Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09 (24 page)

 
          
    'And now, here you
are,' said Mr. Benedict, looking down at the fine body with pleasure. For a
moment he was lost in memory of his own body in his own past.

 
          
    He had once tried
strangling himself with one of those apparatuses you nail in a doorway and
chuck under your jawbone and pull yourself up on, hoping to add an inch to his
ridiculously short frame. To counteract his deadly pale skin he had lain in the
sun, but he boiled and his skin fell off in pink leaflets, leaving only
more pink
, moist, sensitive skin. And what could he do about
the eyes from which his mind peered, those close-set, glassy little eyes and
the tiny wounded mouth? You can repaint houses, burn trash,
move
from the slum, shoot your mother, buy new clothes, get a car, make money,
change all those outer
environmentals
for something
new. But what's the brain to do when caught like cheese in the throat of a
mouse? His own environment thus betrayed him; his own skin, body,
colour
, voice gave him no chance to extend out into that
vast bright world where people tickled ladies' chins and kissed their mouths
and shook hands with friends and traded aromatic cigars.

 
          
    Thinking in this
fashion, Mr. Benedict stood over the magnificent body of Edmund Worth.

 
          
    He severed Worth's
head, put it in a coffin on a small satin pillow, facing up, then he placed one
hundred and ninety pounds of bricks in the coffin and arranged some pillows
inside a black coat and a white shirt and tie to look like the upper body, and
covered the whole with a blanket of blue velvet, up to the chin. It was a fine
illusion.

 
          
    The body itself he
placed in a refrigerating vault.

 
          
    'When I die, I shall
leave specific orders, Mr. Worth, that my head be severed and buried, joined to
your body. By that time I shall have acquired an assistant willing to perform
such a rascally act, for money. If one cannot have a body worthy of love in
life, one can at least gain such a body in death. Thank you.'

 
          
    He slammed the lid on
Edmund Worth.

 
          
    Since it was a growing
and popular habit in the town for people to be buried with the coffin lids
closed over them during the service, this gave Mr. Benedict great opportunities
to vent his repressions on his hapless guests. Some he locked in their boxes
upside down, some face down, or making obscene gestures. He had the most
utterly wondrous fun with a group of old maiden ladies who were mashed in a car
on their way to an afternoon tea. They were famous gossips, always with heads
together over some choice bit. What the onlookers at the triple funeral did not
know (all three casket lids were shut) was that, as in life, all three were
crowded into one casket, heads together in eternal, cold, petrified gossip. The
other two caskets were filled with pebbles and shells and ravels of gingham. It
was a nice service. Everybody cried. 'Those three inseparables, at last
separated,' everybody sobbed.

 
          
    'Yes,' said Mr.
Benedict, having to hide his face in his grief.

 
          
    Not lacking for a sense
of justice, Mr. Benedict buried one rich man stark naked. A poor man he buried
wound in gold cloth, with five-dollar gold pieces for buttons and twenty-dollar
coins on each eyelid. A lawyer he did not bury at all, but burnt him in the
incinerator — his coffin contained nothing but a polecat, trapped in the woods
one Sunday.

 
          
    An old maid, at her
service one afternoon, was the victim of a terrible device. Under the silken
comforter, parts of an old man had been buried with her. There she lay,
insulted by cold organs, being made cold love to by hidden hands, hidden and
planted other things. The shock showed on her face, somewhat.

 
          
    So Mr. Benedict moved
from body to body in his mortuary that afternoon, talking to all the sheeted
figures, telling them his every secret. The final body for the day was the body
of one
Merriwell
Blythe, an ancient man afflicted
with spells and comas. Mr. Blythe had been brought in for dead several times,
but each time had revived in time to prevent premature burial.

 
          
    Mr. Benedict pulled
back the sheet from Mr. Blythe's face.

 
          
    Mr.
Merriwell
Blythe fluttered his eyes.

 
          
    'Ah!' and Mr. Benedict
let fall the sheet.

 
          
    'You!' screamed the
voice under the sheet.

 
          
    Mr. Benedict fell
against the slab, suddenly shaken and sick.

 
          
    'Get me up from here!'
cried the voice of Mr.
Merriwell
Blythe.

 
          
    'You're alive!' said
Mr. Benedict, jerking aside the sheet.

 
          
    'Oh, the thing's I've
heard, the things I've listened to the last hour!' wailed the old man on the slab,
rolling his eyes about in his head in white orbits. 'Lying here, not able to
move, and hearing you talk the things you talk! Oh, you dark, dark thing, you
awful thing, you fiend, you monster, get me up from here. I'll tell the mayor
and the council and everyone, oh, you dark, dark thing! You defiler and sadist,
you perverted scoundrel, you terrible man,
wait'll
I
tell, I tell on you!' shrieked the old man, frothing. 'Get me up from here!'
'No!' said Mr. Benedict, falling to his knees, 'Oh, you terrible man!' sobbed
Mr.
Merriwell
Blythe. 'To think this has gone on in
our town all these years and we never knew the things you did to people!
Oh, you monstrous monster!'
'No,'
whispered Mr. Benedict, trying to get up, falling down, palsied and in terror.
'The things you
said
,' accused the
old man in dry contempt. 'The things you do!' 'Sorry,' whispered Mr. Benedict.

 
          
    The old man tried to
rise. 'Don't!' said Mr. Benedict, and held on to him. 'Let go of me!' said the
old man. 'No,' said Mr. Benedict. He reached for a hypodermic and stabbed the
old man in the arm with it. 'You!' cried the old man, wildly, to all the
sheeted figures. 'Help me!' He squinted blindly at the window, at the
churchyard below with the leaning stones. 'You, out there, too, under the
stones, help! Listen!' The old man fell back, whistling and frothing. He knew
he was dying.
'All,
listen,' he babbled. 'He's done
this to me, and you, and you, all of you, he's done too much, too long. Don't
take it!
Don't,
don't let him do any more to anyone!'
The old man licked away the stuff from his lips, growing weaker. 'Do something
to him!'

 
          
    Mr. Benedict stood
there, shocked, and said, 'They can't do anything to me. They can't. I say they
can't.'

 
          
    'Out of your graves!'
wheezed the old man. 'Help me! Tonight, or tomorrow or soon, but jump up and
fix him, oh, this horrible man!' And he wept many tears.

 
          
    'How foolish,' said Mr.
Benedict
numbly.
'You're dying and foolish.' Mr.
Benedict could not move his lips. His eyes were wide. 'Go on and die, now,
quickly.'

 
          
    'Everybody up!' shouted
the old man.
'Everybody out!
Help!'

 
          
    'Please don't talk any
more,' said Mr. Benedict. 'I really don't like to listen.'

 
          
    The room was suddenly
very dark. It was night. It was getting late. The old man raved on and on,
getting weaker. Finally, smiling, he said, 'They've taken a lot from you,
horrible man. Tonight, they'll do something.'

 
          
    The old man died.

 
          
    People say there was an
explosion that night in the graveyard. Or rather, a series of explosions, a
smell of strange things, a movement, a violence, a raving. There was much light
and lightning, and a kind of rain, and the church bells hammered and slung
about in the belfry, and stones toppled, and things swore oaths, and things
flew through the air, and there was a chasing and a screaming, and many shadows
and all the lights in the mortuary blazing on, and things moving inside and
outside in swift jerks and
shamblings
, windows broke,
doors were torn from hinges, leaves from trees, iron gates clattered, and in
the end there was a picture of Mr. Benedict running about, running about,
vanishing, the lights out, suddenly, and a tortured scream that could only be
from Mr. Benedict himself.

 
          
   
After
that — nothing.
Quiet.

 
          
    The town people entered
the mortuary the next morning. They searched the mortuary building and the
church, and then they went out into the graveyard.

 
          
    And they found nothing
but blood, a vast quantity of blood, sprinkled and thrown and spread everywhere
you could possibly look, as if the heavens had bled profusely in the night.

 
          
   
But
not a sign of Mr. Benedict.

 
          
    'Where could he be?'
everybody wondered.

 
          
    'How should
we
know?' everybody replied, confounded.

 
          
    And then they had the
answer.

 
          
    Walking through the
graveyard they stood in deep tree shadows where the stones, row on row, were
old and time-erased and leaning. No birds sang in the trees. The sunlight which
finally managed to pierce the thick
leaves,
was like a
light bulb illumination, weak, frail, unbelievable, theatrical, thin.

 
          
    They stopped by one
tombstone. 'Here, now!' they exclaimed.

 
          
    Others paused and bent
over the
greyish
, moss-flecked stone, and cried out.

 
          
    Freshly scratched, as
if by feebly,
frantic, hasty fingers (in fact, as if
scratched by fingernails, the writing was that new) was
the name:
MR. BENEDICT
.

 
          
    'Look over here!'
someone else cried. Everybody turned. 'This one, this stone, and this one, and
this one, too!' cried the villager, pointing to five other gravestones.

 
          
    Everybody hurried
around, looking and recoiling.

 
          
    Upon each and every
stone, scratched by fingernail
scratchings
, the same
message appeared:

 
          
    MR. BENEDICT —  

 
          
    The town people were
stunned.

 
          
    'But that's
impossible,' objected one of them, faintly. 'He
couldn't
be buried under
all
these gravestones!'

 
          
    They stood there for
one long moment. Instinctively they all looked at one another nervously in the silence
and the tree darkness. They all waited for an answer. With fumbling, senseless
lips, one of them replied, simply:

 
          
    '
Couldn't
he?'

 
          
'WE hate you!' cried the sixteen boys
and girls rushing and crowding about Michael in the schoolroom. Michael
screamed. Recess was over, Mr. Howard, the teacher, was still absent from the
filling room. 'We hate you!' and the sixteen boys and girls, bumping and
clustering and breathing, raised a window. It was three flights down to the pavement.
Michael flailed.

 
          
    They took hold of
Michael and pushed him out the window.

 
          
    Mr. Howard, their
teacher, came into the room. 'Wait a minute!' he shouted.

 
          
    Michael fell three
flights. Michael died.

 
          
    Nothing was done about
it. The police shrugged eloquently. These children were all eight or
nine,
they didn't understand what they were doing.
So.

 
          
    Mr. Howard's breakdown
occurred the next day. He refused, ever again, to teach! 'But, why?' asked his
friends. Mr. Howard gave no answer. He remained silent and a terrible light
filled his eyes, and later he remarked that if he told them the truth they
would think him quite insane.

 
          
    Mr. Howard left
Madison
City
. He went to live in a small
nearby town,
Green Bay
, for seven
years, on an income managed from writing stories and poetry.

 
          
    He never married. The
few women he approached always desired — children.

 
          
    In the autumn of his
seventh year of self-enforced retirement, a good friend of Mr. Howard's, a
teacher, fell ill. For lack of a proper substitute, Mr. Howard was summoned and
convinced that it was his duty to take over the class. Because he realized the
appointment could last no longer than a few weeks, Mr. Howard agreed,
unhappily.

 
          
    'Sometimes,' announced
Mr. Howard, slowly pacing the aisles of the schoolroom on that Monday morning
in September, 'sometimes, I actually believe that children are invaders from
another dimension.'

 
          
    He stopped, and his
shiny dark eyes snapped from face to face of his small audience. He held one
hand behind him, clenched. The other hand, like a pale animal, climbed his
lapel as he talked and later climbed back down to toy with his
ribboned
glasses.

 
          
    'Sometimes,' he
continued, looking at William Arnold and Russell Newell, and Donald Bowers and
Charlie Hencoop, 'sometimes I believe children are little monsters thrust out
of hell, because the devil could no longer cope with them. And I certainly
believe that everything should be done to reform their uncivil little minds.'

 
          
    Most of his words ran
unfamiliarly into the washed and unwashed ears of Arnold, Newell, Bowers and
Company. But the tone inspired one to dread. The little girls lay back in their
seats, against their pigtails, lest he yank them like bell-ropes, to summon the
dark angels. All stared at Mr. Howard, as if hypnotized.

 
          
    'You are another race
entirely, your motives, your beliefs, your disobediences,' said Mr. Howard.
'You are not human. You are — children. Therefore, until such time as you are
adults, you have no right to demand privileges or question your elders, who
know better.'

 
          
    He paused, and put his
elegant rump upon the chair behind the neat, dustless desk.

 
          
    'Living in your world
of fantasy,' he said, scowling darkly. 'Well, there'll be no fantasy here.
You'll soon discover that a ruler on your hand is no dream, no faerie frill,
no
Peter Pan excitement.' He snorted. 'Have I frightened
you? I have. Good! Well and good. You deserve to be. I want you to know where
we stand. I'm not afraid of you, remember that. I'm not afraid of you' His hand
trembled and he drew back in his chair as all their eyes stared at him. 'Here!'
He flung a glance clear across the room. 'What're you whispering about, back
there?
Some necromancy or other?'

 
          
    A little girl raised
her hand. 'What's necromancy?'

 
          
    'We'll discuss that
when our two young friends, Mr. Arnold and Mr. Bowers, explain their whispers.
Well, young men?'

 
          
    Donald Bowers arose.
'We don't like you. That's all we said.' He sat down again.

 
          
    Mr. Howard raised his
brows. 'I like frankness, truth. Thank you for your honesty. But,
simultaneously, I do not tolerate flippant rebellion. You'll stay an hour after
school tonight and wash the boards.'

 
          
   
After
school, walking home, with autumn leaves falling both before and after his
passing.
Mr. Howard caught up with four of his students. He rapped his
cane sharply on the pavement. 'Here, what are you children doing?'

 
          
    The two startled boys
and girls jerked as if struck upon their shoulders by his cane. 'Oh,' they all
said.

 
          
    'Well,' demanded the
man. 'Explain. What were you doing here when I came up?'

 
          
    William Arnold said,
'Playing poison.'

 
          
   
'Poison!'
Their teacher's face twisted. He was carefully sarcastic.
'Poison,
poison, playing poison.
Well. And how does one play poison?'

 
          
    Reluctantly, William
Arnold ran off.

 
          
    'Come back here!'
shouted Mr. Howard.

 
          
    'I'm only showing you,'
said the boy, hopping over a cement block of the pavement, 'how we play poison.
Whenever we come to a dead man we jump over him.'

 
          
    'One does,
does
one?' said Mr. Howard.

 
          
    'If you jump on a dead
man's grave, then you're poisoned and fall down and die,' explained Isabel
Skelton, much too brightly.

 
          
    'Dead men, graves,
poisoned,' Mr. Howard said, mockingly. 'Where do you get this dead man idea?'

 
          
    'See?' said Clara
Parris, pointing with her arithmetic.
'On this square, the
name of the two dead men.'

 
          
    'Ridiculous,' retorted
Mr. Howard, squinting down. 'Those are simply the names of the contractors who
mixed and laid the cement pavement.'

 
          
    Isabel and Clara both
gasped wildly and turned accusing eyes to the two boys. 'You said they were
gravestones!' they cried, almost together.

 
          
    William Arnold looked
at his feet.
'Yeah.
They are. Well, almost.
Anyway.'
He looked up. 'It's late. I
gotta
go home.
So long.'

 
          
    Clara Parris looked at
the two little names cut into the pavement. 'Mr. Kelly and Mr. Terrill,' she
read the names. 'Then these aren't graves? Mr. Kelly and Mr. Terrill aren't
buried here? See, Isabel, that's what I told you, a dozen times I did.'

 
          
    'You did not,' sulked
Isabel.

 
          
    'Deliberate lies,' Mr.
Howard tapped his cane in an impatient code.
'Falsification
of the highest
calibre
.
Good God, Mr. Arnold,
Mr. Bowers, there'll be no more of this, do you understand?'

 
          
    'Yes, sir,' mumbled the
boys.

 
          
    'Speak up!'

 
          
    'Yes, sir,' they
replied, again.

 
          
    Mr. Howard swung off
swiftly down the street. William Arnold waited until he was out of sight before
he said, 'I hope a bird drops something right smack on his nose
— '

 
          
    'Come on, Clara, let's
play poison,' said Isabel, hopefully.

 
          
    Clara pouted. 'It's
been spoiled. I'm going home.'

 
          
    'I'm poisoned!' cried
Donald Bowers, falling to the earth and frothing merrily. 'Look, I'm poisoned!
Gahhh
!'

 
          
    'Oh,' cried Clara,
angrily, and ran away.

 
          
    Saturday morning Mr.
Howard glanced out of his front window and swore when he saw Isabel Skelton
making chalk marks on his pavement and then hopping about, making a monotonous
sing-song with her voice.

 
          
    'Stop that!'

 
          
    Rushing out, he almost
flung her to the pavement in his emotion. He grabbed her and shook her
violently and let her go and stood over her and the chalk marks.

 
          
    'I was only playing
hopscotch,' she sobbed, hands over her eyes.

 
          
    'I don't care, you can't
play it here,' he declared. Bending, he erased the chalk marks with his
handkerchief, muttering. 'Young witch.
Pentagrams.
Rhymes and incantations, and all looking perfectly innocent, God, how innocent.
You little
fiend
!' he made as if to
strike her, but stopped. Isabel ran off, wailing. 'Go ahead, you little fool!'
he screamed, furiously. 'Run off and tell your little cohorts that you've
failed. They'll have to try some other way! They won't get around
me,
they won't, oh, no!'

 
          
    He stalked back into
his house and poured himself a stiff drink of brandy and drank it down. The
rest of the day he heard the children playing kick-the-can, hide-and-seek.
Over-Annie-Over, jacks, tops,
mibs
, and the sound of
the little monsters in every shrub and shadow would not let him rest. 'Another
week of this,' he thought, 'and I'll be stark staring.' He flung his hand to
his aching head.
'God in heaven, why weren't we all born
adults?'

 
          
   
Another
week, then.
And the hatred growing between him and the
children.
The hate and the fear growing apace.
The nervousness, the sudden tantrums over nothing, and then — the silent
waiting, the way the children climbed the trees and looked at him as they
swiped late apples, the melancholy smell of autumn settling in around the town,
the days growing short, the night coming too soon.

 
          
    'But they won't touch
me, they won't
dare
touch me,'
thought Mr. Howard sucking down one glass of brandy after another. 'It's all
very silly anyhow, and there's nothing to it. I'll soon be away from here, and
— them. I'll soon
— '

 
          
    There was a white skull
at the window.

 
          
    It was
eight o'clock
of a Thursday evening. It had been
a long week, with the angry flares and the accusations. He had had to
continually chase the children away from the water-main excavation in front of
his house. Children loved excavations, hiding-places, pipes and conduits and
trenches, and they were ever
ascramble
over and on
and down in and up out of the holes where the new pipes were being laid. It was
all finished, thank the Lord, and tomorrow the workmen would shovel in the
earth and tamp it down and put in a new cement pavement, and that would
eliminate the children. But, right now —  

 
          
    There was a white skull
at the window!

 
          
    There could be no doubt
that a boy's hand held the skull against the glass, tapping and moving it.
There was a childish tittering from outside.

 
          
    Mr. Howard burst from
the house.
'Hey, you!'
He exploded into the midst of
the three running boys. He leaped after them, shouting and yelling. The street
was dark, but he saw the figures dart beyond and below him. He saw them sort of
bound and could not remember the reason for this, until too late.

 
          
    The earth opened under
him. He fell and lay in a pit, his head taking a terrific blow from a laid
water-pipe, and as he lost consciousness he had an impression as of an
avalanche, set off by his fall, cascading down cool moist pellets of dirt upon
his pants, his shoes, upon his coat, upon his spine, upon the back of his neck,
his head, filling his mouth, his ears, his eyes, his nostrils. . .