A Pleasure to Burn (12 page)

It was the sound of air rushing in to fill a vacuum, where, a moment before, was something.

The clean rocket men faced the directions from which the scream had come rushing forward like a tide.

The captain neatly disposed of the last book.

The air stopped quivering.

Silence.

The rocket men leaned and listened.

“Captain, did you hear it?”

“No.”

“Like a wave, sir. On the sea bottom! I thought I saw something. Over there. A black wave. Big. Running at us.”

“You were mistaken.”

“But the sound?”

“I say you heard
nothing.”

“There, sir!”

“What!”

“See it? There! The castle! Way over! That black castle, near that lake! It's splitting in half. It's falling!”

The men stared. “I don't see it.”

“Yes, it's falling! It's all fire and rock.”

The men squinted and shuffled forward.

Smith stood trembling among them. He put his hand to his head as if to find a thought there. “I remember. Yes, now I do. A long time back. When I was a child. A book I read. A story. Usher, I think it was. Yes, Usher. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher'—”

“By whom?”

“I—I can't remember.”

“Usher? Never heard of it.”

“Yes, Usher, that's what it was. I saw it fall again, just now, like in the story.”

“Smith!”

“Yes, sir?”

“Report for psychoanalysis tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir!” A brisk salute.

“Be careful.”

The men tiptoed, guns alert, beyond the ship's aseptic light to gaze at the long sea and the low hills.

“Why,” whispered Smith, disappointed, “there's no one here at all, is there? No one here at all.”

The wind blew sand over his shoes, whining.

Carnival of Madness

“D
URING THE WHOLE OF A DULL, DARK AND SOUNDLESS
day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher …”

Mr. William Stendahl paused in his quotation. There, upon a low black hill, stood the house, its cornerstone bearing the inscription: 2249 A.D.

Mr. Bigelow, the architect said, “It's completed. Here's the key, Mr. Stendahl.”

The two men stood together, silently, in the quiet autumn afternoon. Blueprints rustled on the raven grass at their feet.

“The House of Usher,” said Mr. Stendahl, with pleasure. “Planned, built, bought, paid for. Wouldn't Mr. Poe be
delighted?
”

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

“Yes!”

“Is its 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, your hand! Congratulations! It's worth every penny. My word, it's
beautiful!
”

“Thank you. I had to work in total ignorance. A puzzling job. 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, fly or anything 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 a sun. Somewhere it was the month of May, a yellow month with a blue sky. Somewhere above, the passenger rockets burned east and west across the continent in a modern land. The sound of their screaming passage was muffled and killed by this dim, sound-proofed 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. That's four centuries back. All of his books were burned in The Great Fire.”

“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. Centuries ago it was a grain of sand. They began by controlling 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 all 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 theatres 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 midair! So, they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning twenty years ago, in 2229, they lined them up, Saint 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 Biologist's 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 Curioser and Curioser, and they gave the Looking Glass one hammer blow to crash it and every Red King and Oyster away!”

 

H
E 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 at Mr. Stendahl and at last said, “Sorry. I don't know what you're talking about. Names, just names to me. From what I hear, the Burning was a good thing.”

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

Mr. Bigelow summoned his workers and went away.

Mr. Stendahl stood alone before his House. “Listen here,” he said to the unseen rockets, flying over. “I'm going to show you all. I'm going to teach you a fine lesson for what you did to Mr. Poe. As of this day, beware. The House of Usher is open for business!”

He pushed a fist at the sky.

 

T
HE ROCKET LANDED
.
A man stepped out. He looked at the House and his gray eyes were displeased and vexed. He strode across the moat and confronted the small man there.

“Your name Stendahl?

“I'm Mr. Stendahl, yes,” said the small man.

“I'm Garrett, Investigator of Moral Climates.” The irritated man waved a card at the House. “Suppose you tell me about this place, Mr. Stendahl.”

“Very well. It's a castle. A haunted castle, if you like.”

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

“Simple enough. In this year of Our Lord 2249 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 creatures 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. You and your library.”

“Yes, me and my library. And a few others like me. Oh, Poe's been forgotten for many centuries, 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 Hallowe'en and told your film producers that if they made anything at all they would have to make and re-make Ernest Hemingway. My God, how many
times
have I seen
For Whom the Bell Tolls!
Thirty different versions! All realistic. Oh, realism! Oh,
here
, oh, now, oh
hell!”

“It doesn't pay to be better!”

“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 got 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 floorstones. 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 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 too 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.

 

P
IKES LOOKED UP
from the table.

“Are we almost ready, Pikes?” Stendahl asked.

“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?
” 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. “Goodby.” He pushed Mr. Garrett in and slammed the door.