Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09 (16 page)

 
          
He
twisted the toy in his sweating hands. Last year, when things began to tremble
and quiver, hadn’t Mother advanced his birthday several months, too? Yes, oh,
yes, yes.

 
          
Think
of something else.
God.
God building
cold
midnight
cellar, sun-baked attic,
and all miracles between.
Think of the hour of his death, crushed by some monstrous beetle beyond the
wall. Oh, how the worlds must have rocked with His passing!

 
          
Edwin
moved the Jack-in-the-Box to his face, whispered against the lid. “Hello!
Hello! Hello,
hello .
 . .”

 
          
No
answer save the sprung-tight coiled-in tension there. I’ll get you out, thought
Edwin. Just wait, just wait. It may hurt, but there’s only one way. Here,
here .
 . .

 
          
And
he moved from bed to window and leaned far out, looking down to the marbled walk
in the moonlight. He raised the box high, felt the sweat trickle from his
armpit, felt his fingers clench,
felt
his arm jerk. He
flung the box out, shouting. The box tumbled in the cold air, down. It
look
a long time to strike the marble pavement.

 
          
Edwin
bent still further over, gasping.

 
          
“Well?”
he cried. “Well?” and again, “You there!” and “You!”

 
          
The
echoes faded. The box lay in the forest shadows. He could not see if the crash
had broken it wide. He could not see if the Jack had risen, smiling, from its
hideous jail or if it bobbed upon the wind now this way, that, this way, that,
its
silver bells jingling softly. He listened. He stood by
the window for an hour staring, listening, and at last went back to bed.

 
          
Morning.
Bright voices moved near and far, in and out the
Kitchen World and Edwin opened his eyes. Whose voices, now whose could they be?
Some of God’s workmen?
The Dali
people?
But Mother hated them; no. The voices faded in a humming roar.
Silence.
And from a great distance, a running,
running grew louder and still louder until the door burst open
.

 
          
“Happy Birthday!”

 
          
They
danced, they ate frosted cookies, they bit lemon ices, they drank pink wines,
and there stood his name on a
snowpowdered
cake as
Mother chorded the piano into an avalanche of sound and opened her mouth to
sing, then whirled to seize him away to more strawberries, more wines, more
laughter that shook chandeliers into trembling rain. Then, a silver key
flourished, they raced to unlock the fourteenth forbidden door.

 
          
“Ready!
Hold on!”

 
          
The
door whispered into the wall.

 
          
“Oh,”
said Edwin.

 
          
For,
disappointingly enough, this fourteenth room was nothing at all but a dusty
dull-brown closet. It promised nothing as had the rooms given him on other
anniversaries! His sixth birthday present, now, had been the schoolroom in the
Highlands
. On his seventh birthday he had opened the
play-room in the
Lowlands
. Eighth, the music room; Ninth, the
miraculous hell-fired kitchen! Tenth was the room where phonographs hissed in a
continuous exhalation of ghosts singing on a gentle
wind.
Eleventh was the vast green diamond room of the Garden with a carpet that had
to be cut instead of swept!

 
          
“Oh,
don’t be disappointed; move!” Mother, laughing, pushed him in the closet. “Wait
till you see how magical! Shut the door!”

 
          
She
thrust a red button flush with the wall.

 
          
Edwin
shrieked. “No!”

 
          
For
the room was quivering, working, like a mouth that held them in iron jaws; the
room moved
,
the wall slid away below.

 
          
“Oh,
hush now, darling,” she said. The door drifted down through the floor, and a
long insanely vacant wall slithered by like an endlessly rustling snake to
bring another door and another door with it that did not stop but traveled on
while Edwin screamed and clutched his mother’s waist. The room whined and
cleared its throat somewhere; the trembling ceased, the room stood still. Edwin
stared at a strange new door and heard his mother say go
on,
open it, there, now, there. And the new door gaped upon still further mystery.
Edwin blinked.

 
          
“The
Highlands
!
This is the
Highlands
! How did we get here? Where’s the Parlor,
mom, where’s the Parlor!”

 
          
She
fetched him out through the door. “We jumped straight up, and we flew. Once a
week, you’ll fly to school instead of running the long way around!”

 
          
He
still could not move, but only stood looking at the mystery of Land exchanged
for Land, of Country replaced by higher and further Country.

 
          
“Oh,
mother,
mother .
 . .” he said.

 
          
It
was a sweet long time in the deep grass of the garden where they idled most
deliciously, sipped huge cupfuls of apple cider with their elbows on crimson
silk cushions, their shoes kicked off, their toes bedded in sour dandelions,
sweet clover. Mother jumped twice when she heard Monsters roar beyond the
forest. Edwin kissed her cheek. “It’s all right,” he said, “I’ll protect you.”

 
          
“I
know you will,” she said, but she turned to gaze at the pattern of trees, as if
any moment the chaos out there might smash the forest with a blow and stamp its
Titan’s foot down and grind them to dust.

 
          
Late
in the long blue afternoon, they saw a chromium bird thing fly through a bright
rift in the trees, high and roaring. They ran for the Parlor, heads bent as
before a green storm of lightning and rain, feeling the sound pour blinding showers
to drench them.

 
          
Crackle,
crackle—the birthday burnt away to cellophane nothingness. At sunset, in the
dim soft Parlor Country, Mother inhaled champagne with her tiny seedling
nostrils and her pale summer-rose mouth, then, drowsy
wild,
herded Edwin off to his room and shut him in.

 
          
He
undressed in slow-pantomimed wonder, thinking, this year, next year, and which
room two years, three years, from today? What about the Beasts, the Monsters?
And being mashed and God killed? What was killed? What was Death? Was Death a
feeling? Did God enjoy it so much he never came back? Was Death a journey then?

 
          
In
the hall, on her way downstairs, Mother dropped a champagne bottle. Edwin heard
and was cold, for the thought that jumped through his head was, that’s how
Mother’d
sound. If she fell, if she broke, you’d find a
million fragments in the morning. Bright crystal and clear wine on the parquet
flooring, that’s all you’d see at dawn.

 
          
Morning
was the smell of vines and grapes and moss in his room, a smell of shadowed
coolness. Downstairs, breakfast was in all probability, at this instant,
manifesting itself in a
fingersnap
on the wintry
tables.

 
          
Edwin
got up to wash and dress and wait, feeling fine. Now things would be fresh and
new for at least a month. Today, like all days, there’d be breakfast, school,
lunch,
songs in the music room, an hour or two at the
electrical games, then—tea
in the Outlands, on the luminous grass. Then
up to school again for a late hour or so, where he and Teacher might prowl the censored
library together and he’d puzzle with words and thoughts about that world
out there
that had been censored from
his eyes.

 
          
He
had forgotten Teacher’s note. Now, he must give it to Mother.

 
          
He
opened the door. The hall was empty. Down through the deeps of the Worlds, a
soft mist floated, through a silence which no footsteps broke; the hills were
quiet; the silver fonts did not pulse in the first sunlight, and the banister,
coiling up from the mists was a prehistoric monster peering into his room. He
pulled away from this creature, looking to find Mother, like a white boat,
drifted by the dawn tides and vapors below.

 
          
She
was not there. He hurried down through the hushed lands, calling, “Mother!”

 
          
He
found her in the Parlor, collapsed on the floor in her shiny green-gold party
dress, a champagne goblet in one hand, the carpet littered with broken glass.

 
          
She
was obviously asleep, so he sat at the magical breakfast table. He blinked at
the empty white cloth and the gleaming plates. There was no food. All his life
wondrous foods had awaited him here.
But not today.

 
          
“Mother,
wake up!” He ran to her. “Shall I go to school? Where’s the food? Wake up!”

 
          
He
ran up the stairs.

 
          
The
Highlands
were cold and shadowed, and the white glass
suns no longer glowed from the ceilings in this day of sullen fog. Down dark
corridors, through dim continents of silence, Edwin rushed. He rapped and
rapped at the school door. It drifted in, whining, by itself.

 
          
The
school lay empty and dark. No fire roared on the hearth to toss shadows on the
beamed ceiling. There was not a crackle or a whisper.

 
          
“Teacher?”

 
          
He
poised in the center of the flat, cold room.

 
          
“Teacher!”
he screamed.

 
          
He
slashed the drapes aside; a faint shaft of sunlight fell through the stained glass.

 
          
Edwin
gestured. He commanded the fire to explode like a popcorn kernel on the hearth.
He commanded it to bloom to life! He shut his eyes, to give Teacher time to
appear. He opened his eyes and was stupefied at what he saw on her desk.

 
          
Neatly
folded was the gray cowl and robe, atop which gleamed her silver spectacles,
and one gray glove. He touched them. One gray glove was gone. A piece of greasy
cosmetic chalk lay on the robe. Testing it, he made dark lines on his hands.

 
          
He
drew back, staring at Teacher’s empty robe, the glasses,
the
greasy chalk. His hand touched a knob of a door which had always been locked.
The door swung slowly wide. He looked into a small brown closet.

 
          
“Teacher!”

 
          
He
ran in, the door crashed shut, he pressed a red button. The room sank down, and
with it sank a slow mortal coldness. The World was silent, quiet, and cool.
Teacher gone and Mother—sleeping.
Down fell the room, with
him in its iron jaws.

 
          
Machinery
clashed. A door slid open. Edwin ran out.

 
          
The
Parlor!

 
          
Behind
was not a door, but a tall oak panel from which he had emerged.

 
          
Mother
lay uncaring, asleep. Folded under her, barely showing as he rolled her
over,
was one of Teacher’s soft gray gloves.