Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 (23 page)

 
          
 
Alyce Fabian stopped talking and the basement
room was silent

 
          
 
"Tell about Mr. Douglas," said a
voice, whispering.

 
          
 
Mrs. Fabian did not look up at the marionette.
With an effort she finished it out "When the years passed and there was so
little love and understanding from John, I guess it was natural I turned to—Mr.
Douglas."

 
          
 
Krovitch nodded. "Everything begins to
fall into place. Mr. Ockham was a very poor man, down on his luck, and he came
to this theater tonight because he knew something about you and Mr. Douglas.
Perhaps he threatened to speak to Mr. Fabian if you didn't buy him off. That
would give you the best of reasons to get rid of him."

 
          
 
"That's even sillier than all the
rest," said Alyce Fabian tiredly. "I didn't kill him."

 
          
 
"Mr. Douglas might have and not told
you." "Why kill a man?" said Douglas. "John knew all about
us." "I did indeed," said John Fabian, and laughed. He stopped
laughing and his hand twitched, hidden in the snowflake interior of the tiny
doll, and her mouth opened and shut, opened and shut. He was trying to make her
carry the laughter on after he had stopped, but there was no sound, save the
little empty whisper of her lips moving and gasping, while Fabian stared down
at the little face and perspiration came out, shining, upon his cheeks.

 
          
 
The next afternoon Lieutenant Krovitch moved
through the theater darkness backstage, found the iron stairs and climbed with
great thought, taking as much time as he deemed necessary on each step, up to
the second-level dressing rooms. He rapped on one of the thin-paneled doors.

 
          
 
"Come in," said Fabian's voice from
what seemed a great distance.

 
          
 
Krovitch entered and closed the door and stood
looking at the man who was slumped before his dressing mirror. "I have
something I'd like to show you," Krovitch said. His face showing no emotion
whatever, he opened a manila folder and pulled out a glossy photograph which he
placed on the dressing table.

 
          
 
John Fabian raised his eyebrows, glanced
quickly up at Krovitch and then settled slowly back in his chair. He put his
fingers to the bridge of his nose and massaged his face carefully, as if he had
a headache. Krovitch turned the picture over and began to read from the
typewritten data on the back. "Name, Miss Ilyana Riamonova. One hundred
pounds. Blue eyes. Black hair. Oval face.
Born 1914,
New York City
.
Disappeared 1934.
Believed a victim
of anmesia.
Of Russo-Slav parentage.
Et cetera, Et cetera."

           
 
Fabian's lip twitched.

 
          
 
Krovitch laid the photograph down, shaking his
head thoughtfully. "It was pretty silly of me to go through police files
for a picture of a marionette. You should have heard the laughter at
headquarters. God. Still, here she is— Riabouchinska. Not papier-mache, not
wood, not a puppet, but a woman who once lived and moved around
and—disappeared." He looked steadily at Fabian. "Suppose you take it
from there?"

 
          
 
Fabian half smiled. "There's nothing to
it at all. I saw this woman's picture a long time ago, liked her looks and
copied my marionette after her."

 
          
 
"Nothing to it at all." Krovitch
took a deep breath and exhaled, wiping his face with a huge handkerchief.
"Fabian, this very morning I shuffled through a stack of Billboard
magazines that high. In the year 1934 I found an interesting article concerning
an act which played on a second-rate circuit, known as Fabian and Sweet
William. Sweet William was a little boy dummy. There was a girl
assistant—Ilyana Riamonova. No picture of her in the article, but I at least
had a name, the name of a real person, to go on. It was simple to check police
files then and dig up this picture. The resemblance, needless to say, between
the live woman on one hand and the puppet on the other is nothing short of
incredible. Suppose you go back and tell your story over again, Fabian."

 
          
 
"She was my assistant, that's all. I
simply used her as a model."

 
          
 
"You're making me sweat," said the
detective. "Do you think I'm a fool? Do you think I don't know love when I
see it? I've watched you handle the marionette, I've seen you talk to it, I've
seen how you make it react to you. You're in love with the puppet naturally,
because you loved the original woman very, very much. I've lived too long not
to sense that. Hell, Fabian, stop fencing around."

 
          
 
Fabian lifted his pale slender hands, turned
them over, examined them and let them fall.

 
          
 
"All right. In 1934 I was billed as
Fabian and Sweet William. Sweet William was a small buib-nosed boy dummy I
carved a long time ago. I was in Los Angeles when this girl appeared at the
stage door one night. She'd followed my work for years. She was desperate for a
job and she hoped to be my assistant...,"

           
 
He remembered her in the half-light of the
alley behind the theater and how startled he was at her freshness and eagerness
to work with and for him and the way the cool rain touched softly down through
the narrow alleyway and caught in small spangles through her hair, melting in
dark warmness, and the rain beaded upon her white porcelain hand holding her
coat together at her neck.

 
          
 
He saw her lips' motion in the dark and her
voice, separated off on another sound track, it seemed, speaking, to him in the
autumn wind, and he remembered that without his saying yes or no or perhaps she
was suddenly on the stage with him, in the great pouring bright light, and in
two months he, who had always prided himself on his cynicism and disbelief, had
stepped off the rim of the world after her, plunging down a bottomless place of
no limit and no light anywhere.

 
          
 
Arguments followed, and more than
arguments—things said and done that lacked all sense and sanity and fairness.
She had edged away from him at last, causing his rages and remarkable
hysterias. Once he burned her entire wardrobe in a fit of jealousy. She had
taken this quietly. But then one night he handed her a week's notice, accused
her of monstrous disloyalty, shouted at her, seized her, slapped her again and
again across the face, bullied her about and thrust her out the door, slamming
it!

 
          
 
She disappeared that night.

 
          
 
When he found the next day that she was really
gone and there was nowhere to find her, it was like standing in the center of a
titanic explosion. All the world was smashed flat and all the echoes of the
explosion came back to reverberate at midnight, at four in the morning, at
dawn, and he was up early, stunned with the sound of coffee simmering and the
sound of matches being struck and cigarettes lit and himself trying to shave
and looking at mirrors that were sickening in their distortion.

 
          
 
He clipped out all the advertisements that he
took in the papers and pasted them in neat rows in a scrapbook—all the ads
describing her and telling about her and asking for her back. He even put a
private detective on the case. People talked. The police dropped by to question
him. There was more talk.

 
          
 
But she was gone like a piece of white
incredibly fragile tissue paper, blown over the sky and down. A record of her
was sent to the largest cities, and that was the end of it for the police. But
not for Fabian. She might be dead or just running away, but wherever she was he
knew that somehow and in some way he would have her back.

 
          
 
One night he came home, bringing his own
darkness with him, and collapsed upon a chair, and before he knew it he found
himself speaking to Sweet William in the totally black room

 
          
 
"William, it's all over and done. I can't
keep it up!"

 
          
 
And William cried, "Coward! Coward!"
from the air above his head, out of the emptiness. "You can get her back
if you want!"

 
          
 
Sweet William squeaked and clappered at him in
the night. "Yes, you can! Think!" he insisted. "Think of a way.
You can do it. Put me aside, lock me up. Start all over."

 
          
 
"Start all over?"

 
          
 
"Yes," whispered Sweet William, and
darkness moved within darkness. "Yes. Buy wood. Buy fine new wood. Buy
hard-grained wood. Buy beautiful fresh new wood. And carve. Carve slowly and
carve carefully. Whittle away. Cut delicately. Make the little nostrils so. And
cut her thin black eyebrows round and high, so, and make her cheeks in small
hollows. Carve, carve ..."

 
          
 
"No! It's foolish. I could never do
it!"

 
          
 
"Yes you could. Yes you could, could,
could, could . . ."

 
          
 
The voice faded, a ripple of water in an
underground stream. The stream rose up and swallowed him. His head fell
forward. Sweet William sighed. And then the two of them lay like stones buried
under a waterfall.

 
          
 
The next morning, John Fabian bought the
hardest, finest-grained piece of wood that he could find and brought it home
and laid it on the table, but could not touch it. He sat for hours staring at
it. It was impossible to think that out of this cold chunk of material he
expected his hands and his memory to re-create something warm and pliable and
familiar. There was no way even faintly to approximate that quality of rain and
summer and the first powderings of snow upon a clear pane of glass in the
middle of a December night. No way, no way at all to catch the snowflake
without having it melt swiftly in your clumsy fingers.

 
          
 
And yet Sweet William spoke out, sighing and
whispering, after midnight, "You can do it. Oh, yes, yes, you can do
it!"

 
          
 
And so he began. It took him an entire month
to carve her hands into things as natural and beautiful as shells lying in the
sun. Another month and the skeleton, like a fossil imprint he was searching
out, stamped and hidden in the wood, was revealed, all febrile and so
infinitely delicate as to suggest the veins in the white flesh of an apple.

 
          
 
And all the while Sweet William lay mantled in
dust in his box that was fast becoming a very real coffin. Sweet William
croaking and wheezing some feeble sarcasm, some sour criticism, some hint, some
help but dying all the time, fading, soon to be untouched, soon to be like a
sheath wilted in summer and left behind to blow in the wind.

 
          
 
As the weeks passed and Fabian molded and
scraped and polished the new wood. Sweet William lay longer and longer in
stricken silence, and one day as Fabian held the puppet in his hand Sweet
William seemed to look at him a moment with puzzled eyes and then there was a
death rattle in his throat.

 
          
 
And Sweet William was gone.

 
          
 
Now as he worked, a fluttering, a faint motion
of speech began far back in his throat, echoing and re-echoing, speaking
silently like a breeze among dry leaves. And then for the first time he held
the doll in a certain way in his hands and memory moved down his arms and into
his fingers and from his fingers into the hollowed wood and the tiny hands
flickered and the body became suddenly soft and pliable and her eyes opened and
looked up at him.

 
          
 
And the small mouth opened the merest fraction
of an inch and she was ready to speak and he knew all of the things that she
must say to him, he knew the first and the second and the third things he would
have her say. There was a whisper, a whisper, a whisper.

 
          
 
The tiny head turned this way gently, that way
gently. The mouth half opened again and began to speak. And as it spoke he bent
his head and he could feel the warm breath—of course it was there!—coming from
her mouth, and when he listened very carefully, holding her to his head, his
eyes shut, wasn't there, too, softly, gently —the beating of her heart?