Bradbury Stories (107 page)

Mr. Bigelow squinted. “Is it everything you wanted, sir?”

“Yes!”

“Is the color right? Is it desolate and
terrible
?”

“Very desolate, very terrible!”

“The walls are—
bleak
?”

“Amazingly so!”

“The tarn, is it ‘black and lurid' enough?”

“Most incredibly black and lurid.”

“And the sedge—we've dyed it, you know—is it the proper gray and ebon?”

“Hideous!”

Mr. Bigelow consulted his architectural plans. From these he quoted in part: “Does the whole structure cause an ‘iciness, a sickening of the heart, a dreariness of thought'? The House, the lake, the land, Mr. Stendahl?”

“Mr. Bigelow, it's worth every penny! My God, it's beautiful!”

“Thank you. I had to work in total ignorance. Thank the Lord you had your own private rockets or we'd never have been allowed to bring most of the equipment through. You notice, it's always twilight here, this land, always October, barren, sterile, dead. It took a bit of doing. We killed everything. Ten thousand tons of DDT. Not a snake, frog, or Martian fly left! Twilight always, Mr. Stendahl; I'm proud of that. There are machines, hidden, which blot out the sun. It's always properly ‘dreary.'”

Stendahl drank it in, the dreariness, the oppression, the fetid vapors, the whole “atmosphere,” so delicately contrived and fitted. And that House! That crumbling horror, that evil lake, the fungi, the extensive decay! Plastic or otherwise, who could guess?

He looked at the autumn sky. Somewhere above, beyond, far off, was the sun. Somewhere it was the month of April on the planet Mars, a yellow month with a blue sky. Somewhere above, the rockets burned down to civilize a beautifully dead planet. The sound of their screaming passage was muffled by this dim, soundproofed world, this ancient autumn world.

“Now that my job's done,” said Mr. Bigelow uneasily, “I feel free to ask what you're going to do with all this.”

“With Usher? Haven't you guessed?”

“No.”

“Does the name Usher mean nothing to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, what about
this
name: Edgar Allan Poe?”

Mr. Bigelow shook his head.

“Of course.” Stendahl snorted delicately, a combination of dismay and contempt. “How could I expect you to know blessed Mr. Poe? He died a long while ago, before Lincoln. All of his books were burned in the Great Fire. That's thirty years ago—1975.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Bigelow wisely. “
One of those!
”

“Yes, one of those, Bigelow. He and Lovecraft and Hawthorne and Ambrose Bierce and all the tales of terror and fantasy and horror and, for that matter, tales of the future were burned. Heartlessly. They passed a law. Oh, it started very small. In 1950 and '60 it was a grain of sand. They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.”

“I see.”

“Afraid of the word ‘politics' (which eventually became a synonym for Communism among the more reactionary elements, so I hear, and it was worth your life to use the word!), and with a screw tightened here, a bolt fastened there, a push, a pull, a yank, art and literature were soon like a great twine of taffy strung about, being twisted in braids and tied in knots and thrown in all directions, until there was no more resiliency and no more savor to it. Then the film cameras chopped short and the theaters turned dark, and the print presses trickled down from a great Niagara of reading matter to a mere innocuous dripping of ‘pure' material. Oh, the word ‘escape' was radical, too, I tell you!”

“Was it?”

“It was! Every man, they said, must face reality. Must face the Here and Now! Everything that was
not so
must go. All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be shot in mid-air! So they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning thirty years ago, in 1975; they lined them up, St. Nicholas and the Headless Horseman and Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin and Mother Goose—oh, what a wailing!—and shot them down, and burned the paper castles and the fairy frogs and old kings and the people who lived happily ever after (for of course it was a fact that
nobody
lived happily ever after!), and Once Upon A Time became No More! And they spread the ashes of the Phantom Rickshaw with the rubble of the Land of Oz; they filleted the bones of Glinda the Good and Ozma and shattered Polychrome in a spectroscope and served Jack Pumpkinhead with meringue at the Biologists' Ball! The Beanstalk died in a bramble of red tape! Sleeping Beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe. And they made Alice drink something from a bottle which reduced her to a size where she could no longer cry ‘Curiouser and curiouser,' and they gave the Looking Glass one hammer blow to smash it and every Red King and Oyster away!”

He clenched his fists. Lord, how immediate it was! His face was red and he was gasping for breath.

As for Mr. Bigelow, he was astounded at this long explosion. He blinked and at last said, “Sorry. Don't know what you're talking about. Just names to me. From what I hear, the Burning was a good thing.”

“Get out!” screamed Stendahl. “You've done your job, now let me alone, you idiot!”

Mr. Bigelow summoned his carpenters and went away.

Mr. Stendahl stood alone before his House.

“Listen here,” he said to the unseen rockets. “I came to Mars to get away from you Clean-Minded people, but you're flocking in thicker every day, like flies to offal. So I'm going to show you. I'm going to teach you a fine lesson for what you did to Mr. Poe on Earth. As of this day, beware. The House of Usher is open for business!”

He pushed a fist at the sky.

The rocket landed. A man stepped out jauntily. He glanced at the House, and his gray eyes were displeased and vexed. He strode across the moat to confront the small man there.

“Your name Stendahl?”

“Yes.”

“I'm Garrett, Investigator of Moral Climates.”

“So you finally got to Mars, you Moral Climate people? I wondered when you'd appear.”

“We arrived last week. We'll soon have things as neat and tidy as Earth.” The man waved an identification card irritably toward the House. “Suppose you tell me about that place, Stendahl?”

“It's a haunted castle, if you like.”

“I don't like, Stendahl, I don't like. The sound of that word ‘haunted.'”

“Simple enough. In this year of our Lord 2005 I have built a mechanical sanctuary. In it copper bats fly on electronic beams, brass rats scuttle in plastic cellars, robot skeletons dance; robot vampires, harlequins, wolves, and white phantoms, compounded of chemical and ingenuity, live here.”

“That's what I was afraid of,” said Garrett, smiling quietly. “I'm afraid we're going to have to tear your place down.”

“I knew you'd come out as soon as you discovered what went on.”

“I'd have come sooner, but we at Moral Climates wanted to be sure of your intentions before we moved in. We can have the Dismantlers and Burning Crew here by supper. By midnight your place will be razed to the cellar. Mr. Stendahl, I consider you somewhat of a fool, sir. Spending hard-earned money on a folly. Why, it must have cost you three million dollars—”

“Four million! But, Mr. Garrett, I inherited twenty-five million when very young. I can afford to throw it about. Seems a dreadful shame, though, to have the House finished only an hour and have you race out with your Dismantlers. Couldn't you possibly let me play with my Toy for just, well, twenty-four hours?”

“You know the law. Strict to the letter. No books, no houses, nothing to be produced which in any way suggests ghosts, vampires, fairies, or any creature of the imagination.”

“You'll be burning Babbitts next!”

“You've caused us a lot of trouble, Mr. Stendahl. It's in the record. Twenty years ago. On Earth. You and your library.”

“Yes, me and my library. And a few others like me. Oh, Poe's been forgotten for many years now, and Oz and the other creatures. But I had my little cache. We had our libraries, a few private citizens, until you sent your men around with torches and incinerators and tore my fifty thousand books up and burned them. Just as you put a stake through the heart of Halloween and told your film producers that if they made anything at all they would have to make and remake Ernest Hemingway. My God, how many times have I seen
For Whom the Bell Tolls
done! Thirty different versions. All realistic. Oh, realism! Oh, here, oh, now, oh hell!”

“It doesn't pay to be bitter!”

“Mr. Garrett, you must turn in a full report, mustn't you?”

“Yes.”

“Then, for curiosity's sake, you'd better come in and look around. It'll take only a minute.”

“All right. Lead the way. And no tricks. I've a gun with me.”

The door to the House of Usher creaked wide. A moist wind issued forth. There was an immense sighing and moaning, like a subterranean bellows breathing in the lost catacombs.

A rat pranced across the floor stones. Garrett, crying out, gave it a kick. It fell over, the rat did, and from its nylon fur streamed an incredible horde of metal fleas.

“Amazing!” Garrett bent to see.

An old witch sat in a niche, quivering her wax hands over some orange-and-blue tarot cards. She jerked her head and hissed through her toothless mouth at Garrett, tapping her greasy cards.

“Death!” she cried.

“Now that's the sort of thing I mean,” said Garrett. “Deplorable!”

“I'll let you burn her personally.”

“Will you, really?” Garrett was pleased. Then he frowned. “I must say you're taking this all so well.”

“It was enough just to be able to create this place. To be able to say I did it. To say I nurtured a medieval atmosphere in a modern, incredulous world.”

“I've a somewhat reluctant admiration for your genius myself, sir.” Garrett watched a mist drift by, whispering and whispering, shaped like a beautiful and nebulous woman. Down a moist corridor a machine whirled. Like the stuff from a cotton-candy centrifuge, mists sprang up and floated, murmuring, in the silent halls.

An ape appeared out of nowhere.

“Hold on!” cried Garrett.

“Don't be afraid.” Stendahl tapped the animal's black chest. “A robot. Copper skeleton and all, like the witch. See?” He stroked the fur, and under it metal tubing came to light.

“Yes.” Garrett put out a timid hand to pet the thing. “But why, Mr. Stendahl, why all this? What obsessed you?”

“Bureaucracy, Mr. Garrett. But I haven't time to explain. The government will discover soon enough.” He nodded to the ape. “All right. Now.”

The ape killed Mr. Garrett.

“Are we almost ready, Pikes?”

Pikes looked up from the table. “Yes, sir.”

“You've done a splendid job.”

“Well, I'm paid for it, Mr. Stendahl,” said Pikes softly as he lifted the plastic eyelid of the robot and inserted the glass eyeball to fasten the rubberoid muscles neatly. “There.”

“The spitting image of Mr. Garrett.”

“What do we do with him, sir?” Pikes nodded at the slab where the real Mr. Garrett lay dead.

“Better burn him, Pikes. We wouldn't want two Mr. Garretts, would we?”

Pikes wheeled Mr. Garrett to the brick incinerator. “Good-bye.” He pushed Mr. Garrett in and slammed the door.

Stendahl confronted the robot Garrett. “You have your orders, Garrett?”

“Yes, sir.” The robot sat up. “I'm to return to Moral Climates. I'll file a complimentary report. Delay action for at least forty-eight hours. Say I'm investigating more fully.”

“Right, Garrett. Good-bye.”

The robot hurried out to Garrett's rocket, got in, and flew away.

Stendahl turned. “Now, Pikes, we send the remainder of the invitations for tonight. I think we'll have a jolly time, don't you?”

“Considering we waited twenty years, quite jolly!”

They winked at each other.

Seven o'clock. Stendahl studied his watch. Almost time. He twirled the sherry glass in his hand. He sat quietly. Above him, among the oaken beams, the bats, their delicate copper bodies hidden under rubber flesh, blinked at him and shrieked. He raised his glass to them. “To our success.” Then he leaned back, closed his eyes, and considered the entire affair. How he would savor this in his old age. This paying back of the antiseptic government for its literary terrors and conflagrations. Oh, how the anger and hatred had grown in him through the years. Oh, how the plan had taken a slow shape in his numbed mind, until that day three years ago when he had met Pikes.

Ah yes, Pikes. Pikes with the bitterness in him as deep as a black, charred well of green acid. Who was Pikes? Only the greatest of them all! Pikes, the man of ten thousand faces, a fury, a smoke, a blue fog, a white rain, a bat, a gargoyle, a monster, that was Pikes! Better than Lon Chaney, the father? Stendahl ruminated. Night after night he had watched Chaney in the old, old films. Yes, better than Chaney. Better than that other ancient mummer? What was his name? Karloff? Far better! Lugosi? The comparison was odious! No, there was only one Pikes, and he was a man stripped of his fantasies now, no place on Earth to go, no one to show off to. Forbidden even to perform for himself before a mirror!

Poor impossible, defeated Pikes! How must it have felt, Pikes, the night they seized your films, like entrails yanked from the camera, out of your guts, clutching them in roils and wads to stuff them up a stove to burn away? Did it feel as bad as having some fifty thousand books annihilated with no recompense? Yes. Yes. Stendahl felt his hands grow cold with the senseless anger. So what more natural than they would one day talk over endless coffeepots into innumerable midnights, and out of all the talk and the bitter brewings would come—the House of Usher.