One More for the Road (35 page)

The train whistle cut across his voice so he had to start over.

“Death—”

Another whistle.

“Death,” said the voice behind me, “is a lonely business.”

A Graveyard for Lunatics

 

Halloween night, 1954. A young, film-obsessed scriptwriter has just been hired at one of the great studios. An anonymous invitation leads him from the giant Maximus Films backlot to an eerie graveyard separated from the studio by a single wall. There he makes a terrifying discovery that thrusts him into a maelstrom of intrigue and mystery—and into the dizzy exhilaration of the movie industry at the height of its glittering power.

 

 

 

Once upon a time there were two cities within a city. One was light and one was dark. One moved restlessly all day while the other never stirred. One was warm and filled with ever-changing lights. One was cold and fixed in place by stones. And when the sun went down each afternoon on Maximus Films, the city of the living, it began to resemble Green Glades cemetery just across the way, which was the city of the dead.

As the lights went out and the motions stopped and the wind that blew around the corners of the studio buildings cooled, an incredible melancholy seemed to sweep from the front gate of the living all the way along through twilight avenues toward that high brick wall that separated the two cities within a city. And suddenly the streets were filled with something one could speak of only as remembrance. For while the people had gone away, they left behind them architectures that were haunted by the ghosts of incredible happenings.

For indeed it was the most outrageous city in the world, where anything could happen and always did. Ten thousand deaths had happened here, and when the deaths were done, the people got up, laughing, and strolled away. Whole tenement blocks were set afire and did not burn. Sirens shrieked and police cars careened around corners, only to have the officers peel off their blues, cold-cream their orange pancake makeup, and walk home to small bungalow court apartments out in that great and mostly boring world.

Dinosaurs prowled here, one moment in miniature, and the next looming fifty feet tall above half-clad virgins who screamed on key. From here various Crusades departed to peg their armor and stash their spears at Western Costume down the road. From here Henry the Eighth let drop some heads. From here Dracula wandered as flesh to return as dust. Here also were the Stations of the Cross and a trail of ever-replenished blood as screenwriters groaned by to Calvary carrying a back-breaking load of revisions, pursued by directors with scourges and film cutters with razor-sharp knives. It was from these towers that the Muslim faithful were called to worship each day at sunset as the limousines whispered out with faceless powers behind each window, and peasants averted their gaze, fearing to be struck blind.

This being true, all the more reason to believe that when the sun vanished the old haunts rose up, so that the warm city cooled and began to resemble the marbled orchardways across the wall. By midnight, in that strange peace caused by temperature and wind and the voice of some far church clock, the two cities were at last one. And the night watchman was the only motion prowling along from India to France to prairie Kansas to brownstone New York to Piccadilly to the Spanish Steps, covering twenty thousand miles of territorial incredibility in twenty brief minutes. Even as his counter-part across the wall punched the time clocks around among the monuments, flashed his light on various Arctic angels, read names like credits on tombstones, and sat to have his midnight tea with all that was left of some Keystone Kop. At four in the morning, the watchmen asleep, the two cities, folded and kept, waited for the sun to rise over withered flowers, eroded tombs, and elephant India ripe for overpopulation should God the Director decree and Central Casting deliver.

And so it was on All Hallows Eve, 1954.

Halloween.

My favorite night in all the year.

About the Author

RAY BRADBURY
is one of the most celebrated fiction writers of our time. Among his best-known works are
Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine
, and
Something Wicked This Way Comes
. He has written for the theater and the cinema, including the screenplay for John Huston's classic film adaptation of
Moby Dick
, and has been nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's “The Ray Bradbury Theater” and won an Emmy for his teleplay of
The Halloween Tree
. In 2000, Mr. Bradbury was honored by the National Book Foundation with a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Among his most recent works is the critically acclaimed novel
From the Dust Returned
, which the
Los Angeles Times
named as “one of the best books of the year.” Mr. Bradbury lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Marguerite.

 

 

 

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Praise for
RAY BRADBURY
and
ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD

“Bradbury is an authentic original.”
Time

“He is a wonderful storyteller.... Nearly everything
he has written is sheer poetry.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Almost no one can imagine a time or place without
the fiction of Ray Bradbury. It's as if he's always been
with us, his books always fresh on the shelf....
[Bradbury's] stories and novels are part of the
American language.... Generations of young
readers have been seduced by his
language and imagination.”
Washington Post

“Affecting, voluble, exuberant—by a writer who
feels life's even better than he can imagine.”
Kirkus Reviews

“His collection of twenty-five new short stories ranks
up there with classics such as
Fahrenheit 451
....
Bradbury is still boldly going where
few writers have gone before.”
Maxim

“Short stories featuring all the Bradbury trademarks,
including the eerie, the strange, the nostalgic, the
bittersweet, the searching, and the speculative …
One of the country's most celebrated authors …
Bradbury's intention here is to focus on simple
truths, enabling the reader to view the world
from fresh perspectives.”
Salt Lake City Deseret News

“Bradbury shines … An author who can turn a
literate phrase like no one else.”
Dallas Morning News

“In this new volume of stories … he maintains his
unflinching dedication to the magic of everyday
life … The pure joy of earthly existence is
something Bradbury has never forgotten.”
Publishers Weekly

“Bradbury spins a gossamer tapestry
with his language.”
Omaha World-Herald

“One of the greats.”
Newsday

“Bradbury is the best author in the entire world.”
Anchorage Daily News

“Ray Bradbury's still in his prime … a writer whose
fantasies are attuned to that perfect season between
childlike wonder and the age of reason … whose
prose often walks up to the edge of a majestic purple
mountain range or straddles a fence separating
lush fields of prairie grass from the trampled
lawns of suburbia … Instead of resting on
his laurels, Bradbury is riding his
third wind into a creative vortex.”
Denver Post

“Bradbury has a style all his own, much imitated but
never matched.... After writing for more than
fifty years, Bradbury has become more than pretty
good at it. He has become a master.”
Portland Oregonian

“An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose,
and mature understanding of human character
have won him an international reputation.”
New York Times

“Time has not dimmed his eloquent and elegant voice
or his lively imagination that asks
‘what if' and then answers.”
San Antonio Express-News

“One of America's rarest dreamers and thinkers …
Bradbury is a living legend.”
Orange County Register

Also by Ray Bradbury

Ahmed & The Oblivion Machines

Dandelion Wine

Dark Carnival

Death Is a Lonely Business

Driving Blind

Fahrenheit 451

From the Dust Returned

The Golden Apples of the Sun

A Graveyard for Lunatics

Green Shadows, White Whale

The Halloween Tree

I Sing the Body Electric!

The Illustrated Man

Journey to Far Metaphor

Kaleidoscope

Long After Midnight

The Martian Chronicles

The Machineries of Joy

A Medicine for Melancholy

The October Country

One Timeless Spring

Quicker Than the Eye

R Is for Rocket

The Stories of Ray Bradbury

S Is for Space

Something Wicked This Way Comes

The Toynbee Convector

When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed

Yestermorrow

Zen in the Art of Writing

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organization, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

AVON BOOKS
An imprint of
HarperCollins
Publishers
10 East 53rd Street
New York, New York 10022-5299

Copyright © 2002 by Ray Bradbury
Excerpts from
Dandelion Wine
copyright © 1946, 1947, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1957, copyright © 1956, 1957 by The Curtis Publishing Company;
The Illustrated Man
copyright © 1951;
The Martian Chronicles
copyright © 1946, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1958;
The October Country
copyright © 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1954, 1955;
Something Wicked This Way Comes
copyright © 1962, 1997;
Death Is a Lonely Business
copyright © 1999;
A Graveyard for Lunatics
copyright © 1990 by Ray Bradbury
ISBN: 0-06-103203-4

Epub Edition © April 2013 ISBN: 9780062242150

www.avonbooks.com

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

First Avon Books paperback printing: January 2003
First William Morrow hardcover printing: April 2002

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The following serves as a continuation of the copyright page:

“Time Intervening” was first published under the title “Interim” in the fall 1947 issue of
Epoch
; copyright © 1947 by Ray Bradbury

“Heart Transplant” first appeared in the January 1981 issue of
Playboy
; copyright © 1981 by Ray Bradbury

“Quid Pro Quo” first appeared in the October/November 2000 issue of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
; copyright © 2000 by Ray Bradbury