Ray Bradbury Stories, Volume 1 (12 page)

‘You!’ She directed her attack at one of the four men with the wicker. ‘Put that down!’

The four men looked up.

One said, ‘Step aside, lady. We’re doing our job.’

‘That’s my body tucked in there!’ She brandished the parasol.

‘That I wouldn’t know anything about,’ said a second man. ‘Please don’t block traffic, madam. This thing is heavy.’

‘Sir!’ she cried, wounded. ‘I’ll have you know I weigh only one hundred and ten pounds.’

He looked at her casually. ‘I’m not interested in your heft, lady. I’m due home for supper. My wife’ll kill me if I’m late.’

The four of them moved on, Aunt Tildy in pursuit, down a hall, into a preparations room.

A white-smocked man awaited the wicker’s arrival with a rather pleased smile on his long, eager-looking face. Aunt Tildy didn’t care for the avidity of that face, or the entire personality of the man. The basket was deposited, the four men wandered off.

The man in the white smock glanced at Auntie and said:

‘Madam, this is no fit place for a gentlewoman.’

‘Well,’ she said, gratified, ‘glad you feel that way. It’s exactly what I tried to tell that dark-clothed young man!’

The mortician puzzled. ‘What dark-clothed young man is that?’

‘The one that came puddlin’ around my house, that’s who.’

‘No one of that description works for us.’

‘No matter. As you just so intelligently stated, this is no place for a lady. I don’t want me here. I want me home cookin’ ham for Sunday visitors, it’s near Easter. I got Emily to feed, sweaters to knit, clocks to wind—’

‘You are quite philosophical, and philanthropical, no doubt of it, madam, but I have work. A body has arrived.’ This last, he said with apparent relish, and a winnowing of his knives, tubes, jars, and instruments.

Tildy bristled. ‘You put so much as a fingerprint on that body, and I’ll—’

He laid her aside like a little old moth. ‘George,’ he called with a suave gentleness, ‘escort this lady out, please.’

Aunt Tildy glared at the approaching George.

‘Show me your backside, goin’ the other way!’

George took her wrists. ‘This way, please.’

Tildy extricated herself. Easily. Her flesh sort of—slipped. It even amazed Tildy. Such an unexpected talent to develop at this late day.

‘See?’ she said, pleased with her ability. ‘You can’t budge me. I want my body back!’

The mortician opened the wicker lid casually. Then, in a recurrent series of scrutinies he realized the body inside was…it seemed…could it be?…maybe…yes…no…no…it just
couldn’t
be, but…‘Ah,’ he exhaled, abruptly. He turned. His eyes were wide, then they narrowed.

‘Madam,’ he said, cautiously. ‘This lady here is—a—relative—of yours?’

‘A very dear relation. Be careful of her.’

‘A sister, perhaps?’ He grasped at a straw of dwindling logic, hopefully.

‘No, you fool. Me, do you hear?
Me!
’

The mortician considered the idea. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Things like this don’t happen.’ He fumbled with his tools. ‘George, get help from the others. I can’t work with a crank present.’

The four men returned. Aunt Tildy crossed her arms in defiance. ‘Won’t budge!’ she cried, as she was moved like a pawn on a chessboard, from
preparations room to slumber room, to hall, to waiting chamber, to funeral parlor, where she threw herself down on a chair in the very center of the vestibule. There were pews going back into gray silence, and a smell of flowers.

‘Please, ma’am,’ said one of the men. ‘That’s where the body rests for the service tomorrow.’

‘I’m sittin’ right plumb here until I get what I want.’

She sat, pale fingers fussing with the lace at her throat, jaw set, one high-buttoned shoe tapping with irritation. If a man got in whopping distance, she gave him a parasol whop. And when they touched her, now, she remembered to—slip away.

Mr Carrington, Mortuary President, heard the disturbance in his office and came toddling down the aisle to investigate. ‘Hear Hear,’ he whispered to everyone, finger to mouth. ‘More respect, more respect. What is this? Oh, madam, may I help you?’

She looked him up and down. ‘You may.’

‘How may I be of service, please?’

‘Go in that room back there,’ directed Aunt Tildy.

‘Yee-ess.’

‘And tell that eager young investigator to quit fiddlin’ with my body. I’m a maiden lady. My moles, birthmarks, scars, and other bric-a-brac, includin’ the turn of my ankle, are my own secret. I don’t want him pryin’ and probin’, cuttin’, or hurtin’ it any way.’

This was vague to Mr Carrington, who hadn’t correlated bodies yet. He looked at her in blank helplessness.

‘He’s got me in there on his table, like a pigeon ready to be drawn and stuffed!’ she told him.

Mr Carrington hustled off to check. After fifteen minutes of waiting silence and horrified arguing, comparing notes with the mortician behind closed doors. Carrington returned, three shades whiter.

Carrington dropped his glasses, picked them up. ‘You’re making it difficult for us.’

‘
I
am?’ raged Aunt Tildy. ‘Saint Vitus in the mornin’! Looky here. Mister Blood and Bones or whatever, you tell that—’

‘We’re already draining the blood from the—’

‘What!’

‘Yes, yes. I assure you, yes. So, you just go away, now; there’s nothing to be done.’ He laughed nervously. ‘Our mortician is also performing a brief autopsy to determine cause of death.’

Auntie jumped to her feet, burning.

‘He can’t do that! Only coroners are allowed to do that!’

‘Well, we sometimes allow a little—’

‘March straight in and tell that Cut-’em-up to pump all that fine New
England blue blood right back into that fine-skinned body, and if he’s taken anything out, for him to attach it back in so it’ll function proper, and then turn that body, fresh as paint, into my keepin’. You hear!’

‘There’s nothing I can do. Nothing.’

‘Tell you
what
. I’m settin’ here for the next two hundred years. You listenin’? And every time any of your customers come by, I’ll spit ectoplasm right squirt up their nostrils!’

Carrington groped that thought around his weakening mind and emitted a groan. ‘You’d ruin our business. You wouldn’t do that.’

Auntie smiled. ‘
Wouldn’t
I?’

Carrington ran up the dark aisle. In the distance you could hear him dialing a phone over and over again. Half an hour later cars roared up in front of the mortuary. Three vice-presidents of the mortuary came down the aisle with their hysterical president.

‘What seems to be the trouble?’

Auntie told them with a few well-chosen infernalities.

They held a conference, meanwhile notifying the mortician to discontinue his homework, at least until such time as an agreement was reached…The mortician walked from his chamber and stood smiling amiably, smoking a big black cigar.

Auntie stared at the cigar.

‘Where’d you put the
ashes
?’ she cried, in horror.

The mortician only grinned imperturbably and puffed.

The conference broke up.

‘Madam, in all fairness, you wouldn’t force us out on the street to continue our services, would you?’

Auntie scanned the vultures. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t mind at all.’

Carrington wiped sweat from his jowls. ‘You can have your body back.’

‘Ha!’ shouted Auntie. Then, with caution: ‘Intact?’

‘Intact.’

‘No formaldehyde?’

‘No formaldehyde.’

‘Blood in it?’

‘Blood, my God, yes, blood, if only you’ll take it and go!’

A prim nod. ‘Fair enough. Fix ’er up. It’s a deal.’

Carrington snapped his fingers at the mortician. ‘Don’t
stand
there, you mental incompetent. Fix it up!’

‘And be careful with that cigar!’ said the old woman.

‘Easy, easy,’ said Aunt Tildy. ‘Put the wicker on the floor where I can step in it.’

She didn’t look at the body much. Her only comment was. ‘Naturallookin’.’ She let herself fall back into the wicker.

A biting sensation of arctic coldness gripped her, followed by an unlikely nausea and a giddy whorling. She was two drops of matter fusing, water trying to seep into concrete. Slow to do. Hard. Like a butterfly trying to squirm back into a discarded husk of flinty chrysalis!

The vice-presidents watched Aunt Tildy with apprehension. Mr Carrington wrung his fingers and tried to assist with boosting and pushing moves of his hands and arms. The mortician, frankly skeptical, watched with idle, amused eyes.

Seeping into cold, long granite. Seeping into a frozen and ancient statue. Squeezing all the way.

‘Come alive, damn ye!’ shouted Aunt Tildy to herself. ‘Raise up a bit.’

The body half-rose, rustling in the dry wicker.

‘Fold your legs, woman!’

The body grabbled up, blindly groping.

‘See!’ shouted Aunt Tildy.

Light entered the webbed blind eyes.

‘Feel!’ urged Aunt Tildy.

The body felt the warmth of the room, the sudden reality of the preparations table on which to lean, panting.

‘Move!’

The body took a creaking, slow step.

‘Hear!’ she snapped.

The noises of the place came into the dull ears. The harsh, expectant breath of the mortician, shaken; the whimpering Mr Carrington; her own crackling voice.

‘Walk!’ she said.

The body walked.

‘Think!’ she said.

The old brain thought.

‘Speak!’ she said.

The body spoke, bowing to the morticians:

‘Much obliged. Thank you.’

‘Now,’ she said, finally, ‘cry!’

And she began to cry tears of utter happiness.

And now, any afternoon about four, if you want to visit Aunt Tildy, you just walk around to her antique shop and rap. There’s a big, black funeral wreath on the door. Don’t mind that! Aunt Tildy left it there: that’s how her humor runs. You rap on the door. It’s double-barred and triple-locked, and when you rap her voice shrills out at you.

‘Is that the man in black?’

And you laugh and say. No, no, it’s only me, Aunt Tildy.

And she laughs and says. ‘Come on in, quick!’ and she whips the door
open and slams it shut behind, so no man in black can ever slip in with you. Then she sets you down and pours your coffee and shows you her latest knitted sweater. She’s not as fast as she used to be, and can’t see as good, but she gets on.

‘And if you’re ’specially good,’ Aunt Tildy declares, setting her coffee cup to one side, ‘I’ll give you a little treat.’

‘What’s that?’ visitors will ask.

‘This,’ says Auntie, pleased with her little uniqueness, her little joke.

Then with modest moves of her fingers she will unfasten the white lace at her neck and chest and for a brief moment show what lies beneath.

The long blue scar where the autopsy was neatly sewn together.

‘Not bad sewin’ for a man,’ she allows. ‘Oh, some more coffee?
There!
’

In the living room the voice-clock sang,
Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o’clock!
as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness.
Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!

In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunnyside up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.

‘Today is August 4, 2026,’ said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, ‘in the city of Allendale, California.’ It repeated the date three times for memory’s sake. ‘Today is Mr Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills.’

Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.

Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o’clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eightone!
But no doors slammed, no carpets took the soft tread of rubber heels. It was raining outside. The weather box on the front door sang quietly: ‘Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today…’ And the rain tapped on the empty house, echoing.

Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. After a long wait the door swung down again.

At eight-thirty the eggs were shriveled and the toast was like stone. An aluminum wedge scraped them into the sink, where hot water whirled them down a metal throat which digested and flushed them away to the distant sea. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and emerged twinkling dry.

Nine-fifteen
, sang the clock,
time to clean
.

Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were acrawl with the small cleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached runners, kneading the rug nap,
sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, like mysterious invaders, they popped into their burrows. Their pink electric eyes faded. The house was clean.

Ten o’clock
. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.

Ten-fifteen
. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

The five spots of paint—the man, the woman, the children, the ball—remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.

The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.

Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace. How carefully it had inquired, ‘Who goes there? What’s the password?’ and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and whining cats, it had shut up its windows and drawn shades in an old-maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia.

It quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow brushed a window, the shade snapped up. The bird, startled, flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the house!

The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.

Twelve noon.

A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch.

The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud. Behind it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience.

For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the wall panels flipped open and the copper scrap rats flashed swiftly out. The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized in miniature steel jaws, was raced back to the burrows. There, down tubes which fed into the cellar, it was dropped into the sighing vent of an incinerator which sat like evil Baal in a dark corner.

The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at last realizing, as the house realized, that only silence was here.

It sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind the door, the
stove was making pancakes which filled the house with a rich baked odor and the scent of maple syrup.

The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour.

Two o’clock
, sang a voice.

Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical wind.

Two-fifteen.

The dog was gone.

In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks leaped up the chimney.

Two thirty-five.

Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered onto pads in a shower of pips. Martinis manifested on an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches. Music played.

But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.

At four o’clock the tables folded like great butterflies back through the paneled walls.

Four-thirty.

The nursery walls glowed.

Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac panthers cavorting in crystal substance. The walls were glass. They looked out upon color and fantasy. Hidden films clocked through well-oiled sprockets, and the walls lived. The nursery floor was woven to resemble a crisp, cereal meadow. Over this ran aluminum roaches and iron crickets, and in the hot still air butterflies of delicate red tissue wavered among the sharp aromas of animal spoors! There was the sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a purring lion. And there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh jungle rain, like other hoofs, falling upon the summer-starched grass. Now the walls dissolved into distances of parched weed, mile on mile, and warm endless sky. The animals drew away into thorn brakes and water holes.

It was the children’s hour.

Five o’clock
. The bath filled with clear hot water.

Six, seven, eight o’clock
. The dinner dishes manipulated like magic tricks, and in the study a
click
. In the metal stand opposite the hearth where a fire now blazed up warmly, a cigar popped out, half an inch of soft gray ash on it, smoking, waiting.

Nine o’clock
. The beds warmed their hidden circuits, for nights were cool here.

Nine-five
. A voice spoke from the study ceiling:

‘Mrs McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?’

The house was silent.

The voice said at last, ‘Since you express no preference, I shall select a poem at random.’ Quiet music rose to back the voice. ‘Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favorite…

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire, Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, If mankind perished utterly:

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn Would scarcely know that we were gone.

The fire burned on the stone hearth and the cigar fell away into a mound of quiet ash on its tray. The empty chairs faced each other between the silent walls, and the music played.

At ten o’clock the house began to die.

The wind blew. A falling tree bough crashed through the kitchen window. Cleaning solvent, bottled, shattered over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!

‘Fire!’ screamed a voice. The house lights flashed, water pumps shot water from the ceilings. But the solvent spread on the linoleum, licking, eating, under the kitchen door, while the voices took it up in chorus: ‘Fire, fire, fire!’

The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut, but the windows were broken by the heat and the wind blew and sucked upon the fire.

The house gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry sparks moved with flaming ease from room to room and then up the stairs. While scurrying water rats squeaked from the walls, pistoled their water, and ran for more. And the wall sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.

But too late. Somewhere, sighing, a pump shrugged to a stop. The quenching rain ceased. The reserve water supply which had filled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was gone.

The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.

Now the fire lay in beds, stood in windows, changed the colors of drapes!

And then, reinforcements.

From attic trapdoors, blind robot faces peered down with faucet mouths gushing green chemical.

The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight of a dead snake. Now there were twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green froth.

But the fire was clever. It had sent flame outside the house, up through the attic to the pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into bronze shrapnel on the beams.

The fire rushed back into every closet and felt of the clothes hung there.

The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air. Help, help! Fire! Run, run! Heat snapped mirrors like the first brittle winter ice. And the voices wailed, Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low, like children dying in a forest, alone, alone. And the voices fading as the wires popped their sheathings like hot chestnuts. One, two, three, four, five voices died.

In the nursery the jungle burned. Blue lions roared, purple giraffes bounded off. The panthers ran in circles, changing color, and ten million animals, running before the fire, vanished off toward a distant steaming river…

Ten more voices died. In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in, the slamming and opening front door, a thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.

The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.

In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and timber, the stove could be seen making breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs,
six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips, which, eaten by fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!

The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.

Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.

Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam:

‘Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…’