Sure is!’ Tom ran.

‘Oh, Tom,’ said Fortnum lightly.

Tom paused at the cellar door.

‘Tom,’ said his father. ‘Next time, fourth-class mail would do fine.’

‘Heck,’ said Tom. ‘They must’ve made a mistake, thought I was some rich company. Airmail special, who can afford that?’

The cellar door slammed.

Fortnum, bemused, scanned the wrapper a moment then dropped it into the wastebasket. On his way to the kitchen, he opened the cellar door.

Tom was already on his knees, digging with a hand rake in the dirt.

He felt his wife beside him, breathing softly, looking down into the cool dimness.

‘Those
are
mushrooms. I hope. Not…toadstools?’

Fortnum laughed. ‘Happy harvest, farmer!’

Tom glanced up and waved.

Fortnum shut the door, took his wife’s arm and walked her out to the kitchen, feeling fine.

Toward noon, Fortnum was driving toward the nearest market when he saw Roger Willis, a fellow Rotarian and a teacher of biology at the town high school, waving urgently from the sidewalk.

Fortnum pulled his car up and opened the door.

‘Hi, Roger, give you a lift?’

Willis responded all too eagerly, jumping in and slamming the door.

‘Just the man I want to see. I’ve put off calling for days. Could you play psychiatrist for five minutes, God help you?’

Fortnum examined his friend for a moment as he drove quietly on.

‘God help you, yes. Shoot.’

Willis sat back and studied his fingernails. ‘Let’s just drive a moment. There. Okay. Here’s what I want to say: Something’s wrong with the world.’

Fortnum laughed easily. ‘Hasn’t there always been?’

‘No, no, I mean…something strange—something unseen—is happening.’

‘Mrs Goodbody,’ said Fortnum, half to himself, and stopped.

‘Mrs Goodbody?’

‘This morning, gave me a talk on flying saucers.’

‘No.’ Willis bit the knuckle of his forefinger nervously. ‘Nothing like saucers. At least, I don’t think. Tell me, what exactly is intuition?’

‘The conscious recognition of something that’s been subconscious for a long time. But don’t quote this amateur psychologist!’ He laughed again.

‘Good, good!’ Willis turned, his face lighting. He readjusted himself in the seat. ‘That’s it! Over a long period, things gather, right? All of a sudden, you have to spit, but you don’t remember saliva collecting. Your hands are dirty, but you don’t know how they got that way. Dust falls on you every day and you don’t feel it. But when you get enough dust collected up, there it is, you see and name it. That’s intuition, as far as I’m concerned. Well, what kind of dust has been falling on
me
? A few meteors in the sky at night? funny weather just before dawn? I don’t know. Certain colors, smells, the way the house creaks at three in the morning? Hair prickling on my arms? All I know is, the damn dust has collected. Quite suddenly I know.’

‘Yes,’ said Fortnum, disquieted. ‘But what
is
it you know?’

Willis looked at his hands in his lap. ‘I’m afraid. I’m not afraid. Then I’m afraid again, in the middle of the day. Doctor’s checked me. I’m A-one. No family problems. Joe’s a fine boy, a good son. Dorothy? She’s remarkable. With her I’m not afraid of growing old or dying.’

‘Lucky man.’

‘But beyond my luck now. Scared stiff, really, for myself, my family; even right now, for you.’

‘Me?’ said Fortnum.

They had stopped now by an empty lot near the market. There was a moment of great stillness, in which Fortnum turned to survey his friend. Willis’s voice had suddenly made him cold.

‘I’m afraid for everybody,’ said Willis. ‘Your friends, mine, and their friends, on out of sight. Pretty silly, eh?’

Willis opened the door, got out and peered in at Fortnum.

Fortnum felt he had to speak. ‘Well, what do we do about it?’

Willis looked up at the sun burning blind in the sky. ‘Be aware,’ he said slowly. ‘Watch everything for a few days.’

‘Everything?’

‘We don’t use half what God gave us, ten per cent of the time. We ought to hear more, feel more, smell more, taste more. Maybe there’s something wrong with the way the wind blows these weeds there in the lot. Maybe it’s the sun up on those telephone wires or the cicadas singing in the elm trees. If only we could stop, look, listen, a few days, a few nights, and compare notes. Tell me to shut up then, and I will.’

‘Good enough,’ said Fortnum, playing it lighter than he felt. ‘I’ll look around. But how do I know the thing I’m looking for when I see it?’

Willis peered in at him, sincerely. ‘You’ll know. You’ve got to know. Or we’re done for, all of us,’ he said quietly.

Fortnum shut the door and didn’t know what to say. He felt a flush of embarrassment creeping up his face. Willis sensed this.

‘Hugh, do you think I’m…off my rocker?’

‘Nonsense!’ said Fortnum, too quickly. ‘You’re just nervous, is all. You should take a week off.’

Willis nodded. ‘See you Monday night?’

‘Any time. Drop around.’

‘I hope I will. Hugh. I really hope I will.’

Then Willis was gone, hurrying across the dry weed-grown lot toward the side entrance of the market.

Watching him go, Fortnum suddenly did not want to move. He discovered that very slowly he was taking deep breaths, weighing the silence. He licked his lips, tasting the salt. He looked at his arm on the doorsill, the sunlight burning the golden hairs. In the empty lot the wind moved all alone to itself. He leaned out to look at the sun, which stared back with one massive stunning blow of intense power that made him jerk his head in. He exhaled. Then he laughed out loud. Then he drove away.

The lemonade glass was cool and deliciously sweaty. The ice made music inside the glass, and the lemonade was just sour enough, just sweet enough on his tongue. He sipped, he savored, he tilted back in the wicker rocking chair on the twilight front porch, his eyes closed. The crickets were chirping out on the lawn. Cynthia, knitting across from him on the porch, eyed him curiously; he could feel her attention.

‘What are you up to?’ she said at last.

‘Cynthia,’ he said, ‘is your intuition in running order? Is this earthquake weather? Is the land going to sink? Will war be declared? Or is it only that our delphinium will die of the blight?’

‘Hold on. Let me feel my bones.’

He opened his eyes and watched Cynthia in turn closing hers and sitting absolutely statue-still, her hands on her knees. Finally she shook her head and smiled.

‘No. No war declared. No land sinking. Not even a blight. Why?’

‘I’ve met a lot of doom talkers today. Well, two anyway, and—’

The screen door burst wide. Fortnum’s body jerked as if he had been struck.

‘What—!’

Tom, a gardener’s wooden flat in his arms, stepped out on the porch.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong, Dad?’

‘Nothing.’ Fortnum stood up, glad to be moving. ‘Is that the crop?’

Tom moved forward eagerly. ‘Part of it. Boy, they’re doing great. In just seven hours, with lots of water, look how big the darn things are!’ He set the flat on the table between his parents.

The crop was indeed plentiful. Hundreds of small grayish-brown mushrooms were sprouting up in the damp soil.

‘I’ll be damned,’ said Fortnum, impressed.

Cynthia put out her hand to touch the flat, then took it away uneasily.

‘I hate to be a spoilsport, but…there’s no way for these to be anything else but mushrooms, is there?’

Tom looked as if he had been insulted. ‘What do you think I’m going to feed you? Poisoned fungoids?’

‘That’s just it,’ said Cynthia quickly. ‘How do you tell them apart?’

‘Eat ’em,’ said Tom. ‘If you live, they’re mushrooms. If you drop dead—
well
!’

He gave a great guffaw, which amused Fortnum but only made his mother wince. She sat back in her chair.

‘I—I don’t like them,’ she said.

‘Boy, oh, boy.’ Tom seized the flat angrily. ‘When are we going to have the next wet-blanket sale in
this
house?’

He shuffled morosely away.

‘Tom—’ said Fortnum.

‘Never mind,’ said Tom. ‘Everyone figures they’ll be ruined by the boy entrepreneur. To heck with it!’

Fortnum got inside just as Tom heaved the mushrooms, flat and all, down the cellar stairs. He slammed the cellar door and ran out the back door.

Fortnum turned back to his wife, who, stricken, glanced away.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why, I just
had
to say that to Tom. I—’

The phone rang. Fortnum brought it outside on its extension cord.

‘Hugh?’ It was Dorothy Willis’s voice. She sounded suddenly very old and very frightened. ‘Hugh, Roger isn’t there, is he?’

‘Dorothy? No.’

‘He’s gone!’ said Dorothy. ‘All his clothes were taken from the closet.’ She began to cry.

‘Dorothy, hold on, I’ll be there in a minute.’

‘You must help, oh, you must. Something’s happened to him. I know it,’ She wailed. ‘Unless you do something, we’ll never see him alive again.’

Very slowly he put the receiver back on its hook, her voice weeping inside it. The night crickets quite suddenly were very loud. He felt the hairs, one by one, go up on the back of his neck.

Hair can’t do that, he thought. Silly, silly. It can’t do that, not in
real
life, it can’t!

But, one by slow prickling one, his hair did.

The wire hangers were indeed empty. With a clatter, Fortnum shoved them aside and down along the rod, then turned and looked out of the closet at Dorothy Willis and her son Joe.

‘I was just walking by,’ said Joe, ‘and saw the closet empty, all Dad’s clothes gone!’

‘Everything was fine,’ said Dorothy. ‘We’ve had a wonderful life. I don’t understand, I don’t I don’t!’ She began to cry again, putting her hands to her face.

Fortnum stepped out of the closet.

‘You didn’t hear him leave the house?’

‘We were playing catch out front,’ said Joe. ‘Dad said he had to go in for a minute. I went around back. Then he was gone!’

‘He must have packed quickly and walked wherever he was going, so we wouldn’t hear a cab pull up in front of the house.’

They were moving out through the hall now.

‘I’ll check the train depot and the airport.’ Fortnum hesitated. ‘Dorothy, is there anything in Roger’s background—’

‘It wasn’t insanity took him.’ She hesitated. ‘I feel, somehow, he was kidnapped.’

Fortnum shook his head. ‘It doesn’t seem reasonable he would arrange to pack, walk out of the house and go meet his abductors.’

Dorothy opened the door as if to let the night or the night wind move down the hall as she turned to stare back through the rooms, her voice wandering.

‘No. Somehow they came into the house. Right in front of us, they stole him away.’

And then: ‘A terrible thing has happened.’

Fortnum stepped out into the night of crickets and rustling trees. The doom talkers, he thought, talking their dooms. Mrs Goodbody, Roger, and now Roger’s wife. Something terrible
has
happened. But what, in God’s name? And how?

He looked from Dorothy to her son. Joe, blinking the wetness from his
eyes, took a long time to turn, walk along the hall and stop, fingering the knob of the cellar door.

Fortnum felt his eyelids twitch, his irises flex, as if he were snapping a picture of something he wanted to remember.

Joe pulled the cellar door wide, stepped down out of sight, gone. The door tapped shut.