Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (23 page)

It was time to go back home.

She took one more turn around the big store. Checking the shelves for what she might have missed, though she had nothing left to trade. She saw a woman she knew, and the woman’s little boy. She stopped to speak for a few minutes, just to be neighborly. Then she went on, with her backpack on her back, and she found herself at the rear of the big store where the old junk was piled up, and she stared at the shiny brushed-aluminum rocket ship of the bedtime machine on a card table with two warped legs.

Art
, he’d called it.

She gave a little snort that made her nostrils flare.

It
was
pretty, if you thought about objects that way.

Maybe she could take the hand crank off and find a use for it?

Junk
, she thought. But still . . . these days it was best not to turn down whatever was offered to you. Next time it might be something of value.

The woman picked up the bedtime machine—and it was as light as a dream, must not have any workings inside it at all—and shoved it into her backpack.

She said goodbye to the men, to the woman and the little boy, and then she got on her green bike and pedaled her way home.

It took her a while to actually put the thing on the chest of drawers in her bedroom. She tried to peer into the black hole. Tried to poke it with a finger. There was a lens of some kind deep within, almost too deep to touch. As the wind blew dust out in the dark and candles burned around her, the woman angled the machine so that the black hole was aimed into the room. She stood back for a few minutes, deciding what she should do next.

Well, it was pretty damned obvious, she thought.

She cranked.

And cranked.

And cranked.

It was a smooth motion, hardly any friction at all. Still, cranking was cranking. After a time she released the hand crank and stepped back and thought she was the biggest fool in this sad, broken world.

Nothing happened.

Nothing was going to happen.

The thing was dead.

And the woman realized she could cry over this. Could really let a sob go, if she wasn’t guarding herself so tightly. Because though she’d never expected anything to happen, she was still disappointed. The bedtime machine. A magic lamp. Something new, amid the old chore of day-to-day living. She had let herself believe that maybe—
maybe
—she really could wake the machine up. And from it might bloom a meadow of flowers under a star-strewn sky, and grass just soft enough for sleeping. Or a holographic waterfall, flowing across smooth, dark, beautiful stones right in the corner of the room. Or a beach at night, with the waves rolling in and the distant lights of ships blinking out at sea. Or a canopy of trees above her, with darkness laced through them like velvet, and from one of them a night bird singing sweetly, for her ears alone.

The woman did begin to cry. But just a little tear, because she knew disappointment and heartbreak as an old presence in life.

She had let herself feel hope. That had been her mistake.

She wiped her eyes, she got herself ready for bed, and she opened the special trunk and from it took a fragile book whose strength she counted on to lift her spirits during long nights like this, when the wind blew from here to there amid the spindly trees outside.

She put on her glasses, climbed into her bed, and opened the book to the first page. She always did this exactly the same way, because of what was inscribed there.

It said,
Live Forever!

Underneath that was the author’s name, faded and ghostly.

There was a month and day, almost illegible. A year: 1988.

A long time ago, forty years before her birth.

The woman always wondered about that inscription. That nearly shouted, joyful
Live Forever!
She wondered if it was a special message of some kind. She wondered if it ever had been said to the author, and he was passing it along. It seemed like the kind of statement you didn’t keep to yourself. It seemed like the kind of thing you hollered out at the top of your lungs, to the very soul of the world.

The woman found a story she wanted to read. It was about a day in the life of an automated house, when no people were there to love it or be loved by it. She began reading, but on this sad night of nights she wanted to hear a voice . . . a voice raised against the lonely wind . . . and so she adjusted her glasses, she cleared her throat, and she began to read the words aloud.

And she had been speaking the author’s words for only a few sentences when she abruptly looked up from the book.

Because something was happening to the bedtime machine.

She
felt
it, before she saw it.

A tremor? A breath, inhaled or exhaled? A heartbeat?

Maybe all those.

She saw the black hole turn electric blue.

Where the lens was aimed, a blue shadow formed in the air.

It shivered, and breathed, and smiled as it took shape and substance.

And suddenly in the room stood a little boy about ten years old, with brown hair and brown eyes and apple-plump cheeks. He was wearing a dark red sweater and white chino trousers with patches on the knees. He was wearing sneakers stained with playground dirt. His smile broadened.

He said, in his little-boy voice, “Would you read to me until you get sleepy?”

The woman did not move. Did not speak.

Could
not move.
Could
not speak.

“Just
one
story?” the little boy prompted.

Her mouth was wide open, yet no sound emerged. She saw that he was not real. She saw that he wore a blue body-halo, and that for all his seeming solidity a little static occasionally disturbed his smile and for an instant warped his features as if he were reacting to a mosquito bite in an unscratchable place. But, of course, mosquitoes were now as rare as birds.

“
One
story,” he repeated, not petulantly but expectantly.

The woman spoke in a hushed and trembling voice.

“One story,” she said.

The little boy sat on the floor beside her bed and crossed his legs beneath him. He put his elbows on his knees and rested his chin on his palms and waited. He was all brown eyes and fixed attention.

“I’m . . . just going to keep reading this story,” said the woman, and the little boy gave a quick nod that said
Just fine
.

She read the rest of it aloud. Her voice cracked a few times. It roughened and rebelled, but she kept going. And at the end of the story, when the last sentence had been read and the woman looked up from the words, the little boy on the floor frowned slightly and said, “I hate that the house burned up. But I guess that’s how it had to end. The house wasn’t happy, was it?”

“No,” the woman said. “Not happy.”

“Are you sleepy yet?”

“No,” the woman said. “Not sleepy.”

“Will you read me another story?” the little boy asked, and he smiled again.

“Yes,” the woman answered. “I will.”

The next story was about a spaceship traveling south toward the sun. The little boy really liked that one, and he asked her to read it again.

And then, in defiance of all sense and wonder and human and electric mystery, the woman at long last yawned and felt the weight of her eyelids.

“You can rest now,” she heard the little boy say. “But you’d better blow out some of those candles first, because we don’t want this house burning down, do we?” He grinned. “This is a happy house.”

He waited for her to blow out all the candles but one.

“Good night,” he said, as if from a distance. He was already going away.

And after the little boy was just a blue sparkle in the air the woman turned over in her bed and sobbed, and the sob became a wrenching torrent, and the torrent swept her away from this world into the realm of sleep.

The woman was up early, cranking.

She tended to her chickens and to her tomatoes. Under the hot gray sun she carried out the day-to-day chore of living. She ate pork-’n’-beans and had a little ham spread on a cracker and drank bottled water from a plastic cup.

Then she cranked the bedtime machine some more.

Panic set in when she lit the candles and got into bed with the book again. The very same book, with the very same inscription.

What if the little boy didn’t appear tonight? How had she
made
him appear? What had she done to the machine to wake it up? She didn’t know, but she decided she would start reading aloud again.

This story was about an April witch who wanted to be in love.

Three sentences in, and the bedtime machine breathed. Its heart beat. Its eye opened, and the little boy in the dark red sweater and the white chinos with patched knees was there.

“Will you read to me until you get sleepy?” he asked, smiling.

“I will,” said the woman.

“Good!” the little boy said. “I brought a friend!”

And a little girl with blond hair and freckles grew from his blue glow, and in her pink dress she was so very pretty. She had a nice smile, too.

The woman said, “I hope . . . this story doesn’t scare you. Either one of you.”

“Oh, no, it won’t!” the little boy answered.

“No, ma’am!” the little girl said, and she shook her head in a very serious way.

They sat down on the floor, and they waited to hear.

Oh, this strange world. This world we cannot understand. This world that turns and turns through torments, trials, and tribulations, yet goes on like any person must . . . day by day.

They liked the story about the foghorn. They really did. The idea of the monster from the deep, falling in love with the call of what it thought was another monster . . . it made some laugh and some cry. But they all really did like it.

All the children. All of them, sitting on the floor. The boys and girls, and none of them looking alike and all dressed differently, and some Hispanic and some Asian and some from other places but they could all speak English and of course understand the stories.

And more of them, every night. Growing from the blue glow. Gathering together on the floor to listen. To hear the stories about the jar, and the lake, and the skeleton and the Earth men and the crowd and the sound of thunder. They did like their dinosaurs.

And then one night when the wind was silent, the little boy appeared and said, “Would you read to us until you get sleepy, Momma?”

“I sure will, you rascal, you,” said the woman, whose eyes were blue and soft. “You bring them all in, and we’ll get started.”

During the day, the woman took her books to Douglasville. She allowed the sun to touch them. She read to people there, and they built a shaded place for her to sit. The people and their children came from all around to listen. The woman could not want for anything, because they needed her and loved her and she needed and loved them, too. Her newfound energy and life were contagious, in a good way. There was no time to sit and wait for the end. That would come someday, if it was coming at all. There was too much to do, to figure out, to build back. To try to make right.

But at night . . .

She had her children.

How many?

Hundreds? Thousands?

Very, very many.

The woman allowed herself to sometimes wonder if they were more than holograms and sparks. She wondered if they were the spirits of children yet to be born. She wondered if when they came to real life, they would not have some memory of the stories, some feeling that they knew them even before they heard them the first time. Because she was sure that through these children the stories would live forever.

The wind didn’t sound so lonely anymore. Life was a pleasure, not a chore. Maybe the birds would come back someday, and maybe the trees would grow strong. Maybe they would build nests again, and maybe from them would come the sweet song of youth.

But in the meantime, from the house came the sweet music of children’s laughter. From the house came the awed rush of electric breath. From the house came the voice of a woman, strong and steady and joyful to live because there were so many stories yet to be read.

So many.

And the house?

The house itself was never lonely again.

The house stood firm against any wind.

At night its blue glow lit up the land like a world full of candles.

The house was happy.

And so too were the woman and her children, both of the present and those yet to be born, in the towns she reached with her backpack of books and her green bicycle the color of May.

About “Children of the Bedtime Machine”

I wrote “Children of the Bedtime Machine” to express my feeling that Ray Bradbury’s work is timeless. There is little doubt in my mind that his fantastic flights of the imagination will continue to inspire readers—and particularly young readers—into the limitless future.