Ray Bradbury Stories, Volume 1 (38 page)

Silently he galloped off among the pines, his voice trailing back, ‘Can’t hear me when I’m set on a rock. I’ll just
set
!’

All day he sat on an observatory rock in the clear wind, motionless and sucking his tongue.

Old Lady gathered wood in the deep forest, feeling his eyes weaseling on her spine. She wanted to babble: ‘Oh, I see you, I see you! I was only fooling about invisible boys! You’re right there!’ But she swallowed her gall and gummed it tight.

The following morning he did the spiteful things. He began leaping from behind trees. He made toad-faces, frog-faces, spider-faces at her, clenching down his lips with his fingers, popping his raw eyes, pushing up his nostrils so you could peer in and see his brain thinking.

Once she dropped her kindling. She pretended it was a blue jay startled her.

He made a motion as if to strangle her.

She trembled a little.

He made another move as if to bang her shins and spit on her cheek.

These motions she bore without a lid-flicker or a mouth-twitch.

He stuck out his tongue, making strange bad noises. He wiggled his loose ears so she wanted to laugh, and finally she did laugh and explained it away quickly by saying, ‘Sat on a salamander! Whew, how it poked!’

By high noon the whole madness boiled to a terrible peak.

For it was at that exact hour that Charlie came racing down the valley stark boy-naked!

Old Lady nearly fell flat with shock!

‘Charlie!’ she almost cried.

Charlie raced naked up one side of a hill and naked down the other—naked as day, naked as the moon, raw as the sun and a newborn chick, his feet shimmering and rushing like the wings of a low-skimming hummingbird.

Old Lady’s tongue locked in her mouth. What could she say? Charlie, go dress? For
shame
?
Stop
that?
Could
she? Oh, Charlie, Charlie, God! Could she say that now?
Well?

Upon the big rock, she witnessed him dancing up and down, naked as the day of his birth, stomping bare feet, smacking his hands on his knees and sucking in and out his white stomach like blowing and deflating a circus balloon.

She shut her eyes tight and prayed.

After three hours of this she pleaded, ‘Charlie, Charlie, come here! I got something to
tell
you!’

Like a fallen leaf he came, dressed again, praise the Lord.

‘Charlie,’ she said, looking at the pine trees, ‘I see your right toe.
There
it is.’

‘You do?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said very sadly. ‘There it is like a horny toad on the grass. And there, up there’s your left ear hanging on the air like a pink butterfly.’

Charlie danced. ‘I’m forming in. I’m forming in!’

Old Lady nodded. ‘Here comes your ankle!’

‘Gimme
both
my feet!’ ordered Charlie.

‘You got ’em.’

‘How about my hands?’

‘I see one crawling on your knee like a daddy longlegs.’

‘How about the other one?’

‘It’s crawling too.’

‘I got a body?’

‘Shaping up fine.’

‘I’ll need my head to go home, Old Lady.’

To go home, she thought wearily. ‘No!’ she said, stubborn and angry. ‘No, you ain’t got no head. No head at all,’ she cried. She’d leave that to the very last. ‘No head, no head,’ she insisted.

‘No head?’ he wailed.

‘Yes, oh my God, yes, yes, you got your blamed head!’ she snapped, giving up. ‘Now, fetch me back my bat with the needle in his eye!’

He flung it at her. ‘Haaaa-yoooo!’ His yelling went all up the valley, and long after he had run toward home she heard his echoes, racing.

Then she plucked up her kindling with a great dry weariness and started back toward her shack, sighing, talking. And Charlie followed her all the way,
really
invisible now, so she couldn’t see him, just hear him, like a pine cone dropping or a deep underground stream trickling, or a squirrel clambering a bough; and over the fire at twilight she and Charlie sat, him so invisible, and her feeding him bacon he wouldn’t take, so she ate it herself, and then she fixed some magic and fell asleep with Charlie, made out of sticks and rags and pebbles, but still warm and her very own son, slumbering and nice in her shaking mother arms…and they talked about golden things in drowsy voices until dawn made the fire slowly, slowly wither out…

‘In the shape of a
pig
?’ cried the Mandarin.

‘In the shape of a pig,’ said the messenger, and departed.

‘Oh, what an evil day in an evil year,’ cried the Mandarin. ‘the town of Kwan-Si, beyond the hill, was very small in my childhood. Now it has grown so large that at last they are building a wall.’

‘But why should a wall two miles away make my good father sad and angry all within the hour?’ asked his daughter quietly.

‘They build their wall,’ said the Mandarin, ‘in the shape of a pig! Do you see? Our own city wall is built in the shape of an orange. That pig will devour us, greedily!’

‘Ah.’

They both sat thinking.

Life was full of symbols and omens. Demons lurked everywhere, Death swam in the wetness of an eye, the turn of a gull’s wing meant rain, a fan held
so
, the tilt of a roof, and, yes, even a city wall was of immense importance. Travelers and tourists, caravans, musicians, artists, coming upon these two towns, equally judging the portents, would say, ‘The city shaped like an orange? No! I will enter the city shaped like a pig and prosper, eating all, growing fat with good luck and prosperity!’

The Mandarin wept. ‘All is lost! These symbols and signs terrify. Our city will come on evil days.’

‘Then,’ said the daughter, ‘call in your stonemasons and temple builders. I will whisper from behind the silken screen and you will know the words.’

The old man clapped his hands despairingly. ‘Ho, stonemasons! Ho, builders of towns and palaces!’

The men who knew marble and granite and onyx and quartz came quickly. The Mandarin faced them most uneasily, himself waiting for a whisper from the silken screen behind his throne. At last the whisper came.

‘I have called you here,’ said the whisper.

‘I have called you here,’ said the Mandarin aloud, ‘because our city is shaped like an orange, and the vile city of Kwan-Si has this day shaped theirs like a ravenous pig—’

Here the stonemasons groaned and wept. Death rattled his cane in the outer courtyard. Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.

‘And so,’ said the whisper, said the Mandarin, ‘you raisers of walls must go bearing trowels and rocks and change the shape of
our
city!’

The architects and masons gasped. The Mandarin himself gasped at what he had said. The whisper whispered. The Mandarian went on: ‘And you will change our walls into a club which may beat the pig and drive it off!’

The stonemasons rose up, shouting. Even the Mandarin, delighted at the words from his mouth, applauded, stood down from his throne. ‘Quick!’ he cried. ‘To work!’

When his men had gone, smiling and bustling, the Mandarin turned with great love to the silken screen. ‘Daughter,’ he whispered. ‘I will embrace you.’ There was no reply. He stepped around the screen, and she was gone.

Such modesty, he thought. She has slipped away and left me with a triumph, as if it were mine.

The news spread through the city; the Mandarin was acclaimed. Everyone carried stone to the walls. Fireworks were set off and the demons of death and poverty did not linger, as all worked together. At the end of the month the wall had been changed. It was now a mighty bludgeon with which to drive pigs, boars, even lions, far away. The Mandarin slept like a happy fox every night.

‘I would like to see the Mandarin of Kwan-Si when the news is learned. Such pandemonium and hysteria; he will likely throw himself from a mountain! A little more of that wine, oh Daughter-who-thinks-like-a-son.’

But the pleasure was like a winter flower; it died swiftly. That very afternoon the messenger rushed into the courtroom. ‘Oh Mandarin, disease, early sorrow, avalanches, grasshopper plagues, and poisoned well water!’

The Mandarin trembled.

‘The town of Kwan-Si,’ said the messenger, ‘which was built like a pig and which animal we drove away by changing our walls to a mighty stick, has now turned triumph to winter ashes. They have built their city’s walls like a great bonfire to burn our stick!’

The Mandarin’s heart sickened within him, like an autumn fruit upon the ancient tree. ‘Oh, gods! Travelers will spurn us. Tradesmen, reading the symbols, will turn from the stick, so easily destroyed, to the fire, which conquers all!’

‘No,’ said a whisper like a snowflake from behind the silken screen.

‘No,’ said the startled Mandarin.

‘Tell my stonemasons,’ said the whisper that was a falling drop of rain, ‘to build our walls in the shape of a shining lake.’

The Mandarin said this aloud, his heart warmed.

‘And with this lake of water,’ said the whisper and the old man, ‘we will quench the fire and put it out forever!’

The city turned out in joy to learn that once again they had been saved by the magnificent Emperor of ideas. They ran to the walls and built them nearer to this new vision, singing, not as loudly as before, of course, for they were tired, and not as quickly, for since it had taken a month to rebuild the wall the first time, they had had to neglect business and crops and therefore were somewhat weaker and poorer.

There then followed a succession of horrible and wonderful days, one in another like a nest of frightening boxes.

‘Oh, Emperor,’ cried the messenger, ‘Kwan-Si has rebuilt their walls to resemble a mouth with which to drink all our lake!’

‘Then,’ said the Emperor, standing very close to his silken screen, ‘build our walls like a needle to sew up that mouth!’

‘Emperor!’ screamed the messenger. ‘They make their walls like a sword to break your needle!’

The Emperor held, trembling, to the silken screen. ‘Then shift the stones to form a scabbard to sheathe that sword!’

‘Mercy,’ wept the messenger the following morn, ‘they have worked all night and shaped their walls like lightning which will explode and destroy that sheath!’

Sickness spread in the city like a pack of evil dogs. Shops closed. The population, working now steadily for endless months upon the changing of the walls, resembled Death himself, clattering his white bones like musical instruments in the wind. Funerals began to appear in the streets, though it was the middle of summer, a time when all should be tending and harvesting. The Mandarin fell so ill that he had his bed drawn up by the silken screen and there he lay, miserably giving his architectural orders. The voice behind the screen was weak now, too, and faint, like the wind in the eaves.

‘Kwan-Si is an eagle. Then our walls must be a net for that eagle. They are a sun to burn our net. Then we build a moon to eclipse their sun!’

Like a rusted machine, the city ground to a halt.

At last the whisper behind the screen cried out:

‘In the name of the gods, send for Kwan-Si!’

Upon the last day of summer the Mandarin Kwan-Si, very ill and withered away, was carried into our Mandarin’s courtroom by four starving footmen. The two mandarins were propped up, facing each other. Their breaths fluttered like winter winds in their mouths. A voice said:

‘Let us put an end to this.’

The old men nodded.

‘This cannot go on,’ said the faint voice. ‘Our people do nothing but rebuild our cities to a different shape every day, every hour. They have no time to hunt, to fish, to love, to be good to their ancestors and their ancestors’ children.’

‘This I admit,’ said the mandarins of the towns of the Cage, the Moon, the Spear, the Fire, the Sword and this, that, and other things.

‘Carry us into the sunlight,’ said the voice.

The old men were borne out under the sun and up a little hill. In the late summer breeze a few very thin children were flying dragon kites in all the colors of the sun, and frogs and grass, the color of the sea and the color of coins and wheat.

The first Mandarin’s daughter stood by his bed.

‘See,’ she said.

‘Those are nothing but kites,’ said the two old men.

‘But what is a kite on the ground?’ she said. ‘It is nothing. What does it need to sustain it and make it beautiful and truly spiritual?’

‘The wind, of course!’ said the others.

‘And what do the sky and the wind need to make
them
beautiful?’

‘A kite, of course—many kites, to break the monotony, the sameness of the sky. Colored kites, flying!’

‘So,’ said the Mandarin’s daughter. ‘You, Kwan-Si, will make a last rebuilding of your town to resemble nothing more nor less than the wind. And we shall build like a golden kite. The wind will beautify the kite and carry it to wondrous heights. And the kite will break the sameness of the wind’s existence and give it purpose and meaning. One without the other is nothing. Together, all will be beauty and co-operation and a long and enduring life.’

Whereupon the two mandarins were so overjoyed that they took their first nourishment in days, momentarily were given strength, embraced, and lavished praise upon each other, called the Mandarin’s daughter a boy, a man, a stone pillar, a warrior, and a true and unforgettable son. Almost immediately they parted and hurried to their towns, calling out and singing, weakly but happily.

And so, in time, the towns became the Town of the Golden Kite and the Town of the Silver Wind. And harvestings were harvested and business tended again, and the flesh returned, and disease ran off like a frightened jackal. And on every night of the year the inhabitants in the town of the Kite could hear the good clear wind sustaining them. And those in the Town of the Wind could hear the kite singing, whispering, rising, and beautifying them.

‘So be it,’ said the Mandarin in front of his silken screen.

Out there in the cold water, far from land, we waited every night for the coming of the fog, and it came, and we oiled the brass machinery and lit the fog light up in the stone tower. Feeling like two birds in the gray sky, McDunn and I sent the light touching out, red, then white, then red again, to eye the lonely ships. And if they did not see our light, then there was always our Voice, the great deep cry of our Fog Horn shuddering through the rags of mist to startle the gulls away like decks of scattered cards and make the waves turn high and foam.

‘It’s a lonely life, but you’re used to it now, aren’t you?’ asked McDunn.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’re a good talker, thank the Lord.’

‘Well, it’s your turn on land tomorrow,’ he said, smiling, ‘to dance the ladies and drink gin.’

‘What do you think, McDunn, when I leave you out here alone?’

‘On the mysteries of the sea.’ McDunn lit his pipe. It was a quarter past seven of a cold November evening, the heat on, the light switching its tail in two hundred directions, the Fog Horn bumbling in the high throat of the tower. There wasn’t a town for a hundred miles down the coast, just a road which came lonely through dead country to the sea, with few cars on it, a stretch of two miles of cold water out to our rock, and rare few ships.

‘The mysteries of the sea,’ said McDunn thoughtfully. ‘You know, the ocean’s the biggest damned snowflake ever? It rolls and swells a thousand shapes and colors, no two alike. Strange. One night, years ago, I was here alone, when all of the fish of the sea surfaced out there. Something made them swim in and lie in the bay, sort of trembling and staring up at the tower light going red, white, red, white across them so I could see their funny eyes. I turned cold. They were like a big peacock’s tail, moving out there until midnight. Then, without so much as a sound, they slipped away, the million of them was gone. I kind of think maybe, in some sort of way, they came all those miles to worship. Strange. But think how the
tower must look to them, standing seventy feet above the water, the Godlight flashing out from it, and the tower declaring itself with a monster voice. They never came back, those fish, but don’t you think for a while they thought they were in the Presence?’

I shivered. I looked out at the long gray lawn of the sea stretching away into nothing and nowhere.

‘Oh, the sea’s full,’ McDunn puffed his pipe nervously, blinking. He had been nervous all day and hadn’t said why. ‘For all our engines and socalled submarines, it’ll be ten thousand centuries before we set foot on the real bottom of the sunken lands, in the fairy kingdoms there, and know
real
terror. Think of it, it’s still the year 300,000 Before Christ down under there. While we’ve paraded around with trumpets, lopping off each other’s countries and heads, they have been living beneath the sea twelve miles deep and cold in a time as old as the beard of a comet.’

‘Yes, it’s an old world.’

‘Come on. I got something special I been saving up to tell you.’

We ascended the eighty steps, talking and taking our time. At the top, McDunn switched off the room lights so there’d be no reflection in the plate glass. The great eye of the light was humming, turning easily in its oiled socket. The Fog Horn was blowing steadily, once every fifteen seconds.

‘Sounds like an animal, don’t it?’ McDunn nodded to himself. ‘A big lonely animal crying in the night. Sitting here on the edge of ten billion years calling out to the Deeps, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. And the Deeps
do
answer, yes, they do. You been here now for three months, Johnny, so I better prepare you. About this time of year,’ he said, studying the murk and fog, ‘something comes to visit the lighthouse.’

‘The swarms of fish like you said?’

‘No, this is something else. I’ve put off telling you because you might think I’m daft. But tonight’s the latest I can put it off, for if my calendar’s marked right from last year, tonight’s the night it comes. I won’t go into detail, you’ll have to see it yourself. Just sit down there. If you want, tomorrow you can pack your duffel and take the motorboat in to land and get your car parked there at the dinghy pier on the cape and drive on back to some little inland town and keep your lights burning nights, I won’t question or blame you. It’s happened three years now, and this is the only time anyone’s been here with me to verify it. You wait and watch.’

Half an hour passed with only a few whispers between us. When we grew tired waiting, McDunn began describing some of his ideas to me. He had some theories about the Fog Horn itself.

‘One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said. “We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I’ll make a voice that is like an
empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.”’

The Fog Horn blew.

‘I made up that story,’ said McDunn quietly, ‘to try to explain why this thing keeps coming back to the lighthouse every year. The Fog Horn calls it, I think, and it comes…’

‘But—’ I said.

‘Sssst!’ said McDunn. ‘There!’ He nodded out to the Deeps.

Something was swimming toward the lighthouse tower.

It was a cold night, as I have said; the high tower was cold, the light coming and going, and the Fog Horn calling and calling through the raveling mist. You couldn’t see far and you couldn’t see plain, but there was the deep sea moving on its way about the night earth, flat and quiet, the color of gray mud, and here were the two of us alone in the high tower, and there, far out at first, was a ripple, followed by a wave, a rising, a bubble, a bit of froth. And then, from the surface of the cold sea came a head, a large head, dark-colored, with immense eyes, and then a neck. And then—not a body—but more neck and more! The head rose a full forty feet above the water on a slender and beautiful dark neck. Only then did the body, like a little island of black coral and shells and crayfish, drip up from the subterranean. There was a flicker of tail. In all, from head to tip of tail, I estimated the monster at ninety or a hundred feet.

I don’t know what I said. I said something.

‘Steady, boy, steady,’ whispered McDunn.

‘It’s impossible!’ I said.

‘No, Johnny,
we’re
impossible.
It’s
like it always was ten million years ago.
It
hasn’t changed. It’s
us
and the land that’ve changed, become impossible.
Us!
’

It swam slowly and with a great dark majesty out in the icy waters, far away. The fog came and went about it, momentarily erasing its shape. One of the monster eyes caught and held and flashed back our immense light, red, white, red, white, like a disk held high and sending a message in primeval code. It was as silent as the fog through which it swam.

‘It’s a dinosaur of some sort!’ I crouched down, holding to the stair rail.

‘Yes, one of the tribe.’

‘But they died out!’

‘No, only hid away in the Deeps. Deep, deep down in the deepest Deeps. Isn’t
that
a word now, Johnny, a real word, it says so much: the Deeps. There’s all the coldness and darkness and deepness in the world in a word like that.’

‘What’ll we do?’

‘Do? We got our job, we can’t leave. Besides, we’re safer here than in any boat trying to get to land. That thing’s as big as a destroyer and almost as swift.’

‘But here, why does it come
here
?’

The next moment I had my answer.

The Fog Horn blew.

And the monster answered.

A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and alone that it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at the tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster roared again. The Fog Horn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound that came from it was the sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far away. The sound of isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound.

‘Now,’ whispered McDunn, ‘do you know why it comes here?’

I nodded.

‘All year long, Johnny, that poor monster there lying far out, a thousand miles at sea, and twenty miles deep maybe, biding its time, perhaps it’s a million years old, this one creature. Think of it, waiting a million years; could
you
wait that long? Maybe it’s the last of its kind. I sort of think that’s true. Anyway, here come men on land and build this lighthouse, five years ago. And set up their Fog Horn and sound it and sound it, out toward the place where you bury yourself in sleep and sea memories of a world where there were thousands like yourself, but now you’re alone, all alone in a world not made for you, a world where you have to hide.

‘But the sound of the Fog Horn comes and goes, comes and goes, and you stir from the muddy bottom of the Deeps, and your eyes open like the lenses of two-foot cameras and you move, slow, slow, for you have the ocean sea on your shoulders, heavy. But that Fog Horn comes through a thousand miles of water, faint and familiar, and the furnace in your belly stokes up, and you begin to rise, slow, slow. You feed yourself on great slakes of cod and minnow, on rivers of jellyfish, and you rise slow through the autumn months, through September when the fogs started, through October with more fog and the horn still calling you on, and then, late in November, after pressurizing yourself day by day, a few feet higher every hour, you are near the surface and still alive. You’ve got to go slow; if you surfaced all at once you’d explode. So it takes you all of three
months to surface, and then a number of days to swim through the cold waters to the lighthouse. And there you are, out there, in the night, Johnny, the biggest damn monster in creation. And here’s the lighthouse calling to you, with a long neck like your neck sticking way up out of the water, and a body like your body, and, most important of all, a voice like your voice. Do you understand now, Johnny, do you understand?’

The Fog Horn blew.

The monster answered.

I saw it all, I knew it all—the million years of waiting alone, for someone to come back who never came back. The million years of isolation at the bottom of the sea, the insanity of time there, while the skies cleared of reptile-birds, the swamps dried on the continental lands, the sloths and saber-tooths had their day and sank in tar pits, and men ran like white ants upon the hills.

The Fog Horn blew.

‘Last year,’ said McDunn, ‘that creature swam round and round, round and round, all night. Not coming too near, puzzled, I’d say. Afraid, maybe. And a bit angry after coming all this way. But the next day, unexpectedly, the fog lifted, the sun came out fresh, the sky was as blue as a painting. And the monster swam off away from the heat and the silence and didn’t come back. I suppose it’s been brooding on it for a year now, thinking it over from every which way.’

The monster was only a hundred yards off now, it and the Fog Horn crying at each other. As the lights hit them, the monster’s eyes were fire and ice, fire and ice.

‘That’s life for you,’ said McDunn. ‘Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can’t hurt you no more.’

The monster was rushing at the lighthouse.

The Fog Horn blew.

‘Let’s see what happens,’ said McDunn.

He switched the Fog Horn off.

The ensuing minute of silence was so intense that we could hear our hearts pounding in the glassed area of the tower, could hear the slow greased turn of the light.

The monster stopped and froze. Its great lantern eyes blinked. Its mouth gaped. It gave a sort of rumble, like a volcano. It twitched its head this way and that, as if to seek the sounds now dwindled off into the fog. It peered at the lighthouse. It rumbled again. Then its eyes caught fire. It reared up, threshed the water, and rushed at the tower, its eyes filled with angry torment.

‘McDunn!’ I cried. ‘Switch on the horn!’

McDunn fumbled with the switch. But even as he flicked it on, the monster was rearing up. I had a glimpse of its gigantic paws, fishskin glittering in webs between the fingerlike projections, clawing at the tower. The huge eye on the right side of its anguished head glittered before me like a cauldron into which I might drop, screaming. The tower shook. The Fog Horn cried; the monster cried. It seized the tower and gnashed at the glass, which shattered in upon us.

McDunn seized my arm. ‘Downstairs!’

The tower rocked, trembled, and started to give. The Fog Horn and the monster roared. We stumbled and half fell down the stairs. ‘Quick!’

We reached the bottom as the tower buckled down toward us. We ducked under the stairs into the small stone cellar. There were a thousand concussions as the rocks rained down; the Fog Horn stopped abruptly. The monster crashed upon the tower. The tower fell. We knelt together, McDunn and I, holding tight, while our world exploded.

Then it was over, and there was nothing but darkness and the wash of the sea on the raw stones.

That and the other sound.

‘Listen,’ said McDunn quietly. ‘Listen.’

We waited a moment. And then I began to hear it. First a great vacuumed sucking of air, and then the lament, the bewilderment, the loneliness of the great monster, folded over and upon us, above us, so that the sickening reek of its body filled the air, a stone’s thickness away from our cellar. The monster gasped and cried. The tower was gone. The light was gone. The thing that had called to it across a million years was gone. And the monster was opening its mouth and sending out great sounds. The sounds of a Fog Horn, again and again. And ships far at sea, not finding the light, not seeing anything, but passing and hearing late that night, must’ve thought: There it is, the lonely sound, the Lonesome Bay horn. All’s well. We’ve rounded the cape.