A Pleasure to Burn (10 page)

“Do you think you can all fool me, me,
me?”

I did not answer.

“How can you be sure,” he said, “I won't burn people, as well as books?”

I did not answer.

I left him standing in the complete night.

Inside, I checked out the last volumes of those leaving the library now with night come on and shadows everywhere and the great Baal machinery churning smoke, its fire dying in the spring grass where the Chief Censor stood like a poured cement statue, not seeing his men drive off. His fist suddenly flew high. Something swift and bright flew up to crack the front-door glass. Then Barnes turned and walked after the Incinerator as it trundled off, a fat black funeral urn unraveling long tissues and scarves of black bunting smoke and fasTVanishing crepe.

I sat listening.

In the far rooms, filled with soft jungle illumination, there was a lovely autumnal turning of leaves, faint sifts of breathing, infinitesimal quirks, the gesture of a hand, the glint of a ring, the intelligent squirrel blink of an eye. Some nocturnal voyager sailed between the half-empty stacks. In porcelain serenity, the rest-room waters flowed down to a still and distant sea. My people, my friends, one by one, passed from the cool marble, the green glades, out into a night better than we could ever have hoped for.

At nine, I went out to pick up the thrown front door key. I let the last reader, an old man, out with me, and as I was locking up, he took a deep breath of the cool air, looked at the town, the spark-burnt lawn, and said:

“Will they come back again, ever?”

“Let them. We're ready for them, aren't we?”

The old man took my hand. “‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie dawn with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together.'”

We moved down the steps.

“Good evening, Isaiah,” I said.

“Mr. Socrates,” he said. “Good night.”

And each walked his own way, in the dark.

The Mad Wizards of Mars

T
HEIR EYES WERE FIRE AND THE BREATH FLAMED FROM
out the witches' mouths as they bent to probe the cauldron with greasy stick and bony finger.

 

“When shall we three meet again
  In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”
“When the hurly burly's done,
  When the battle's lost and won.”

 

They danced most drunkenly on the shore of an empty sea, fouling the air with their three tongues and burning it with their cat's eyes all aglitter:

 

“Round about the cauldron go;
  In the poisoned entrails throw!
  Double, double, toil and trouble,
  Fire burn and cauldron bubble!”

 

They paused and cast their glances round. “Where's the crystal? Where the needles?” “Here!” “Good!” “Is the yellow wax thickened?” “Yes!” “Pour it in the iron mold!” “Is the wax figure done?” They shaped the stuff like molasses adrip on their green hands. “Shove the needle through the heart!” “The crystal, the crystal, fetch it from the tarot bag, dust it off, and have a look!”

They went to the crystal, their faces white.

“See, see, see—”

 

A
ROCKET SHIP MOVED
through space from the planet Earth to the planet Mars. On the rocket ship, men were dying.

The captain raised his head, tiredly, “We'll have to use the morphine.”

“But, Captain—”

“You see yourself this man's condition.” The captain lifted the wool blanket and the man restrained beneath the wet sheet moved and groaned. The air was full of sulphurous thunder.

“I saw it, I saw it!” The man opened his eyes and stared at the port where there were only black spaces, reeling stars, Earth far-removed, and the planet Mars rising large and red. “I saw it, a bat, a huge thing, a bat with a man's face, spread over the front port. Fluttering and fluttering, fluttering and fluttering!”

“Pulse?” asked the captain.

The orderly measured it. “130.”

“He can't go on with that. Use the morphine: Come along, Smith.”

They moved away. Suddenly the floorplates were laced with bone and white skulls that screamed. The captain did not dare look down, and over the screaming he said, “Is this where Perse is?” turning in at a hatch.

A white-smocked surgeon stepped away from a body. “I just don't understand it.”

“How did Perse die?”

“We don't know, captain. It wasn't his heart, his brain, or shock. He just—died.”

The captain felt the doctor's wrist which changed to a hissing snake and bit him. The captain did not flinch. “Take care of yourself. You've a pulse, too.”

The doctor nodded. “Perse complained of pains, needles, he said, in his wrists and legs. Said he felt like wax, melting. He fell. I helped him up. He cried like a child. Said he had a silver needle in his heart. He died. Here he is. Everything's physically normal.”

“That's impossible. He died of
some
thing.”

The captain walked to a port. He smelled of menthol and iodine and green soap on his polished and manicured hands. His white teeth were very bright, and his ears scoured to a pinkness, as were his cheeks. His uniform was the color of new salt, and his boots were black mirrors shining below him. His crisp crew-cut hair smelled of sharp alcohol. Even his breath was antiseptic and new and clean. There was no spot to him. He was a fresh instrument, honed and ready, still hot from the surgeon's oven.

The men with him were from the same mold. One expected, but did not find, huge brass keys spiraling slowly from their backs. They were expensive, talented, well-oiled toys, obedient and quick.

The captain watched the planet Mars grow very large in space.

“We'll be landing in an hour on that blasted place. Smith, did you see any bats, or have other nightmares?”

“Yes, sir. The month before our rocket took off from New York, sir. Felt rats biting my neck, drinking my blood. I didn't tell. I was afraid you wouldn't let me come on this trip.”

“Never mind,” sighed the captain. “I had dreams, too. In all of my fifty years I never had a dream until that week before we took off from Earth. And then, every night, I dreamed I was a white wolf. Caught on a snowy hill. Shot with a silver bullet. Buried with a stake in my heart.” He moved his head toward Mars. “Do you think, Smith,
they
know we're coming?”

“We don't know if there
are
Martian people, sir.”

“Don't we? They began frightening us off, eight weeks ago, before we started. They've killed Perse and Reynolds now. Yesterday, they made Grenville go blind. How? I don't know. Bats, needles, dreams, men dying for no reason. I'd call it witchcraft in another day. But this is the year 2120, Smith. We're rational men. This all can't be happening. But it is. Whoever they are, with their needles and their bats, they'll try to finish all of us.” He swung about. “Smith, fetch those books from my file. I want them when we land.”

Two hundred books were piled on the rocket deck.

“Thank you, Smith. Have you glanced at them? Think I'm insane? Perhaps. It's a crazy hunch. At the last moment, I ordered these books from the Historical Museum. Because of my dreams. Twenty nights I was stabbed, butchered, a screaming bat pinned to a surgical mat, a thing rotting underground in a black box; bad, wicked dreams. Our whole crew dreamed of witch-things and were-things, vampires and phantoms, things they
couldn't
know anything about. Why? Because books on such ghastly subjects were destroyed a century ago. By law. Forbidden for anyone to own the grisly volumes. These books you see here are the last copies, kept for historical purposes in the locked Museum vaults.”

Smith bent to read the dusty titles:

Tales of Mystery and Imagination,
by Edgar Allan Poe.
Dracula,
by Bram Stoker.
Frankenstein,
by Mary Shelley.
The Turn of the Screw,
by Henry James.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,
by Washington Irving.
Rappacini's Daughter,
by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,
by Ambrose Bierce.
Alice in Wonderland,
by Lewis Carroll.
The Willows,
by Algernon Blackwood.
The Wizard of Oz,
by L. Frank Baum.
The Weird Shadow over Innsmouth,
by H. P Lovecraft. And more! Books by Walter De La Mare, Wakefield, Harvey, Wells, Asquith, Huxley, all forbidden authors. All burned in the same year that Halloween was outlawed and Christmas was banned! But, sir, what good are these to us on the rocket?”

“I don't know,” sighed the captain, “yet.”

 

T
HE THREE HAGS LIFTED THE CRYSTAL
where the captain's image flickered, tiny voice tinkling out of the glass:

“I don't know,” sighed the captain, “yet.”

The three witches glared redly into each other's faces.

“We haven't much time,” said one.

“Better warn
Them
up at the House.”

“They'll want to know about the books. It doesn't look good. That fool of a captain!”

“In an hour they'll land their rocket.”

The three hags shuddered and blinked up at the castle by the edge of the dry Martian sea. In its highest window, a small man held a blood-red drape aside. He watched the wastelands where the three witches fed their cauldron and shaped the waxes. Farther along, ten thousand other blue fires and laurel incenses, black tobacco smokes and fir-weeds, cinnamons and bone-dusts rose soft as moths through the Martian night. The man counted the angry magical fires. Then, as the witches stared, he turned. The crimson drape, released, fell causing the distant portal to wink, like a yellow eye.

Mr. Edgar Allan Poe stood in the tower window, a faint vapor of spirits upon his breath. “Hecate's friends are busy tonight,” he said, seeing the witches, far below.

A voice behind him said, “I saw Will Shakespeare on the shore, earlier, whipping them on. All along the sea, Shakespeare's army alone, tonight, numbers thousands; the three Witches, Oberon, Hamlet's father, Othello, Lear, all of them, thousands! Good Lord, a regular sea of people.”

“Good William.” Poe turned. He let the crimson drape fall shut. He stood for a moment to observe the raw stone room, the black-timbered table, the candle flame, the other man, Mr. Ambrose Bierce, seated peering desolately into the flame.

“We'll have to tell Mr. Hawthorne now,” said Mr. Poe. “We've put it off too long. It's a matter of hours. Will you go down to his home with me, Bierce?”

Bierce glanced up. “What will happen to us? God save us!”

“If we can't kill the rocket men off, frighten them away, then we'll have to leave, of course. We'll go on to Jupiter, and when they come to Jupiter, we'll go to Saturn, and when they come to Saturn we'll go to Uranus, or Neptune, and then on out to Pluto—”

“Where then?”

Mr. Poe's face was weary, there were coals of fire remaining, fading, in his eyes, and a sad wildness in the way he talked, and a uselessness of his hands and the way his hair fell over his amazing white brow. He was like a satan of some lost dark cause, a general arrived from a derelict invasion. His silky soft black mustache was worn away by his musing lips. He was so small that his brow seemed to float, vast and phosphorescent by itself, in the dark room.

“We have the advantage of superior forms of travel,” he said. “We can always hope for one of their atomic wars, dissolution, the dark ages come again. The return of superstition. We could go back then to Earth, all of us, in one night.” Mr. Poe's black eyes brooded under his round and illuminant brow. He looked at the ceiling. “So they're coming to ruin this world, too? They won't leave anything undefiled, will they?”

“Does a wolf pack stop until it's killed its prey and eaten the guts?”

Poe swayed, faintly drunk with wine. “What did we do? Did we have a fair trial before a company of literary critics? No! Our books were plucked by neat, sterile surgeon's pliers, and flung into vats, to boil!”

They were interrupted by a hysterical shout from the tower stair.

“Mr. Poe, Mr. Bierce!”

“Yes, yes, we're coming!” Poe and Bierce descended to find a man gasping against the stone passage wall.

 

“H
AVE YOU HEARD THE NEWS
!”
he cried, immediately, clawing at them like a man about to fall over a cliff. “In an hour they'll land! They're bringing books with them, old books, the witches said! What're you doing in the tower at a time like this? Why aren't you acting?”

Poe said, “We're doing everything we can, Blackwood. You're new to this. Come along, we're going to Mr. Hawthorne's place—”

“—to contemplate our doom, our
black
doom,” said Mr. Bierce.

They moved down the echoing throats of the castle, level after dim, green level, down into mustiness and decay and spiders and dreamlike webbing.

“Don't worry,” said Poe, his brow like a huge white lamp before them, descending, sinking. “All along the dead sea tonight I've called the Others. Your friends and mine, Blackwood, Bierce. They're all there. The animals and the old women and the tall men with the sharp white teeth. The traps are waiting, the pits, yes, and the pendulums. The Red Death.” Here he laughed quietly.

“Yes, even the Red Death. I never thought, no, I never thought the time would come when a thing like the Red Death would actually
be.
But
they—
” he poked his finger at the sky “—asked for it, and they shall have it!”

“But are we strong enough?” wondered Blackwood. “How strong is strong? They won't be prepared for us, at least. They haven't the imagination. Those clean young rocket men with their antiseptic bloomers and fish-bowl helmets, with their new religion. About their necks, on gold chains, scalpels. Upon their heads, a diadem of microscopes. In their holy fingers, steaming incense urns which in reality are only germicidal ovens for steaming out superstition. The names of Poe, Bierce, Hawthorne, Blackwood blasphemy to their clean lips.”

Outside the castle, they advanced through a watery space, a tarn that was not a tarn, which misted before them like the stuff of nightmares. The air filled with wing sounds and a whirring, a motion of winds and blacknesses. Voices changed, figures swayed at campfires. Mr. Poe watched the needles knitting, knitting, knitting, in the firelight, knitting pain and misery, knitting wickedness into wax marionettes, clay puppets. The cauldron smells of wild garlics and cayennes and saffron hissed up to fill the night with evil pungency.

“Get on with it!” cried Poe. “I'll be back!”

All down the empty seashore black figures spindled and waned, grew up and blew into black smokes on the wind. Bells rang in mountain towers and licorice ravens spilled out with the bronze sounds and spun away to ashes.