Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09 (14 page)

 
          
And
that’s the way it’s been since time began, when crowds gather. You murder much
easier, this way. Your alibi is very simple; you didn’t know it was dangerous
to move a hurt man. You didn’t mean to hurt him.

 
          
He
looked at them, above him, and he was curious as a man under deep water looking
up at people on a bridge. Who are you? Where do you come from and how do you get
here so soon? You’re the crowd that’s always in the way, using up good air that
a dying man’s lungs are in need of, using up space he should be using to lie
in, alone. Tramping on people to make sure they die, that’s you. I know
all
of you.

 
          
It
was like a polite monologue. They said nothing.
Faces.
The old man.
The red-haired woman.

 
          
Someone
picked up his briefcase. “Whose is this?”

 
          
It’s
mine! It’s evidence against all of you!

 
          
Eyes,
inverted over him.
Shiny eyes under tousled hair or under
hats.

 
          
Faces.

 
          
Somewhere—a siren.
The ambulance was coming.

 
          
But,
looking at the faces, the construction, the cast, the form of the faces,
Spallner
saw it was too late. He read it in their faces.
They
knew.

 
          
He
tried to speak. A little bit got out:

 
          
“It—looks
like I’ll—be joining up with you. I—guess I’ll be a member of your—group—now.”

 
          
He
closed his eyes then, and waited for the coroner.

 
          
H
e looked through the cold morning windows
with the Jack-in-the-Box in his hands, prying the rusted lid. But no matter how
he struggled, the Jack would not jump to the light with a cry, or slap its
velvet mittens on the air, or bob in a dozen directions with a wild and painted
smile. Crushed under the lid, in its jail, it stayed crammed tight coil on
coil. With your ear to the box, you felt pressure beneath, the fear and panic
of the trapped toy. It was like holding someone’s heart in your hand. Edwin
could not tell if the box pulsed or if his own blood beat against the lid.

 
          
He
threw the box down and looked to the window. Outside the window the trees
surrounded the house which surrounded Edwin. He could not see beyond the trees.
If he tried to find another World beyond them, the trees wove themselves thick
with the wind, to still his curiosity, to stop his eyes.

 
          
“Edwin!”
Behind him, Mother’s waiting, nervous breath as she drank her breakfast coffee.
“Stop staring. Come eat.”

 
          
“No,”
he whispered.

 
          
“What?”
A stiffened rustle.
She must have turned. “Which is
more important, breakfast or that window?”

 
          
“The
window .
 . .” he whispered and sent his gaze
running the paths and trails he had tried for thirteen years. Was it true that
the trees flowed on ten thousand miles to nothingness? He could not say. His
sight returned defeated, to the lawn, the steps,
his
hands trembling on the pane.

 
          
He
turned to eat his tasteless apricots, alone with his mother in the vast and
echoing breakfast room.
Five thousand mornings at this table,
this window, and no movement beyond the trees.

 
          
The
two of them ate silently.

 
          
She
was the pale woman that no one but the birds saw in old country houses in
fourth-floor cupola windows, each morning at six, each afternoon at four, each
evening at nine, and also passing by one minute after
midnight
, there she would be, in her tower, silent
and white, high and alone and quiet. It was like passing a deserted greenhouse
in which one last wild white blossom lifted its head to the moonlight.

 
          
And
her child, Edwin, was the thistle that one breath of wind might
unpod
in a season of thistles. His hair was silken and his
eyes were of a constant blue and feverish temperature. He had a haunted look,
as if he slept poorly. He might fly apart like a packet of ladyfinger
firecrackers if a certain door slammed.

 
          
His
mother began to talk, slowly and with great caution, then more rapidly, and
then angrily, and then almost spitting at him.

 
          
“Why
must you disobey every morning? I don’t like your staring from the window, do
you hear? What do you want? Do you want to see them?” she cried, her fingers twitching.
She was blazingly lovely, like an angry white flower. “Do you want to see the
Beasts that run down paths and crush people like strawberries?”

 
          
Yes,
he thought, I’d like to see the Beasts, horrible as they are.

 
          
“Do
you want to go out there?” she cried, “like your father did before you were
born, and be killed as he was killed, struck down by one of those Terrors on
the road, would you like that!”

 
          
“
No .
 . .”

 
          
“Isn’t
it enough they murdered your Father? Why should you even think of those
Beasts!
” She motioned toward the forest. “Well, if you
really want to die that much, go ahead!”

 
          
She
quieted, but her fingers kept opening and closing on the tablecloth. “Edwin,
Edwin, your Father built every part of this World, it was beautiful for him, it
should be for you. There’s nothing, nothing, beyond those trees but death; I
won’t have you near it! This is the World. There’s no other worth bothering
with.”

 
          
He
nodded miserably.

 
          
“Smile
now, and finish your toast,” she said.

 
          
He
ate slowly, with the window reflected in secret on his silver spoon.

 
          
“
Mom .
 . . ?” He couldn’t say it. “
What’s .
 . . dying? You talk about it. Is it a
feeling?”

 
          
“To those who must live on after someone else, a bad feeling, yes.”
She stood up suddenly. “You’re late for school! Run!”

 
          
He
kissed her as he grabbed his books. “Bye!”

 
          
“Say
hello to teacher!”

 
          
He
fled from her like a bullet from a gun. Up endless staircases, through
passages, halls, past windows that poured down dark gallery panels like white
waterfalls. Up, up through the layer-cake Worlds with the thick frostings of
Oriental rug between, and bright candles on top.

 
          
From
the highest stair he gazed down through four intervals of Universe.

 
          
Lowlands
of kitchen, dining room,
parlor.
Two Middle
Countries of music, games, pictures, and locked, forbidden rooms. And here—he
whirled—the
Highlands
of picnics, adventure, and learning. Here
he roamed, idled, or sat singing lonely child songs on the winding journey to
school.

 
          
This,
then, was the Universe. Father (or God, as Mother often called him) had raised
its mountains on wallpapered plaster long ago. This was Father-God’s creation,
in which stars blazed at the flick of a switch. And the sun was Mother, and
Mother was the sun, about which all the Worlds swung, turning. And Edwin, a
small dark meteor, spun up around through the dark carpets and shimmering
tapestries of space. You saw him rise to vanish on vast comet staircases, on
hikes and explorations.

 
          
Sometimes
he and Mother picnicked in the
Highlands
,
spread cool snow linens on red-
tuffed
, Persian lawns,
on crimson meadows in a rarefied plateau at the summit of the Worlds where
flaking portraits of sallow strangers looked meanly down on their eating and
their revels. They drew water from silver taps in hidden tiled niches, smashed
the tumblers on hearthstones, shrieking. Played hide-and-seek in enchanted
Upper Countries, in unknown, wild, and hidden lands, where she found him rolled
like a mummy in a velvet window drape or under sheeted furniture like a rare plant
protected from some wind. Once, lost, he wandered for hours in insane foothills
of dust and echoes, where the hooks and hangers in closets were hung only with
night. But she found him and carried him weeping down through the leveling
Universe to the Parlor where dust motes, exact and familiar, fell in showers of
sparks on the sunlit air.

 
          
He
ran up a stair.

 
          
Here
he knocked a thousand
thousand
doors, all locked and
forbidden. Here Picasso ladies and Dali gentlemen screamed silently from canvas
asylums, their gold eyes burning when he dawdled.

 
          
“Those
Things live
out there,”
his mother
had said, pointing to the Dali-Picasso families.

 
          
Now
running quickly past, he stuck out his tongue at them.

 
          
He
stopped running.

 
          
One
of the forbidden doors stood open.

 
          
Sunlight
slanted warm through it, exciting him.

 
          
Beyond
the door, a spiral stair screwed around up in sun and silence.

 
          
He
stood, gasping. Year after year he had tried the doors that were always found
locked. What would happen now if he shoved this one full open and climbed the
stair? Was some Monster hiding at the top?

 
          
“Hello!”

 
          
His
voice leapt up around the spiraled sunlight. “
Hello .
 . .”
whispered a faint, far lazy echo, high, high, and gone.

 
          
He
moved through the door.

 
          
“Please,
please, don’t hurt me,” he whispered to the high sunlit place.

 
          
He
climbed, pausing with each step to wait for his punishment, eyes shut like a
penitent. Faster now, he leapt around and around and up until his knees ached
and his breath
fountained
in and out and his head
banged like a bell and at last he reached the terrible summit of the climb and
stood in an open, sun-drenched tower.

 
          
The
sun struck his eyes a blow.
Never, never so much sun!
He stumbled to the iron rail.

 
          
“It’s
there!” His mouth opened from one direction to another. “It’s there!” He ran in
a circle. “There!”

 
          
He
was above the somber tree barrier. For the first time he stood high over the
windy chestnuts and elms and as far as he could see was green grass, green
trees, and white ribbons on which beetles ran, and the other half of the world
was blue and endless, with the sun lost and dropping away in an incredible deep
blue room so vast he felt himself fall with it, screamed, and clutched the
tower ledge, and beyond the trees, beyond the white ribbons where the beetles
ran he saw things like fingers sticking up, but he saw no Dali-Picasso terrors,
he saw only some small red-and-white-and-blue handkerchiefs fluttering high on
great white poles.

 
          
He
was suddenly sick; he was sick again.

 
          
Turning,
he almost fell flat down the stairs.

 
          
He
slammed the forbidden door, fell against it.

 
          
“You’ll
go blind.” He crushed his hands to his eyes. “You shouldn’t have seen, you
shouldn’t,
you
shouldn’t!”

 
          
He
fell to his knees, he lay on the floor twisted tight, covered up. He need wait
but a moment—the blindness would come.

 
          
Five
minutes later he stood at an ordinary
Highlands
window, looking out at his own familiar Garden World.

 
          
He
saw once more the elms and hickory trees and the stone wall, and that forest
which he had taken to be an endless wall itself, beyond which lay nothing but
nightmare nothingness, mist, rain, and eternal night. Now it was certain, the
Universe did not end with the forest. There were other worlds than those
contained in
Highland
or Lowland.

 
          
He
tried the forbidden door again.
Locked.

 
          
Had
he really gone up? Had he really discovered those half-green, half-blue
vastnesses? Had God seen him? Edwin trembled.
God.
God, who smoked mysterious black pipes and wielded magical walking
sticks
. God who might be watching even now!

 
          
Edwin
murmured, touching his cold face.

 
          
“I
can still see. Thank you, thank you. I can
still
see!”