Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09 (6 page)

 
          
“We
must live,” said the little man.

 
          
Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three.

 
          
Marie
counted in the center of the long corridor, the standing dead on all sides of
her.

 
          
They
were screaming.

 
          
They
looked as if they had leaped, snapped upright in their graves, clutched hands
over their shriveled bosoms and screamed, jaws wide, tongues out, nostrils
flared.

 
          
And been frozen that way.

 
          
All
of them had open mouths. Theirs was a perpetual screaming. They were dead and
they knew it. In every raw fiber and evaporated organ they knew it.

 
          
She
stood listening to them scream.

 
          
They
say dogs hear sounds humans never hear, sounds so many decibels higher than
normal hearing that they seem nonexistent.

 
          
The
corridor swarmed with screams. Screams poured from terror-yawned lips and dry
tongues, screams you couldn’t hear because they were so high.

 
          
Joseph
walked up to one standing body.

 
          
“Say
‘ah,’” he said.

 
          
Sixty-five,
sixty-six, sixty-seven, counted Marie, among the screams.

 
          
“Here
is an interesting one,” said the proprietor.

 
          
They
saw a woman with arms flung to her head, mouth wide, teeth intact, whose hair
was wildly flourished, long and
shimmery
on her head.
Her eyes were small pale white-blue eggs in her skull.

 
          
“Sometimes,
this happens. This woman, she is a cataleptic. One day she falls down upon the
earth, but is really not dead, for, deep in her, the little drum of her heart
beats and beats, so dim one cannot hear. So she was buried in the graveyard in
a fine inexpensive box. . . .”

 
          
“Didn’t
you know she was cataleptic?”

 
          
“Her
sisters knew. But this time they thought her at last dead. And funerals are
hasty things in this warm town.”

 
          
“She
was buried a few hours after her ‘death?’ ”

 
          
“
Si
,
the same.
All of this, as you
see
her here, we
would never have known, if a year later her sisters, having other things to
buy, had not refused the rent on her burial. So we dug very quietly down and
loosed the box and took it up and opened the top of her box and laid it aside
and looked in upon her—”

 
          
Marie
stared.

 
          
This
woman had wakened under the earth. She had torn, shrieked, clubbed at the
box-lid with fists, died of suffocation, in this attitude, hands flung over her
gaping face, horror-eyed, hair wild.

 
          
“Be
pleased,
senor,
to find that
difference between
her
hands and
these other ones,” said the caretaker. “Their peaceful fingers at their hips,
quiet as little roses.
Hers?
Ah, hers!
are
jumped up, very wildly, as if to pound the lid free!”

 
          
“Couldn’t
rigor mortis do that?”

 
          
“Believe
me,
senor,
rigor mortis pounds upon
no lids. Rigor mortis screams not like this, nor twists nor wrestles to rip
free nails,
senor,
or
prise
boards
loose hunting for
air, senor. All these others are open of mouth,
si
, because they were not
injected with the fluids of embalming, but theirs is a simple screaming of
muscles,
senor.
This
senorita,
here, hers is the
muerte
horrible.
”

 
          
Marie
walked,
scuffling
her shoes, turning first this way,
then that.
Naked bodies.
Long ago the clothes had
whispered away. The fat women’s breasts were lumps of yeasty dough left in the
dust. The men’s loins were indrawn, withered orchids.

 
          
“Mr.
Grimace and Mr. Gape,” said Joseph.

 
          
He
pointed his camera at two men who seemed in conversation, mouths in
mid-sentence, hands
gesticulant
and stiffened over
some long-dissolved gossip.

 
          
Joseph
clicked the shutter, rolled the film, focused the camera on another body,
clicked the shutter,
rolled
the film, walked on to
another.

 
          
Eighty-one, eight-two, eighty-three.
Jaws
down, tongues out like jeering children, eyes pale brown-
irised
in
upclenched
sockets.
Hairs, waxed and prickled
by sunlight, each sharp as quills embedded on the lips, the cheeks, the
eyelids, the brows. Little beards on chins and bosoms and loins. Flesh like
drumheads and manuscripts and crisp bread dough.
The women,
huge ill-shaped tallow things, death-melted.
The insane hair of them,
like nests made and unmade and remade. Teeth, each single, each fine, each
perfect, in jaw.
Eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight.
A rushing of Marie’s eyes.
Down the corridor,
flicking. Counting, rushing,
never
stopping. On! Quick!
Ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three! Here was a man, his stomach open, like a
tree hollow where you dropped your child love letters when you were eleven! Her
eyes entered the hole in the space under his ribs. She peeked in. He looked
like an Erector set inside.
The spine, the pelvic plates.
The rest was tendon, parchment, bone, eye, beardy jaw, ear, stupefied nostril.
And this ragged eaten cincture in his navel into which a pudding might be
spooned. Ninety-seven, ninety-eight! Names, places, dates, things!

 
          
“This
woman died in childbirth!”

 
          
Like
a little hungry doll, the prematurely born child was wired, dangling, to her
wrist.

 
          
“This
was a soldier. His uniform still half on him—”

 
          
Marie’s
eyes slammed the furthest wall after a back-forth, back-forth swinging from
horror to horror, from skull to skull, beating from rib to rib, staring with
hypnotic fascination at paralyzed, loveless, fleshless loins, at men made into
women by evaporation, at women made into
dugged
swine. The fearful ricochet of vision, growing, growing, taking impetus from
swollen breast to raving mouth, wall to wall, wall to wall, again, again, like
a ball hurled in a game, caught in the incredible teeth, spat in a scream
across the corridor to be caught in claws, lodged between thin teats, the whole
standing chorus invisibly chanting the game on, on, the wild game of sight
recoiling, rebounding,
reshuttling
on down the
inconceivable procession, through a montage of erected horrors that ended
finally and for all time when vision crashed against the corridor ending with
one last scream from all present!

 
          
Marie
turned and shot her vision far down to where the spiral steps walked up into
sunlight. How talented was death.
How many expressions and
manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.
They stood like the
naked pipes of a vast derelict calliope, their mouths cut into frantic vents.
And now the great hand of mania descended upon all keys at once, and the long
calliope screamed upon one hundred-throated, unending scream.

 
          
Click
went the camera and Joseph rolled the film. Click went the camera and Joseph
rolled the film.

 
          
Moreno
,
Morelos
,
Cantine
, Gomez, Gutierrez,
Villanousul
,
Ureta
,
Licon
, Navarro,
Iturbi
; Jorge,
Filomena
,
Nena
, Manuel, Jose, Tomas, Ramona.
This man walked and this man sang and this
man had three wives; and this man died of this, and that of that, and the third
from another thing, and the fourth was shot, and the fifth was stabbed and the
sixth fell straight down dead; and the seventh drank deep and died dead, and the
eighth died in love, and the ninth fell from his horse, and the tenth coughed
blood, and the eleventh stopped his heart, and the twelfth used to laugh much,
and the thirteenth was a dancing one, and the fourteenth was most beautiful of
all, the fifteenth had ten children and the sixteenth is one of those children
as is the seventeenth; and the eighteenth was Tomas and did well with his
guitar; the next three cut maize in their fields, had three lovers each; the
twenty-second was never loved; the twenty-third sold tortillas, patting and
shaping them each at the curb before the Opera House with her little charcoal
stove; and the twenty-fourth beat his wife and now she walks proudly in the
town and is merry with new men and here he stands bewildered by this unfair
thing, and the twenty-fifth drank several quarts of river with his lungs and
was pulled forth in a net, and the twenty-sixth was a great thinker and his
brain now sleeps like a burnt plum in his skull.

 
          
“I’d
like a color shot of each, and his or her name and how he or she died,” said
Joseph. “It would be an amazing, an ironical book to publish. The more you
think, the more it grows on you.
Their life histories and
then a picture of each of them standing here.”

 
          
He
tapped each chest, softly. They gave off hollow sounds, like someone rapping on
a door.

 
          
Marie
pushed her way through screams that hung
netwise
across her path. She walked evenly, in the corridor center, not slow, but not
too fast, toward the spiral stair, not looking to either side. Click went the
camera behind her.

 
          
“You
have room down here for more?” said Joseph.

 
          
“
Si
, senor.
Many
more.”

 
          
“Wouldn’t want to be next in line, next on your waiting list.”

 
          
“Ah,
no,
senor,
one would not wish to be
next.”

 
          
“How
are chances of buying one of these?”

 
          
“Oh, no, no,
senor.
Oh, no, no.
Oh no,
senor.”

 
          
“I’ll
pay you fifty pesos.”

 
          
“Oh, no,
senor,
no, no,
senor.”

 
          
In
the market, the
remainder of candy skulls from the Death
Fiesta were
sold from flimsy little tables. Women hung with black
rebozos
sat quietly, now and then speaking one word to each
other, the sweet sugar skeletons, the saccharine corpses and white candy skulls
at their elbows. Each skull had a name on top in gold candy curlicue; Jose or
Carmen or Ramon or Ten
a or
Guiermo
or Rosa. They sold cheap. The Death Festival was gone. Joseph paid a peso and
got two candy skulls.

 
          
Marie
stood in the narrow street. She saw the candy skulls and Joseph and the dark
ladies who put the skulls in a bag.

 
          
“Not
really,
” said Marie.

 
          
“Why
not?” said Joseph.

 
          
“Not
after just
now,
” she said.

 
          
“In the catacombs?”